1900s: New Century, New Need, New Women

Girls coming of age as the 20th century began were already on their way to becoming modern women. Since 1860, when a brewer named Vassar established a college to offer women the same rigorous academic training received by men, more and more middle class women were attending new women’s colleges or progressive co-educational institutions in the west. After Frederic A.P. Barnard, president of Columbia University, failed to win admission of young women, a women’s college named after him opened across Broadway in 1889, joining what would be called The Seven Sisters, private education institutions that took women seriously and challenged them intellectually. It was at Barnard just after the turn of the century that Mary Harriman decided to form a “junior league” of affluent young women, volunteering their energies to help cure the social ills of their city. The Junior League Movement built upon and expanded a new awareness that women could make a difference in society beyond hearth and home.

“Our League, as I see it, was organized as a means of expressing the feeling of social responsibility for the conditions which surrounded us. We have the responsibility to act, and we have the opportunity to conscientiously act to affect the environment around us.”
-Mary Harriman, 1912