Barnard College

Gerald Geerlings

Barnard College in Manhattan, New York, was founded in 1889 by Annie Nathan Meyer after Columbia University refused to admit women. Deemed a "coordinate" college to Columbia, the private, liberal arts school was named after Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, the deaf mathematician and president of Columbia who had advocated for equal education oppourtunities for women and men until his death in 1889.

In 1887, at the age of just twenty and newly married, Annie Nathan Meyer began organizing a committee to fund a liberal arts college for women in New York. Such intitutions were already available in several other states and, having been barred from lectures and relegated to non-degreed, examination-only collegiate courses for women at Columbia, Meyer wanted the women of New York to have a better chance at receiving an education on par with men.

By the time Gerald Geerlings created this lithograph the school had become a magnet not only for women seeking higher education but to professors, as well, due to the quality of the students' output and participation. (Anthropolgist Franz Boas, for instance, reportedly considered his Barnard students superior to his Columbia ones.) In "Barnard College" Geerlings shows the campus on what must be a spring day, with small leaves sprouting from the walnut tree in the foreground and a women wearing a cap-sleeved blouse, chatting with her friends on a bench.