Seven Sisters (colleges)

For other uses, see Seven Sisters.

The "Seven Sisters" refers to a group of seven private liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that were historically women's institutions of higher education. Five remain women's colleges: Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Wellesley College. The other two: Vassar College became coeducational in 1969, and Radcliffe College's undergraduate functions were absorbed by Harvard College when the institutions merged in 1999.

The name "Seven Sisters" is a reference to the Greek myth of the Pleiades, goddesses immortalized as stars in the sky: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope.

These colleges were created in the 19th century to provide women with a high-quality liberal arts education comparable to that offered by the historically all-male Ivy League colleges.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.