This month marks the centennial of the first degree awarded to a woman at the University of Georgia.
UGA became the nation’s first chartered state university in 1785, and classes began in 1801 on a wooded site overlooking the Oconee River in then-sparsely populated northeast Georgia. For more than a century, the university’s student body numbered only a few hundred — all male. A 1949 manuscript history of UGA by longtime registrar Tom Reed records, “It was not until 1889 that the movement to open the University of Georgia to women began to take shape,” in a spurned appeal to the school’s trustees. The effort was repeated — and again rejected — in 1892 and 1896.
“But the Colonial Dames and the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs were not satisfied to let it rest there, so the next year at the annual meeting of the trustees, June 11, 1897, they presented another request, and three young ladies of Athens asked permission to take courses leading to degrees,” wrote Reed.
That effort also failed, as did another in 1899, near the end of William Boggs’ 10-year chancellorship. “Chancellor Boggs had never been in favor of admitting women to the university, and the unfavorable action of the board from year to year no doubt reflected his judgment,” Reed recalled.
In 1902, Georgia’s Daughters of the American Revolution joined Colonial Dames and Women’s Clubs in another petition. “By this time, every state except Georgia has permitted women to the higher State University of Learning,” the petition read. Chancellor Walter B. Hill, who had succeeded Boggs, said he supported coeducation but believed university buildings of that era were unfit for women.
Hill devised a plan that would have moved graves from the early Athens cemetery on Jackson Street to Oconee Cemetery across the river, then located a women’s division of the university on the former cemetery site. The cemetery move gained approval from the Athens City Council, but coeducation still faced resistance from trustees. Hill’s death in 1905 effectively thwarted women’s hopes for another six years.
Finally, in 1911, the first breakthrough came. Trustees authorized UGA’s summer school to award a master of arts degrees to female teachers, for whom the summer sessions had been created in 1903. In 1914, Mary Dorothy Lyndon accumulated enough summer credits to earn the master of arts, the first UGA degree awarded to a woman.
An Athens native, Lyndon graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon in 1896. She became a teacher and director of UGA’s Thalian dramatic club in 1898. She continued to direct and act in Thalian productions until 1918, when she was appointed the university’s first dean of women and an associate professor of education. She was instrumental in making Phi Mu, her college sorority, the first sorority established on the Athens campus in 1921.
It was not until 1918 that university trustees authorized full admission of women and their inclusion in undergraduate studies — initially for a new program in home economics established by the College of Agriculture.
Mary Ethel Creswell of Athens, who had directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s home economics work in 15 Southern states, was recruited to lead the new program. In 1919, Creswell received a degree in home economics, the first undergraduate degree awarded to a woman by UGA, years after some state universities had become coeducational.
With the exception of the World War II years, UGA remained majority male for another half-century. From the 1970s forward, following national trends, women students have outnumbered men. Today, the university’s student body is 57 percent female, 43 percent male.
