Overview

As late as the 1920s, when Eleanor Roosevelt's daughter Anna enrolled in Cornell's School of Agriculture, her grandmother complained that "Girls who went to college were very apt to be 'old maids' and become 'bookworms, ' a dire threat to any girl's chance of attracting a husband." In today's higher education landscape, when women earn fully half the degrees granted by Cornell in every category, this modest volume reminds readers of those devoted daughters of their Alma Mater whose cumulative strength pushed open the door for women in intellectual life, in politics, in industry - and includes the remarkable and influential who followed in their footsteps. It is not meant to provide a comprehensive nor complete academic reference, but rather an accessible distillation that recognizes many of the authentic heroines we already know, and introduces more than a few we ought to know.