Brief History: Smith’s First Woman President

It was nearly 100 years to the day after admitting its first students that Smith inaugurated a woman president. The moment came in 1975, when scholar and author Jill Ker Conway became head of the college—a turning point not only for Smith, but for higher education and the larger society. (That year, Time magazine named Conway, together with Barbara Bush ’47, a “Woman of the Year.”)

From the start, Conway—who journeyed to Smith by way of rural Australia, Harvard, and the University of Toronto—focused on improving the status of women. In her inaugural address, she cited the importance of the college’s mission to “foster research and the creation of new knowledge about matters of central importance in women’s lives.”

Among her key accomplishments were establishing Smith’s Ada Comstock Scholars Program for women of nontraditional college age, the interdisciplinary faculty research Project on Women and Social Change, and the women’s studies and engineering degree programs.

A highly effective fundraiser, Conway also oversaw a major renovation and expansion of Neilson Library during her tenure, as well as the construction of Ainsworth Gymnasium and groundbreaking on the Indoor Track and Tennis facility.

Only 40 years old when she became president of Smith, Conway defied prevailing stereotypes about women leaders—as well as resistance from the old guard of the college’s senior male faculty. An avowed feminist, she helped transform perceptions about the role of women’s colleges, from the finishing school notions of an earlier era, to institutions fostering women’s intellectual and leadership power.

Conway, who remained connected to Smith after her retirement in 1985, wrote about her experiences as president in her memoir, A Woman’s Education. In 2016, Smith opened the Jill Ker Conway Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center in recognition of Conway’s legacy of advancing solutions to real-world problems.

While Conway—who died in 2018 at the age of 83—was Smith’s first woman president, she was not the last. In fact, since 1975, all of the college’s succeeding presidents have been women. In 1995, in another watershed moment, Ruth Simmons became the college’s first African American president and the first African American woman to head a top-ranked American college or university.