c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They closed the original Marymount College the other day. It was 100 years old.

Marymount was a small Catholic women’s college in Tarrytown, N.Y. The buildings sit mostly silent now, on 25 acres overlooking the Hudson River at Tappan Zee, just south of Sleepy Hollow, where the headless horseman road. Washington Irving wrote about the neighborhood in 1824, and captured it completely. When there, he said, you “begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams.”

Nearly 13,000 Marymount alumnae attest to that. Those who walked through Butler Hall _ named for the foundress _ include Anne M. Mulcahy, the chairman and CEO of Xerox, and actress Rosalind Russell. Loret Miller Ruppe was director of the Peace Corps, then ambassador to Norway. The alumnae roster includes presidents of colleges and corporations, wives and mothers, venture capitalists, doctors, lawyers, politicians, professors and volunteers. And me.

Was Marymount the flagship Catholic women’s college? It certainly was a good one. It was among the first to have a junior year abroad. It offered double science majors, as well as a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. It awarded degrees in all the liberal arts and sciences.

There was little women’s higher education a hundred years ago, and even less for Catholic women. Religious orders built schools to educate the unending tide of immigrants. Mother Joseph Butler, a member of the Sacred Heart of Mary from Kilkenny, Ireland, by way of France and Portugal, arrived in Tarrytown on Dec. 8, 1907. In short order, she had a college up and running. “The world never needed women’s intelligence and sympathy more than it does today,” she said.

Mother Butler’s idea took hold. Fine Catholic education for women became synonymous with Marymount. As years rolled into decades, other Marymounts took root: colleges in California, Florida, Virginia and Manhattan; high schools in Canada, Spain, England, France, Italy, Columbia, Mexico and Africa, as well as in New York, Missouri, Virginia and California.

By the time the 20th century was halfway done, most women’s colleges were Catholic women’s colleges. Where else would Catholic women go? The men’s colleges _ Catholic or not _ would not allow them through the door. The other women’s schools were not for the daughters of Irish or German or Italian immigrants, whether upper crust or not.

Catholic women’s colleges flourished because Catholic women knew the value of a real college education, a liberal arts education that opened up the world. Their task, as Mother Butler said, was to “equip women to meet modern conditions effectively … (so) true American womanhood may find its best expression.”

I think they did that.

But the demographics and the culture changed. Catholic women’s colleges fell out of favor. Men’s schools that once shut women out became co-ed. The final facts are bare: Marymount ran short of money and students several years ago. Fordham University, the lumbering Jesuit giant in the Bronx, already had three graduate programs nearby. Five years ago, it took over Marymount in Tarrytown, pledging to run it as a women’s school.

Whether Fordham couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t do it, is grist for other mills. It remains that it did not.

Washington Irving describes the view from Tarrytown in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It was much the same that last day of Catholic women’s education on that hill:

“The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down in the west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy. … A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides.”

And then they closed the doors to Butler Hall.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

KRE/LF END ZAGANO

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