Records of Radcliffe College President Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, 1879-1978

Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, educator and college president, was born in Boston, December 5, 1822, and married the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850. She was an educational reformer, member of the Woman's Education Association, but never an advocate of women's suffrage or of co-education. Agassiz administered the Agassiz School for Girls from 1855 to 1863. She was one of the managers of the program for the Private Collegiate Instruction for Women (also known as the Harvard Annex); was president of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (1882-1894), first president of Radcliffe 1894-1900, and then honorary president, 1900-1903.

Agassiz guided the college through its early years. She negotiated the permanent institutional tie with Harvard and the incorporation of Radcliffe College in 1894 as a degree-granting agency. Her addresses at "parlor meetings" elicited substantial support for the college and made possible the purchase of properties bordering on Brattle, Mason, Garden, Streets and Appian Way which eventually formed the Radcliffe Yard, and the Phillips and Bemis estate on Concord Avenue which was laid out by her nephew Guy Lowell as the dormitory quadrangle. The funds for Agassiz House were raised largely by the Agassiz family as an eightieth birthday tribute in 1902, and became the student center and third permanent building in the Yard.