Miss Lyman of Vassar College First-hand accounts of the earliest days of Vassar College vividly demonstrate how a deeply felt sense of having lived through something momentous can motivate the recording of history. In her 1915 memoir, The Golden Age of Vassar, former student Mary Harriott Norris (class of 1870) describes the deep obligation she felt to record her recollections of the opening years of Vassar College. By telling this history, Norris was fulfilling what she perceived to be her duty to future generations who might otherwise never understand that a college education for women was once considered little more than a dubious experiment. Norris' work memorializes many of Vassar's first administrators and faculty as a small band of carefully selected and quite extraordinary individuals—all of whom shared with Vassar's first students an awareness both thrilling and daunting of being participants in an experiment that was being watched by the entire world. The new college for women, however, had no choice but to begin by building upon the existing norms of the traditional girls "finishing school." These older traditions were memorably embodied in Vassar's first "Lady Principal," the redoubtable Miss Hannah Lyman who used the tremendous force of her character to shape Vassar girls into true Victorian "ladies" even as a new and more modern concept of "womanhood" was being born.
Mary Harriott Norris: "...Perhaps, just here, it is well to describe Hannah W. Lyman of sacred memory. ...A spirit of the most intense loyalty prevails among the older alumnae to the memory of Miss Lyman. ...I am sure the first alumnae rejoice in the vision of Miss Lyman that memory paints of her. It was a delight to see her walk in her stately fashion down one of our long corridors. She usually wore, in the morning, a purple or lavender gown, the skirt hanging in unbroken straight lines. Her hair was snowy white and very fine and arranged in graduated curls on either side of her face. Her eyes were brilliant, penetrating and very blue, the seat of a high intelligence, a lofty will. Her complexion was fair and colorless, her features large, handsome and usually softened by a smile such as would become a queen.
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