Association of Collegiate Alumnae records

In 1882 Marion Talbot, Alice Freeman Palmer, Alice Hayes, Ellen Swallow Richards, and thirteen other women met in Boston to establish the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), uniting college graduates for "practical educational work." Members of the first generation of college-educated women, they had struggled to get an education only to find that society had no place for them and no interest in utilizing their abilities. Through the new organization (ACA), they hoped to promote and raise standards for women's higher education. To distinguish themselves from normal-school and academy graduates, they limited membership to alumnae of specified, carefully selected four-year colleges and universities. Additionally, they expected the ACA to help end the social isolation often faced by women college graduates when they returned home. Women in other regions responded enthusiastically and set up ACA branches across the country. Founded in 1901, the Southern Association of College Women (SACW) served a similar community. In 1921 the ACA and the SACW merged, forming the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Although the ACA, the SACW, and later the AAUW were committed to equal access to education, they avoided identification as explicitly feminist organizations. Until the 1970s, AAUW leaders rejected controversial and potentially divisive issues like suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment.

During its first fifty years, the ACA studied a variety of issues related to women's education. Its members addressed the status of women within the academy by lobbying for women to serve as college trustees, fought discrimination on coeducational campuses, and argued for inclusion in the curriculum of home economics courses designed to make homemaking more professional and scientific. Additionally, the ACA provided fellowships for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral study, and encouraged women's careers, particularly in the social sciences. Activities of regional branches and local groups of the ACA varied. The internationalism of the war years carried over into the 1920s, when the AAUW joined similar organizations from eight other countries to promote women's education around the world and to create an international community of college women through the International Federation of College Women.