Biography | Gloria Steinem — Magna Cum Laude in Government from This Northampton Hall

In September 1952 Gloria Steinem entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

She had finished her senior year at Western High School in Washington, D.C., after leaving Toledo.

Smith was a women's college that let her major in government, not a finishing course.

She spent a junior year in Geneva and a summer in Oxford.

She wrote book reviews for the campus paper, The Sophian.

In 1956 she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

The speaker that year was the poet Archibald MacLeish.

Smith commencements of that period were held in John M. Greene Hall at 60 Elm Street, the 1910 auditorium that still faces the campus green.

The photograph attached to this pin shows a commencement inside that same hall in 1917.

It is not her class.

It is the room.

After the degree she took a Chester Bowles fellowship and spent two years in India.

She later described the trip as the place where she learned how grassroots organizing actually worked, from people who had learned it under Gandhi.

Smith kept her papers.

In 1984 she began depositing them in the Sophia Smith Collection, one of the major women's-history archives in the United States.

In 2022 the college named the Special Collections reading room in the rebuilt Neilson Library for her.

The hall on this pin is the public place where the degree was conferred.

The reading room is where the paper trail of the later work now sits.

Photo: Smith College commencement inside John M. Greene Hall, 1917, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The 1956 ceremony used the same auditorium; this image is the earlier class, not hers.