Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 193, No Country for Young Women, Part 2.

In January of 1861, a beer brewer named Matthew Vassar did something rather extraordinary.

He gathered together a board of trustees at the Hotel Gregory in his adopted hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York,

and handed them two things.

The first was a tin box, with a little over half his fortune in it, a bit over $400,000, if you're curious.

The second was a deed to some land in the town.

With these two things, the board was to establish a new college with Vassar's name on it,

but not just any college, a college specifically for women.

Women's colleges were a rarity in the United States or anywhere else during this time.

Vassar had been convinced of their necessity by his niece, Lydia Booth,

who'd made the case to him that educated women were essential to cultivating the talents of the next generation of Americans.

So, when Yamakawa Stematsu and Nagashige were looking for colleges at which to close out their

American experiences, they were not flush with options, but Vassar spoke to them both.

The two young women joined Vassar's freshman class in 1878 as part of the 17th admitted class.

They were signing onto a school that was still less than totally established.

Indeed, Vassar had already rebranded itself from its original name of Vassar Women's College to

just Vassar College, prompting rumor-mongering around the rural town of Poughkeepsie that the school

was about to embrace the unspeakable madness that was co-education. Vassar would admit men for the

first time in 1969.

Nagayishige would discover a talent for music and was admitted to the three-year program for the study of music theory.

She was, by all accounts, rather brilliant at it.

For her senior spring concert, she played a memorable rendition of Chopin, which by all accounts

...