H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College

1905–1906

Josephine Louise Newcomb (born Josephine Louise Le Monnier, 1816–1901) established the college as a memorial to her daughter Sophie, who died in 1870 at the age of 15. Following an initial donation of $100,000, she made gifts totaling $3 million. She wanted to support a liberal academic education for young white women. Newcomb was influenced by Ida Richardson and the college was associated with the Progressive Movement from its earliest years.

Until its move in 1918 to its Broadway campus, Newcomb College was made up mostly of day students. Its move to its current site on the uptown campus of Tulane was also the occasion of development of dormitories and more campus life. Students at Newcomb College became increasingly sophisticated and the school's reputation grew.

The university had recruited Brandt V.B. Dixon as the first president of Newcomb College. To ensure girls and young women were academically prepared for college, Dixon established the Newcomb High School, which operated from 1888 to 1920. The preparatory school ensured that girls were ready to study at the college level, as some parents tried to send girls to Newcomb who were as young as 13 or 14, with little academic preparation. Dixon worked with faculty and students to continue to raise academic standards. By 1916, Newcomb had achieved a strong regional reputation and become "one of seven Southern schools which held a standard college designation within the Southern Association of College Women."[3]

Out of its art school, the college created the business of what became the renowned Newcomb Pottery. This reflected both a progressive interest in craft and parents' desire for their daughters to learn a practical, "industrial" skill in the economically difficult postwar years. It was first headed by Mary Given Sheerer, previously associated with the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati. While the pottery did not employ that many women, some did find work there. Angela Gregory was artist-in-residence at Newcomb College. It produced more than 70,000 pieces before the pottery program closed in 1939. During these years, the college's art program expanded to include other arts and crafts, such as illustrated bookplates, jewelry, embroidery, and hand-bound books, the latter often given embossed leather covers and elaborate clasps.[3]

In 2016, Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service and the Newcomb Art Museum was shown at the Princeton University Art Museum, ending its tour at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.[4]

Newcomb college founder Josephine Louise Newcomb and her family commissioned windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany for a chapel at the original site of Newcomb College. One of the commissions was for Resurrection, part of a triptych designed in memory of her daughter, Harriet Sophie Newcomb, for whom the college was named. Other Tiffany windows were designed for an area behind the altar of the original chapel in memory of Josephine's husband Warren Newcomb and her mother Mary Sophie LeMonnier.[5]

Noted art critic, author, and art historian John Canaday taught at Newcomb College (1934-1936). Later Canaday headed the art department at Newcomb (1950-1952). He had a 17-year career as art critic for the New York Times, beginning in 1959.

Interest in the Newcomb Art Department and the college's collections of art gave rise to support for the Newcomb Art Museum and sustained support and restoration of its collections during post-Katrina administrative adjustments. In July 2015 the Newcomb Art Museum officially became the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University.

Newcomb contributed greatly to the early development of basketball and other sports for women, which added to its reputation. The college was one of the first women's colleges to compete in national basketball games, along with northern women's colleges such as Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Vassar.

In 1895, Newcomb's physical education instructor Clara Gregory Baer published the handbook Basketball Rules for Women and Girls. The book described both the one-handed shot and the jump shot, which would not be adopted by men's basketball until 1936. The college had the first women's team to wear bloomers, a better solution for sports. On March 13, 1895, Newcomb students played the first public basketball game in the South before 560 other women at the Southern Athletic Club.[6][7][8]

Newcomb ball, a game played as an alternative to volleyball, originated at Newcomb College and bears its name. The sport was very popular in the 1920s.[9] The game is still played in various forms across the world.

As it grew, the college reflected many social changes, such as the wider roles of women during and after World War II. Married women were included in admissions. The college began to offer more coeducational classes with Tulane University. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in the early 1960s both the university and college integrated to adjust to a new moral imperative. The focus of the curriculum changed over the years, and women were offered more science and business classes.[3]

In December 2005 the Tulane University board of directors announced that the university would be reorganized on July 1, 2006, to accommodate needed changes due to losses following Hurricane Katrina.[10] The board also approved the recommendation of a special Tulane Renewal task force to name a new, co-educational, single undergraduate college Newcomb-Tulane College. The new college within the university is not a successor to Newcomb College.

This followed years of talk about restructuring. Some of the faculty had believed that Newcomb's separate status had adversely affected promotions, for instance, as well as other academic opportunities and had long encouraged a realignment within Tulane University. Since social changes of the 1970s, college and university discussions had centered on a different arrangement within the university.[3]

Historically many Jewish girls from the Southern United States attended Newcomb. For one decade over one third of the girls in the school were Jewish. The school had the nickname, "Jewcomb," a nickname described by Eli S. Evans, author of The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, as not elegant.[19] Historically most graduates of the Louise S. McGehee School in New Orleans attended Newcomb.[19] Evans wrote that was because "Mardi Gras heavily intrudes itself in college life" at Newcomb and because the area's debutante season lasts from November to March.[19]

Gentile and Jewish girls at Newcomb historically had separate social spheres. This was a continuation of the social separation that occurred on the secondary school level in New Orleans. The gentile sororities, through the members and the alumnae, practiced exclusion of Jews. The alumnae of gentile sororities screened prospective applicants and recommended them to the girls in the current gentile sororities. Some less prestigious gentile sororities did admit Jewish girls.[19] Historically, each period two rushes were held at the school; one for gentile sororities and one for Jewish sororities. A girl entering Newcomb would receive a letter in the mail over the summer and return a photograph of herself and a preference on whether she would participate in the gentile rush or the Jewish rush. Jewish sororities used the Hillel foundation to get lists of names of Jewish first year students.[20]

Several years before 1997 the school stopped the two rush system.[19]

• Newcomb Art Gallery
• Newcomb-Tulane College
• Timeline of women's colleges in the United States
• Women's colleges in the Southern United States

• Tucker, Susan, and Beth Willinger, eds. Newcomb College, 1886–2006: Higher Education for Women in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 424 pp.

• Official website
• Newcomb Scholars
• Newcomb Art Gallery
• The Future of Newcomb College, Inc., organized to preserve Newcomb College as a women’s degree-granting institution.
• Newcomb College Pottery
• Newcomb Pottery Marks