About VGIF

Donate OnLine

Who was Virginia Gildersleeve?

 

VGIF is named in honor of Virginia Gildersleeve, a noted leader in women's education and Dean of Barnard College. Gildersleeve was a co-founder and twice President of the International Federation of University Women. She was the only woman appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to the US Delegation that established the United Nations and the first woman in the United States to sign a United States treaty.
 

 


VIRGINIA CROCHERON GILDERSLEEVE
(Oct. 3, 1877 - July 7, 1965)

Professor of English and Dean of Barnard College from 1911 to 1947, Virginia Gildersleeve did more to advance the cause of women at Columbia University than any other person of her time. Women had won the right to an undergraduate education with the founding of Barnard College (1889), and they had achieved the formal right to enter the Columbia graduate faculties after another decade of conflict. But prejudice against female graduate students persisted, the professional schools remained closed, and places on the faculty appeared largely out of reach, when Gildersleeve became Dean of Barnard in 1911. >>more

 

 

" I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society."

Virginia Gildersleeve

"The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community-these are the most vital things education must try to produce."

Virginia Gildersleeve

More links about Virginia Gildersleeve
www.kappakappagamma.org. [1920]

Living Legacies - Columbia University

  1. Virginia Gildersleeve: Opening the Gates by Rosalind Rosenberg
  2. I.I. Rabi, Lionel Trilling, and Virginia Gildersleeve
  3. THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE OF THE VIRGINIA GILDERSLEEVE INTERNATIONAL FUND TO BE HELD AT BARNARD COLLEGE APRIL 8, 2000
  4. Reminiscences of University Life Includes Five Barnard Authors
  5. Her Life at Barnard

"Education should not be a thing apart, but interwoven with every structure and essence of life." Gildersleeve, 1954


The Writings of Virginia Gildersleeve (available on Amazon.com)

Many a Good Crusade (Signal Lives) (1954)
Many a good crusade;: Memoirs (1954)
"The making of the United Nations charter, San Francisco" (1945)
Address (1946)
"The relationship of nations: An address by Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve ... " delivered at the Congress of National Service of the National Security League, at Chicago, February 22, 1918
"The soul of a college", (Bulletin of Randolph-Macon woman's college) (Bulletin of Randolph-Macon woman's college) (Jan 1, 1917)
"Should the army canteen be restored?" (Jan 1, 1910)
"Government regulation of the Elizabethan drama" (Burt Franklin research and source works series) (Jan 1, 1961)