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Vassar College Album, 1873.
Large quarto format album containing approximately fifty-eight photographs, including portraits of the graduates, the majority of which are signed by the subjects on the verso (a few names trimmed); other subjects include professors and administrators; Vassar buildings and local landscapes; and one group shot of the class assembled in and around row boats tied up along the shore of Vassar Lake; [and] a carte-de-visite of Matthew Vassar inserted; each photo mounted on a heavy card page; bound in full dark brown morocco tooled and ruled in blind, titled in gilt on the front board, with the initials L.S.T., almost certainly Lilla Sarah Thomas's (1853-1907) copy, as she is the only graduate with these initials, and her photo is unsigned; some toning, pages slightly rippled, generally good, aeg, 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.
Lilla S. Thomas grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. She married Samuel J. Elder in 1876, and the two lived in Winchester, Massachusetts. Lilla was also a poet, Lilacs in the Wood, was published by her friends and family after she passed away at the age of 53. The Vassar Archive holds her college diary, in which she wrote as an undergraduate between 1866 and 1873. In it, she records details about her college experience. "The diary ends with her thoughts on how her Vassar education developed her character but had a negative effect on her romantic relationships with men." https://digitallibrary.vassar.edu/islandora/object/vassar%3A2796/Metadata
Another notable Vassar graduate of 1873 is Ella Weed (1853-1894), whose photograph is signed on the verso of the mount. Weed served as Chairman of the Academic Committee of the Board of Trustees of Barnard College during the first five years of its existence, and was the author of A Foolish Virgin, a satirical novel published in 1883 about a Vassar graduate who fears revealing her intelligence and higher education "in order to meet accepted standards for female behavior." "Her policies at Barnard were the practical expression of her belief that women could gain full intellectual standing only if their education were equal to men's in rigor." (cf. James, Edward T.; James, Janet Wilson, eds. (1974), "Weed, Ella", quotes from entry by Annette K. Baxter in Famous American Women: a biographical dictionary, Harvard University Press, pp. 556–7)
