Women at the Mount: Celebrating 50 Years

1976

Friends in form room, 1975

Bradley Hall residents, 1970s

Honoring the Past and Igniting the Future

By Donna Klinger and Katherine Stohlman

FOR 150 YEARS, students at the Catholic colleges founded by the Rev. John Dubois and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, located within a few miles of each other in Emmitsburg, got to know each other by participating in social and academic activities and events at their sister institution. Countless dates and ultimately marriages resulted between Mount St. Mary’s College and St. Joseph College students, as alluded to in the poster created when St. Joseph announced its plan to close and the Mount opened its doors to St. Joe’s women as commuter students in academic year 1971-72: Going steady 150 years, finally engaged.

In an interview with Mount Magazine in 2012, Andrea Novotny Foley, C’76, shared that she graduated “quite confident for a girl coming from a small town" because she never felt intimated by men in any situation after “having been surrounded by so many men, particularly in classes."

Perhaps inspired by the then-hit song “I Am Woman," women quickly sought opportunities to get involved, with at least two freshmen hosting a campus radio show and others jumping in to work on the Pridwin yearbook and Mountain Echo newspaper and joining the Glee and Sock and Buskin clubs. In the 1973 Pridwin, an anonymous male student shared his view of the Mount going coed: “…There was a discernible new mood on campus. Things seemed a little more calm, a little less rowdy." The Rev. James Delaney, C’57, S’66, who had returned to the Mount as a faculty member, wrote that the arrival of women on campus helped usher in a more relaxed, open and friendly environment.

Field hockey, 1976; snowy campus, 1974

While women only represented 8% of the student body in 1972, today 51%, or 1,000, of the university’s students are female. The daughters of the Mount who began their journey to a purpose-driven life over the past 50 years often showed early signs of the impact they would have on their community, region, state and nation through their service to the university. For example, Fran Becker, C’75, who capped off a multi-faceted career by leading Northern Virginia’s largest homelessness program, made the case, along with her future husband Rich, for the Ratskeller bar to be built on campus to cut down on drunk driving and resulting accidents. Tamika Tremaglio, C’92, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, started a dance squad and rallied for a Business Law II course. Christine Gelles, C’92, senior vice president for operations at Longenecker & Associates, founded the university’s first environmental club, LIFE. Lyndsey Saunders, C’20, program manager at Pathways to College in West Palm Beach, Florida, cofounded The V.O.I.C.E., a student organization that advocated for equity and inclusion on campus.

Daughters of the Mount are healthcare providers, educators, corporate and nonprofit leaders, scientists, attorneys and judges, authors, artists, forensic accountants, cybersecurity experts and more. On the pages that follow, we profile women representing each of the six decades in which women have been welcomed. Their paths have led them in different directions, but they still all call Mount St. Mary’s their mountain home.

Classroom, 1973