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YOUNG WOMEN who left their parents and homes between 1837 and 1850 to enroll at Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary were beginning to plan consciously for a new kind of life. Their social origins indicate that their decisions to attend Mount Holyoke were schemes to widen their life chances. Their diaries and letters revealed what planners they were; their calculations seemed a necessity. By the time Lucinda Guilford, class of 1847, left her home in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, in 1845, she and her family necessarily had calculated each step of her life. She had five brothers and at least one sister; and her father, a shoemaker, owned neither a house nor land. Looking upon Mount Holyoke with clear intentions, Guilford wrote in her journal on November 4, 1845, "I do mean to improve all I possibly can. I mean to be as wise, as consistent, as energetic, as 'planning', as sedate, as thinking, as thorough, as Miss Mary Lyon's beau ideal of a lady can be.. . ." (1) Resolutions like Lucinda Guilford's abound in the diaries and letters of Mount Holyoke students in this period. Students mentioned planning whenever they wrote about Mary Lyon, and when they thought about their own futures. Helen Maria Graves, who attended Holyoke in 1848, was struck by what she called the "many little plans" Mary Lyon had devised to administer the Seminary. "Miss Lyon is certainly a wonder of the age," Graves wrote. "She is such a planner." Eliza Peabody described Lyon in the same terms in 1840: "Her intent seems to be to improve all the time, & she plans admirably, & executes with rapidity." In 1841 Peabody wrote, "She is ever planning & tries to have us perfect in little things." (2) A penchant for planning, once kindled in Mary Lyon's students, encompassed everything from details of daily routine to schemes for staging

WITHIN THE SMALL BUILDINGS and gatherings of young men at New England colleges in the early nineteenth century, a social transformation began to work that would alter the experience of being a student. Unlike the conscious reforms introduced by the rise of universities after the Civil War, the transformation of the early nine teenth century proceeded without plan. No theorist designed it ac cording to conscious pedagogical aims, and no institution either anti cipated or really controlled the changes between 1800 and 1840. Only after 1840, when New England colleges already had assumed new forms, did a consciousness arise concerning what had transpired. The material conditions of collegiate life, the old communal arrangements that had controlled the behavior and intellectual activity of students through most of the colonial period had been demolished, creating a new disorder. Only after 1840 did plans arise for dealing with this disorder, a consequence of social changes sweeping over every New England institution of higher education. Long before the rise of universities, antebellum colleges had become places of dynamic change through the needs and workings of the student population itself. A shift in the social origins of the student population caused this transformation. It began almost imperceptibly at the time of the American Revolution and then assumed unprecedented proportions after 1800. Into the New England colleges there came a flood of students from poor families. Never before had these families sent sons to college, nor could they afford to do so now; their sons came vol untarily to higher education, for the most part having made their own

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