Sophia Smith sat in her Massachusetts mansion in 1863, surrounded by silence and an impossible question.

Her last family member had died. She was unmarried, increasingly deaf, and suddenly one of the wealthiest women in New England—with $400,000 to her name (about $9.5 million today).
But here’s what made her situation truly extraordinary: she had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

In 1860s America, wealthy unmarried women had exactly one script: donate quietly to charities, live respectably, leave your fortune to male relatives. Women couldn’t vote. Couldn’t hold office. Couldn’t even serve on boards. Society expected them to exist in the margins of importance.

Sophia Smith was about to rewrite that entire script.

She consulted her pastor with a simple question: “How can I make my fortune matter?”
His answer was radical: “Build a college. For women.”

The idea electrified her. Here was a woman who’d been denied formal education her entire life, told that women’s minds weren’t worth investing in, that they needed needlework and deportment—not algebra, Latin, or philosophy.

And she knew it was complete nonsense.

In March 1870, at age 73, Sophia finalized a will that would shake the foundation of American education. Her instructions were crystal clear: use her entire fortune to create a college providing women with opportunities “equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men.”

Not separate. Not watered down. Not a “female version” of education.

Equal.

Three months later, she died. She never saw a single student. Never witnessed the revolution she’d ignited. Never knew if her dream would actually work.
But her will was ironclad.

Smith College opened on September 14, 1875, with fourteen young women. Just fourteen.

Those fourteen women studied the exact same curriculum as Harvard men: Latin, Greek, mathematics, natural sciences, philosophy. The real thing. No dumbing down.
Critics claimed women’s brains couldn’t handle it. That advanced education would damage their reproductive systems. That college would make women unmarriageable and unnatural.
The women proved them wrong, one degree at a time.

The timing was perfect. The 1870s women’s rights movement was exploding, but women kept hitting the same wall: lack of education. You couldn’t be a doctor without medical school. Couldn’t be a lawyer without law school. And colleges wouldn’t admit women.

Sophia Smith’s endowment shattered that wall.
The ripple effects were staggering.

By 1900, Smith College had over 1,000 students. By the 1920s, it became one of the legendary “Seven Sisters” colleges. Its graduates became teachers who started schools, writers who published groundbreaking work, scientists who made revolutionary discoveries.

Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. Gloria Steinem became a feminist icon. Sylvia Plath became one of America’s greatest poets. Barbara Bush became First Lady.
All because a deaf, unmarried woman in Massachusetts decided her fortune should empower women she would never meet.

Here’s the beautiful irony: Sophia’s unmarried status gave her something married women didn’t have—complete control over her wealth. Under coverture laws, married women’s property automatically became their husbands’ property. But Sophia’s money was entirely hers to direct.

She used that power to create opportunities that didn’t exist in her own lifetime.

That’s a particular kind of generosity—investing in a future you won’t live to see, for people you’ll never know, because you believe they deserve better than what you had.
Today, Smith College has an endowment over $2 billion. It’s educated over 50,000 women. Its alumnae include Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, members of Congress, CEOs, groundbreaking scientists.

None of it would exist without one woman’s 1870 decision to leave everything to a college that didn’t yet exist, for students not yet born, to study subjects women supposedly couldn’t master.
Sophia Smith died alone, deaf, unmarried—circumstances that should have rendered her invisible to history.

Instead, she became one of the most influential women in American education.

Not by breaking barriers herself, but by funding the institution that would help generations of women break every barrier that followed.
She couldn’t attend college.

So she built one.
And 150 years later, it’s still opening doors she never got to walk through.