University of Michigan. Women's League.

From the time that women were admitted to the University of Michigan in 1870 (some four decades after the university's founding) until 1896, when the first dean of women was appointed, there was no organized supervision of women students on campus. The university provided no housing for students; female students, like their male counterparts, were left to find their own lodgings in town, usually in mixed rooming houses. Few of these rooming houses had sitting rooms for receiving callers.

Given the small number of women students on campus in proportion to the men, and lacking dormitories or places on campus where they might meet, women students at times felt isolated. As one early student related: "Of social life we had none, and in sheer despair of ever becoming acquainted with one another we founded a society mildly literary and aggressively friendly." The Women's League, of which this student spoke, was organized in 1890 by women students and wives of faculty members.

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