Mary L. Matthews recognized as first woman to complete academic course at Washington College

In December 1991, here expressed as December 1, 1991, a feature in a Washington College magazine highlighted Mary L. Matthews of Kent County (Class of ’85) as the first woman to complete the academic course at Washington College.[1][7] Earlier institutional history referred to her as the first woman to graduate from the college, though the precise nature of her credential—whether a full degree or a certified completion—remains somewhat unclear in accessible sources. Nonetheless, the 1991 article brought renewed attention to Matthews as a pioneering woman student from the nineteenth century.

This recognition is significant because it re‑centers a woman whose achievement predated both Bertha Stiles’s faculty appointment and the more widely known early women graduates of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth‑century context, for a woman from Kent County to pursue and complete the college’s full academic course was a bold challenge to prevailing norms that reserved advanced, classical education for men. By recovering and publicizing Matthews’s story in 1991, the college participated in a broader historiographical trend: reassessing archival records to acknowledge women’s often overlooked educational firsts.[1][7] For contemporary readers and students, the article situates Matthews as a foundational figure in the history of women’s education at Washington College, underscoring that women’s academic ambitions and accomplishments on the Eastern Shore reach back much further than many had assumed.