Miss Howard came to Wellesley in 1875, giving up a private school
of her own, Ivy Hall, in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in order to become
a college president. No far-seeing policies can be traced to her,
however; she seems to have been content to press her somewhat
narrow and rigid conception of discipline upon a more or less
restive student body, and to follow Mr. Durant's lead in all matters
pertaining to scholarship and academic expansion.

We can trace that expansion from year to year through this first
administration. In 1877 the Board of Visitors was established,
and eminent educators and clergymen were invited to visit the
college at stated intervals and stimulate by their criticism the
college routine. In 1878 the Students' Aid Society was founded
to help the many young women who were in need of a college training,
but who could not afford to pay their own way. Through the wise
generosity of Mrs. Durant and a group of Boston women, the society
was set upon its feet, and its long career of blessed usefulness
was begun. This is only one of the many gifts which Wellesley
owes to Mrs. Durant. As Professor Katharine Lee Bates has said
in her charming sketch of Mrs. Durant in the Wellesley Legenda
for 1894: "Her specific gifts to Wellesley it is impossible to
completely enumerate. She has forgotten, and no one else ever
knew. So long as Mr. Durant was living, husband and wife were
one and inseparable in service and donation. But since his death,
while it has been obvious that she spends herself unsparingly in
college cares, adding many of his functions to her own, a
continuous flow of benefits, almost unperceived, has come to
Wellesley from her open hand." As long as her health permitted,
she lavished "her very life in labor of hand and brain for Wellesley,