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The Seven Sisters


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The Rosanna Spring/Summer 2017 collection added a new, very chic member to the family (or should I say members?). Seven Sisters, with deep purple and gold might seem like a quaint tea set with cute giftables but under the name is much more meaning.

“Seven Sisters” originally was a group of women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. They are: Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Vassar College and Wellesley College.

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The Seven Sisters were all founded between 1837 and 1889 as a response to the lack of quality education being offered to women. Four are in Massachusetts, two are in New York and one is in Pennsylvania. Radcliffe (which merged with Harvard College) and Vassar (which is now coeducational) are no longer women’s colleges. The 'Seven Sisters' name was given to Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe, because of their parallel to the “Ivy League men’s colleges" in 1927.

The term Seven Sisters is adopted from the Greek myth of The Pleiades, who are the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione. The daughters, (Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Calaeno, Sterope and Merope) were collectively referred to as The Seven Sisters. In Astronomy, a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus is referred to as The Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters.

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Today, what’s left of the Seven Sisters, is a group of colleges that are considered highly competitive among liberal arts institutions in the U.S. Wellesley College consistently ranks in the top three or four of national liberal arts colleges, and Smith and Vassar was recently ranked 12 by U.S. News and World Reports.

Shop the Seven Sisters collection here.