Founding Sisters introduces the pioneering women — renowned archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, and professors — who founded departments and built collections at Mount Holyoke College in the 19th and 20th centuries. Research in college archives and museum files by current students yielded valuable information about the lives, contributions, and influence of these visionary women, how and when they solidified their disciplines and the ways that they assembled marble statues, plaster casts, and scientific specimens to form the first college collections. Their biographies illuminate the major, forgotten role of women in shaping the liberal arts in the 19th and 20th centuries.