Bryn Mawr was one of the first institutions of higher education in the United States to offer graduate degrees, including doctorates, to women.

In 1931, Bryn Mawr began accepting men as graduate students, while remaining women-focused at the undergraduate level.

[11] In September 2010, Bryn Mawr hosted an international conference on issues of educational access, equity, and opportunity in secondary schools and universities in the United States and around the world.

Each is named after a county town in Wales: Brecon, Denbigh (1891), Merion (1885), and Radnor (1887), and Pembroke East and West (1892).

In 2015, Perry House was relaunched by the college in the former French tower of Haffner, which had undergone renovations and reconstruction the previous year.

[21] Along with Perry, now known as the Enid Cook '31 Center, a new residence hall was built where the old Haffner Language and Culture House once stood.

[23] In 1960, architect Louis I. Kahn and Bryn Mawr College president, Katharine Elizabeth McBride, came together to create the Erdman Hall dormitory.

[24] The Marjorie Walter Goodhart Theater houses a vaulted auditorium designed by Arthur Ingersoll Meigs of Mellor, Meigs & Howe, two smaller spaces that are ideal for intimate performances by visiting artists, practice rooms for student musicians, and the Office for the Arts.

The building's towers and gables, friezes, carvings and ornamental ironwork, designed by Samuel Yellin, were done in the gothic revival style.

[29][30] The Great Hall was once the home of an Athena Lemnia statue (damaged in 1997) that is now located in a high alcove in the Rhys Carpenter Art and Archaeology Library.

This renaming was in response to student protests, which claimed that many of M. Carey Thomas's views did not represent the values of the college.

Today, the building houses a plaque explaining the controversy of the former name and affirming the college's current dedication to equity and inclusion, which was unveiled during the 2019 Community Day of Learning.

[33] Named for Bryn Mawr's late professor of Classical Archaeology, the Rhys Carpenter Library was designed by Henry Myerberg of New York and opened in 1997.

Names of art and archaeology faculty are displayed on the main wall of the atrium, along with a series of plaster casts of the metopes of the Parthenon.

The building was demolished in the spring of 1968 to make space for the construction of Canaday Library, which stands on the site today.

At the time of its demolition, many of the Deanery's furnishings were re-located to Wyndham, an 18th-century farmhouse (with several modern additions) which became the college's new Alumnae Center.

The Emily Balch Seminars are similar to courses in freshman composition at other institutions, though focus on a specific topic.

"[40] Its most popular undergraduate majors, based on 2021 graduates, were:[41] In 1972, the college founded a year-long post baccalaureate pre-medical program for career changers.

It includes a breakfast of strawberries and cream, a parade, dancing around the traditional Maypole, a feminist alternative called the Mayhole,[48] and student performances.

[51] Bryn Mawr has signed the American College and University President's Climate Commitment, and in doing so, the school agreed to make all new buildings comply with a LEED silver standard or higher; to purchase Energy Star products whenever possible; and to provide and encourage the use of public transportation.

The dining halls previously offered biodegradable takeout containers, but reverted to Styrofoam in the 2009/10 academic year.

1894); archaeologist Doreen Canaday Spitzer (1936); author, social activist and feminist Grace Lee Boggs (Ph.D. 1940); Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch (1889); geneticist Nettie Stevens (Ph.D. 1903); physicist Elizabeth Laird (Ph.D. 1901); physicist and astronomer Frances Lowater (Ph.D. 1904); mathematician Ada Isabel Maddison (Ph.D. 1896); Physician Martha Tracy (1898) a pioneer in medical education[58] and in public health;[59][60] 1891 Fellow in Mathematics Ruth Gentry; artist Anne Truitt (1943); author Ellen Kushner (attended); economist and founding Director of the Congressional Budget Office Alice Rivlin (1952); four-time Academy Award-winning actress Katharine Hepburn (1928); poet Jane Hess Flanders (1962); Carol Alonso, nuclear physicist; Mary Elizabeth Taylor, former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Forbes 30 under 30; Carolyn Goodman, mayor of Las Vegas from 2011–; Betsy Hodges, mayor of Minneapolis from 2013 to 2017; Renata Adler, novelist and journalist; Dame A.S. Byatt, novelist and Booker Prize winner; Joan Slonczewski, biologist and science fiction novelist; Caroline Stevermer, fantasy novelist; Rachel Simon, author and memoirist; Maggie Siff, actor (1996).

[64] The social reformer, Alice P. Gannett (1898), for whom the Goodrich-Gannett Neighborhood Center is named, attended Bryn Mawr,[65] as did Maya Ajmera, CEO of Society for Science & the Public.

[66] Notable faculty include Woodrow Wilson, chemists Arthur C. Cope and Louis Fieser, Arthur Lindo Patterson of the Patterson function, Edmund Beecher Wilson, Geraldine Richmond, philologists Catherine Conybeare, Grace Frank and Louise Holland, archaeologists Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Leicester Bodine Holland, Thomas Hunt Morgan, historian Caroline Robbins, mathematician Emmy Noether, neurobiologist Paul Grobstein, and Lillian Rosanoff Lieber, Richmond Lattimore, Tenney Frank, Mabel Louise Lang, and Lily Ross Taylor, the Spanish philosopher José Ferrater Mora, Germanic philologist Agathe Lasch, Classical philologist Wilmer Cave Wright, Hispanist and medievalist Georgiana Goddard King, poet Karl Kirchwey,[67][68] decorated French Resistance officer Marcelle Pardé (French literature 1919 to 1929), and historian and author Amy Kelly.