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In the 1880s, more than 40 years after the university’s creation, women graduated from Queen’s for the first time.

An association for Queen's women graduates was founded at the turn of the 20th century to serve the university and especially to help female students. Together, these alumnae – to use the proper Latin term — formed a loose organization to ensure “a bond of union” and rally other women to the idea of higher education. In 1911, they formalized into the Queen’s Alumnae Association (QAA), and its branches soon fanned across the country.

From the outset, the association demonstrated its activism. Its main accomplishment during its 90-year history was to found and help fund the university's women's residences, which were operated by the Association until the early 1970s.

Students were initially housed in rented buildings near campus, but as the number of women students grew at Queen’s, the question of proper accommodation arose. Women didn’t want the boarding house culture of their male counterparts, so the QAA set out to build an all-woman residence on campus.

Guided by federal bureaucrat Margaret Mackintosh, BA 1913 (and sister of future Queen’s principal William Mackintosh), among others, the association set about fundraising. In the interim, it rented houses just off campus where women could live together and develop their ties. The best known of these was a brick house at 174 Earl Street, an abode affectionately dubbed “the Hencoop.”

By 1923, to the surprise and consternation of Queen's Board of Trustees, $80,000 had been raised (thanks primarily to the Alumnae Association), and an architect retained to design a 57-bed residence opposite the Lower Campus. The Board of Trustees gave the project lukewarm approval, agreed to cover the rest of the cost, and conceded subsequent management of women’s residences to the women themselves.

The first residence for women and first on-campus accommodation for students - Ban Righ Hall - was completed in 1925. Lady Byng, the wife of the governor general, opened the new residence.

The association had other devotions: in 1937, it underwrote the cost of the Marty Scholarship program, designed to support promising women graduates in their academic progress, and it allied with other groups dedicated to women in higher education. All the while, the women’s residences – Adelaide and Chown were added in the 1950s – thrived, so much so that their frugal management produced handsome annual surpluses.

Alumnae Association volunteers sat on the Ban Righ Board and continued to have a direct role in running (and funding) the growing number of women's residences until the early 1970s. As the end of the 20th century approached, Queen’s residences became co-educational. In 1970, all Queen’s residences were merged under one, unisex board of control. 

By the end of this era of alumnae management, a large surplus had accumulated. True to its founding spirit, the association insisted that the accumulated residence surplus be applied to facilitating higher education for mature women, and part of this money was used to launch and maintain the Ban Righ Foundation for Continuing Education (now the Ban Righ Centre) in 1974.

In 1990 the alumnae voted to integrate into Queen’s Alumni Association, which agreed to embed a committee on women’s affairs.

In 1962, the Alumnae Association published a collection of retrospective articles by leading association members on the early days of the association and its struggle to build residences for women at Queen's (for that story, visit the Ban Righ Centre website). The book was called ���˴�Ƭ Alumnae Association 1900-1961 and Women's Residences at Queen's (see Books about Queen's). It was edited by Mary Chown, Melva Eagleson, and Thelma Boucher. In 1992, to help celebrate the University's sesquicentennial anniversary, the Alumni Association reissued the book, edited for republication by Margaret Gibson (Arts '46) under the title A Generous Loyalty: The Queen's Alumnae Memory Book.