Yet the Pink Bubble, as Sweet Briar women have long called their alma mater, has also nurtured generations of feisty professionals, many of them working in the sciences, who attended the school before the era of widespread coeducation at the college level.

Image Anna "Chips" Pai, 1957

Since March, when the school’s board suddenly said it would close the college because of dwindling enrollment and strapped finances, a campaign to save it has pursued legal and other actions with increasing gusto and success; last month, the Commonwealth of Virginia sued to keep the college open. Last week, a judge ruled that, for a period of 60 days, the board could not close the school using funds solicited for its operation.. The campaign #Save Sweet Briar has raised $1 million, and another $10 million has been pledged.

Against this backdrop, the experiences of Sweet Briar’s postwar graduates, who have been galvanized by the campaign and are reconnecting on Facebook, email and by phone, paint a vivid picture of an era marked by conflicting cultures: one that was still defined by hostess houses, white gloves and the “ring before spring” doctrine that cast women’s colleges as mere finishing schools, and one with a commitment to educating women for roles far from the home.

In 1960, The New York Times published an article with a headline that read, “Road From Sophocles to Spock Is Often a Bumpy One.” It reported on “the problem,” as the president of Barnard College put it, of the educated housewife: her anxiety, frustration and claustrophobia.

Phyllis Levin, its author, likened her subjects to “a two-headed schizophrenic” who “used to talk about whether music was frozen architecture, now she talks over frozen food plans.” Noting that the right to vote had been won in 1920, Ms. Levin pointed out that “the modern woman” was only 40 years old, and lamented her descent from the ivory tower of academia to “push-button kitchens, supermarkets and finished basements.”