BY LILY REAVIS ’21 & DECLAN LANGTON ’22
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & MANAGING EDITOR OF CONTENT
For years, anyone who asked who was behind the historicallywomens.c0m Instagram page got the same answer: “One singular girl from a Seven Sisters college who likes memes.” It came up a lot, so much so that it’s still the first question listed on the FAQ of the self-described “premiere women’s college meme page.”
The page’s acclaim began after the 2019 premiere of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” when historicallywomens.c0m posted a package of memes tagging each of the Seven Sisters as its characters. What ensued was thousands of comments and reposts, a weekslong feud between college students about whether or not Barnard was truly Amy and an explosion of popularity for the Instagram page. The account went from 1,000 to over 10,000 followers in a matter of days, and suddenly it was home to a new, younger community of current students at historically women’s colleges throughout the country.
The creator pledged to remain anonymous so that followers wouldn’t think the content was biased. She reaffirmed that she was a student at a Seven Sisters college, but refused to say which. In a Smith Sophian article about the infamous “Little Women” meme from May 2020, the creator said, “While I try to stay neutral, I do have this wealth of knowledge about my own institution and mostly run off of hearsay for other schools. Though everyone knows I came from only one institution, the mystery surrounding ‘which one??’ sort of validates my content.”
She continued, “There’s something exciting about posting anonymously.”
But as the academic year comes to a close and her younger sister prepares to graduate from Smith, the Mount Holyoke alum behind the viral online meme page is ready to open up about the community she created and her role behind it.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Mary Estrera ’19 first thought that historically women’s colleges needed a better social media presence while applying to colleges her senior year of high school. “I really wished that I had a space where I could learn about the different schools and their different cultures,” she explained.
Three years later, she launched historicallywomens.c0m on Instagram to share memes she made about her student experience.
“Where I come from in Texas, there’s a lot of football culture and school rivalry,” Estrera said. She saw online memes about the bigger universities that her friends attended, but no one from her home understood or discussed historically women’s colleges.
“I feel like there’s like Seven Sisters content there as well, but people weren’t really making memes of it,” she said. “If you go to a school in Texas with like 50,000 people, then yeah, someone’s gonna be pumping out content, and it’s gonna be funny. But when you go to school with like 1,000 people, maybe you’re not going to. Or maybe it’s not going to be dispersed, even if someone is making it. So I was like, ‘Let me make this Instagram account.’”
Estrera launched the account in 2017 during her junior year at Mount Holyoke. At first, she made all of the page’s content by hand and posted without a set schedule. The page’s follower base was small, which meant that there wasn’t a lot of pressure to keep up with messages or submissions from fans.
“Part of the reason why I was anonymous in the first place was because I was making all the memes,” Estrera explained. “People would be like, ‘Oh, she obviously goes to Wellesley,’ or like, ‘She obviously goes to Smith. That’s why Smith gets all the good stuff.’”
She kept the page operational without divulging her personal information, and one year later, Estrera graduated from Mount Holyoke. “That’s also part of why I didn’t ever release my identity,” she added. “I don’t want to be a graduate and then have people, like, call me a boomer. That’d be so embarrassing, if my memes were like, really stale,” she said, laughing. “So I just made everyone think I was still a student. No one really asked.”
BUILDING COMMUNITY FOR HWCS
While applying to colleges in 2015, Estrera wished she had more friendly online spaces to turn to. The page has since branched out into a community support system for current and prospective HWC students.
“The only thing I had at the time … was College Confidential which — I don’t know if you guys have ever been on that crazy website — but it’s really cutthroat on there. It is so toxic. It made me so scared just to go to college in general,” she said. “I feel like if I had a place where you could talk to current students or alums or even other prospies, and everyone’s really candid, … that probably would have really helped my decision-making at the time,” she added.
Across the United States, there are currently 33 colleges open specifically to women. One of Estrera’s goals for historicallywomens.c0m became connecting the students of these schools, both current and prospective, starting with the Seven Sisters.
“I think I just want more people to know what historically women’s colleges offer,” she said. “I have all this extra knowledge that I can give to other people. And I just think it’s cool to kind of be like a part of a network or a part of something bigger like that.”
For more than a few current students at HWCs throughout the country, Estrera’s page has accomplished that goal. Grace Sanford ’24 is one of those students whose college decision process was made easier by historicallywomens.c0m.
“I was trying to make a decision without having ever seen the College since it was last spring,” she explained. “It was hard to get a sense [of] the school culture just from admissions events since those are very carefully curated to make the school look perfect. In a normal year, I could have gotten a sense by visiting campus, seeing what people were doing and asking questions, but I didn’t really have any access.” She became involved with the community through a post targeted for incoming first-years at HWCs that appeared on the page last May and was instantly hooked.
The past few years have seen a substantial rise in interest in historically women’s colleges. According to the Mount Holyoke College website, the class of 2023 was one of the most competitive classes in the school’s history. That year, 3,908 students applied, an 8 percent increase from 2018. This trend is similar across all HWCs.
This growth has interested Estrera. “It … [feels] like there’s a revival in interest that’s coinciding with people’s further acceptance of an exploration of gender and sexuality,” she said. “So people are like, ‘It’s okay to be queer,’ then, ‘Okay, so what’s a queer college I can go to?’”
For this, she looks toward the HWCs because they have a “specific type of queer culture that’s extremely visible.” She believes that this culture is reflected in the content of the page.
As an alum, running historicallywomens.c0m has helped Estrera stay connected to the Mount Holyoke community. “I feel like a lot of what I do is because I want someone else to have an experience I didn’t have,” she said. “When I came to [Mount] Holyoke, so many things shifted for me. It was just such a different experience,” she recalled.
While the group has expanded to encompass nearly all historically women’s colleges, it is still mainly built around the Seven Sisters. Most of the group’s participants live in the Northampton area, which includes both Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges.
To continue to build community on the page, Estrera started hosting events, such as one she called “missed connections.” “It was a Valentine’s Day thing to set up dates or just get to know people better,” she explained.
At least one lasting connection was made that day, a fact that Estrera remains proud of. “Somebody messaged me recently and was like, ‘Oh, I met someone through that, but it didn’t really work out. And then we were dating other people for a while, but then we reconnected, and we’re dating now,’” she recalled.
In September, Estrera launched a Discord server for the historicallywomens.c0m community. She hoped that adding a second platform to the online group would expand access and cohesion.
The Discord server is now the hub of all these larger conversations, with 988 members as of April 28. According to Estrera, the server was recently partnered on the app for being an active and unique community. “I feel like our Discord server was given [partnership] because a lot of Discord servers are just based around anime or gaming,” she explained. “They’re probably like, ‘Oh, this is different! Women!’”
The Discord server has four moderators who work alongside Estrera, but she remains the sole admin of the Instagram page.
A MOVE TO MUTUAL AID AND ACTIVISM
When the pandemic started, Estrera realized that historicallywomens.c0m could be used to spread word about students who needed money, housing or rides to get off campus due to the coronavirus-driven closure.
“I basically thought, ‘I’ll just use my stories as a place where people can connect and get help and find [out] how to offer help,’” she said. “A lot of people responded to that.”
From there, the number of mutual aid requests sent to the page increased, so Estrera decided to do a weekly roundup. “I wanted to make a program, basically, to let people know that they can send me things and also that it would be posted at a certain time and it would be a weekly thing,” she explained.
What is now known as the “HWC Mutual Aid Purse” is posted on the historicallywomens.c0m Instagram page’s story each Tuesday. Estrera compiles the requests she receives each week into a series of posts that advertise needs from across the HWC community.
The program was purposefully created with very loose parameters: As long as the request will benefit a women’s college student or alum, Estrera will include it in the page’s weekly roundup post.
Dealing with the needs and emotions of students through the page hasn’t always been easy. For Estrera, moderating and administering the page has been a learning experience rooted in activism and community building.
“There was a time when I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with the labor associated with the account,” she explained. “Trying to do the right thing and trying to make sure that all the right information is out there, but also keeping an open dialogue.”
Estrera said that some people have submitted memes that were problematic in one way or another. Rather than deleting the posts immediately, she has attempted to use them as learning opportunities for the community. “I think that was something that was sort of hard for me to navigate, especially by myself, especially through a platform like Instagram, where it does feel one-sided in some ways,” she said.
Estrera eventually created submission guidelines and a process for dealing with problematic memes. Instead of deleting the pieces outright or engaging in constant debate, she asked contributors and community members to openly talk about their issues with the content. If a post was accused of being insensitive, the person who submitted it was given the opportunity to add a note or warning to the caption.
“That was a little bit hard for me,” Estrera explained. “But then I just figured out I could ask. I could just tell everyone, ‘If you have a problem, then you can write it out. I’m not going to write it myself, but you can do it, and then you can use my platform.’”
The resulting community is one that is tightly knit and dedicated to holding discussions. While there are still moments of conflict and disagreement on the Instagram page and Discord server, Estrera feels that there is also more kindness and understanding from the community members when they commit to talking with each other.
STEPPING IN FRONT OF THE CURTAIN
After nearly four years of running the page, Estrera decided it was time to reveal her identity. “The account has graduated,” she joked.
The end of the 2020-2021 academic year also marks the graduation of her sister, Rachel Estrera, a senior at Smith. She recalled thinking, “Maybe when Rachel graduates, then I’ll do my reveal, because then it’s like, we’re out. There’s no stakes anymore.”
While those stakes largely centered around maintaining the anonymity of her alma mater, this isn’t something she continues to be concerned about. “It’s not gonna be crazy,” she said. “At this point, I’m mostly just administering the page. It’s not too much of my own personality or my own content on the page,” she added.
As she moves into the next phase of her life — applying for jobs after being furloughed at the start of the pandemic — Estrera hopes to use the page to show what she is capable of doing on social media. “I want my community to know before my job interviewer,” she explained.
For now, she will continue to run the page from her home in Dallas while pursuing her professional career. “Because of this page, I feel very in tune with other people from women’s colleges,” she explained. “It’s just, like, that desire to give back, basically, because I don’t have money to donate to the school. So this is my donation.”
Estrera isn’t afraid to reveal her identity. Rather, she wants to express her gratitude for the community that has congregated around her page and continue working to better the women’s college experience.
“It’s like, mask-off,” she said. “Like, let’s go.”