In her article Overlooking Women, Kathy M. Newman (Ph.D 1997) describes how she discovered female portraits welded into stained glass in the Branford Mendel Room: “I didn’t overlook them at first, so much as I looked through them. They were welded into the panes of the windows of the Mendel Room in Branford College, lacy and leaded at the same time, sitting at spinning wheels, dancing, flirting, posing. They were dressed like the characters in Little Women; tiny waists, billowing skirts, slippered feet. It took me more than a few long stares out of those windows to realize the irony: real undergraduate women have only been at Yale for two decades, but these silhouetted women in lead and glass have been sitting in on Yale classes since Branford College was built in the 1930s.”