ignore these workers in the college handbook during this era, and employees were forbidden from developing friendly relationships with women studying at Hollins. 1855 - 1870s: Family institution As the head of Hollins, Cocke saw his students as a part of a family and himself as their father figure. His pedagogy was based upon the "southern sensibility that a lady was to be trained to submit to the order of men". Though he thought women studying at Hollins were best confined to domestic duties, he still placed great value on intellectual excellence. Cocke considered the higher education of young women in the South to be his life's calling; in 1857, he wrote that "young women require the same thorough and rigid mental training as that afforded to young men". Hollins was known as a rigorous institution where degrees were not easily earned during Cocke's tenure. Students at the school during this period remember the "unbelieveably serious" instruction and "high standards". During this period, Hollins also pioneered several academic practices; it became the first school in the United States to begin a system of elective study, and it was the first to establish an English department under a full professor. 1880s - 1901 The Hollins of Cocke's ambitions was limited by region, as Cocke was interested in educating women only from Southern states. Because of this limited scope, Hollins struggled to "professionalize" in the 1880s and beyond. Its remote location far from the better respected and funded men's institutions put Hollins in contrast with the Seven Sisters in the Northeast. Despite its academic rigor, Hollins and other southern women's colleges were smaller and poorer than women's college such as Smith College and Mount Holyoke in the north. However, Hollins saw its enrollment rise in the last two decades of the 19th century, as more women sought higher education nationwide. From 1846 until his death, Cocke did not take a stipulated salary from the institution so that the trustees could instead put the school's income toward paying faculty and improving the grounds. In 1900, the board of trustees found themselves so thoroughly in debt to Cocke that the school was deeded to him and his family. 1901–1932: Matty Cocke and accreditation Charles Lewis Cocke's death in 1901 at the age of eighty-one was a grave moment for the Hollins Institute, but the transition to the leadership of his forty-five-year-old daughter Matty Cocke