Pembroke Hall was purpose-built to fulfill Doyle’s vision of women in higher education. While her initial student applicant was rejected, years of activism by Doyle and other advocates (mostly members of Rhode Island women’s clubs) saw the first women enroll in what was called the “Women’s College” in 1891. They were taught in gender-segregated classes by Brown faculty in a rented building on Benefit Street. The endeavor was self-funded; women’s tuition paid for rent and stipends for faculty who taught their Brown men’s courses again for the Women’s College students. 

Enrollment demands quickly outstripped capacity, and  advocates began to push for a permanent physical location. The university rejected the request, insisting that they raise their own funds. Doyle and her associates formalized their group as the Rhode Island Society for the Collegiate Education of Women (RISCEW) and undertook the project of establishing a permanent address. Their tenacity was met with relatively quick success, and in 1896 the Brown Corporation legislated the founding of the Women’s College and defined it as part of the university. Once Pembroke Hall was paid for, women were officially welcomed at Brown. The building was finished and formally dedicated on November 22, 1897. 

Pembroke Hall was an all-purpose space. It contained a library and reading room (today a classroom), “recitation rooms” (small classrooms), a cafeteria, room on the top floor for social, religious, and gymnastic activities (today an event space), and lockers, dressing rooms, and mailboxes in the basement (now the home of the Pembroke Center Archives). The September 12, 1897 edition of The Providence Sunday Journal reported that the “handsomest room in the building” was the second floor library, with its stucco frieze created by local sculptor Hippolyte L. Hubert at the direction of Miss Amelia S. Knight, RISCEW treasurer. The frieze was designed on the theme of education, beginning and ending with the image of a mother educating her children. The Journal noted that “this panel is the beginning and end of the series, the idea being conveyed that the greatest mission of any education is to fit the woman for her duties.” The sculpture also depicts “a procession of figures” representing diverse areas of study including literature, medicine, poetry, and agriculture. 

Pembroke Hall was the first permanent building on what became known as the “Pembroke campus”: the ring of buildings around Pembroke Green (also called the Pembroke Quad) that comprised the Women’s College. Slowly but steadily, the small campus grew over the first half of the twentieth century. 

Not long after Pembroke Hall opened, it became clear that more space was required, specifically, living quarters for residential students. The second college-designated building, located not on the Pembroke campus but down the street at 66 Meeting, was originally constructed as a large home. Slater Homestead was a gift of Mrs. Horatio N. Slater, who donated it for use as the first women’s dormitory. When actual dormitories were built around Pembroke Green, number 66 was sold, although the lack of dormitory space would remain an issue.

From the founding of the Women’s College, concerns were raised about whether women’s access to higher education might make them unfit for childbearing. “The prevalent fear that coeducation would not only feminize collegiate education but also masculinize women and even reduce their physical ability to bear children,” writes Polly Welts Kaufman, “had to be addressed by the new Women’s College” (20).  

Holding mandatory physical education classes in the same building as academics quickly proved less than ideal. In a 1902 article in the Sepiad, the College’s literary magazine, senior Emma May Caufield summed up the problem when she referred to Pembroke Hall as “the chapel-gymnasium-study-philosophy-dance hall” (qtd. in Kaufman, 124). A second fundraising drive in 1906 resulted in the 1907 opening of Sayles Gymnasium, an exercise facility featuring basement-level bowling alleys that remained popular with students for decades. 

Turn-of-the-century Women’s College students were mostly local commuters; however, as Brown began to draw students from farther away, two dormitories were added: Miller Hall in 1910 and Metcalf Hall in 1919, both built through fundraising efforts. Concerns as to whether the dormitories were suitably “domestic” suggest the anxiety provoked by the presence of women living on campus, thus the design of Miller, the first purpose-built dormitory for women at Brown was symbolically important. President William H. P. Faunce commented at the time that it was more than a residence: it was “the center of a home atmosphere, appealing to the domestic instincts of the students, as the gym appeals to the physical and Pembroke Hall to the intellectual” (qtd. in Eisenmann, 72). 

Dormitory space was and remained at a premium and was preferentially allocated to white Christian students. Discriminatory housing policies grounded in the racism and anti-Semitism common at predominantly white institutions during this era put a cap on the number of Jewish students and a complete ban on Black students living in the dormitories. Such racist policies were similarly implemented at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, where a contested ban-and-quota policy on Black and Jewish students in the early 1920s was supposed to protect “the essential Harvard tradition—the flavor that stamped Harvard men as such” (Wolters, 197). At Pembroke College, at least one student was asked to leave a residence hall after it was discovered that she was Black (Eisenmann, 76). A blight in the midst of progress, these practices did not change until after the Second World War (Newman, 90).

In the 1920s, Women’s College students, alumnae, and local supporters began fundraising for a social hall (the precursor to the modern student center) in which to put on plays and hold dances and, as students wrote in their 1924 yearbook, “oh, blessed relief, … where the various musical organizations may practice, and thus eliminate the musical accompaniment to studying in the [Pembroke Hall] library” (Pembroke College in Brown University, 111). This effort resulted in the building of Alumnae Hall, opened in 1927. The Hall was an especially important development for the college’s sizable commuter student population. Pembroke Dean Margaret Shove Morriss commented, “Living in an atmosphere of beauty, of grace of line, of richness of color, they will gain a grace and richness of spirit that only lovely surroundings can impart. It will mean that city students will now receive much that they have lost through leaving the campus every day” (qtd. in Eisenmann, 72). As more activities were moved from Pembroke Hall, other services moved in, including a bookstore in the basement, which also held the Pembroke College student mailboxes described by Caryl-Ann Miller Nieforth '59, P'86, '91MD as “an important daily stop.” In 1928, the Women’s College, colloquially referred to as “Pembroke,” was officially renamed Pembroke College.

The economic impact of the Great Depression was felt at Brown as falling enrollments, with the result that fewer buildings were constructed and women were gradually permitted to take classes with their male counterparts as a cost-saving measure. This trend accelerated during the Second World War, when classes became and remained fully coeducational. Post-war, all buildings erected on the Pembroke campus were dormitories: Andrews Hall in 1947, Morris and Champlin Halls in 1960, and Emery and Woolley Halls in 1963. 

By the time Emery and Woolley Halls were built, students’ academic and extracurricular lives at Pembroke and the men’s college were deeply intertwined. Remaining separate were dormitories, athletics, social policies, and some student activities. In terms of dress, curfews, and visitors, Pembroke College students continued to be held to more restrictive social standards. “The deans of Pembroke still continued to supervise an elaborate social system,” writes Louise M. Newman, “while men at Brown were free to come and go as they wished” (100). This led Pembroke students to protest the system that surveilled and sanctioned them for individual choices that bore no similar consequences for men, such as staying over at a man’s apartment.

See how the Pembroke Record, the newspaper of Pembroke College, covered the protests in 1966.

Pembroke students’ demands—in line with the social movements of the 1960s—resulted in Acting University President Merton Stolz appointing a committee to consider the merger of the men’s college and Pembroke. The committee created two sets of recommendations, one representing a majority opinion in favor of the merger and one a minority, anti-merger opinion. Stolz adopted the majority recommendations in 1971, at which time Pembroke College ceased to exist.

Post-merger, Pembroke College alumnae, current students, and women in leadership continued to fight for an equitable allocation of community and academic space for women and for the emerging field then called women’s studies at Brown. That advocacy led to the opening of the Sarah Doyle Center in 1975, the endowment of the Nancy Duke Lewis Professorship, and, in 1981, the establishment of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, whose founding director was the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Joan W. Scott. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, the buildings that once formed Pembroke College accommodated a variety of offices and campus programs. While the dormitories retained their original purpose, Pembroke Hall, Sayles Gymnasium, and Alumnae Hall housed, over the years, the Physical Education department (in Sayles until 1990, when the building was converted for academic use), Career Services, the Brown Choices program, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, in addition to providing general classroom and event space. 

The various uses to which Pembroke Hall was put following the merger did not always align with the original contract between RISCEW and Brown. When the society, having raised the funds for Pembroke Hall, transferred the building to Brown, “they extracted a solemn pledge that ‘the building would be used always for a Women’s College.’ The women consulted the firm of Edwards and Angell to make that pledge legally binding; they reserved the right to name the building and to oversee its use” (Scott, Financing 7). Though a center for research and teaching on women would seem an appropriate fit, the original Pembroke Center was not located in Pembroke Hall. “In the earliest days, my office was on the first floor of Alumnae Hall, next door to the men’s room” noted Scott (“Re: Thank you”). In the early 1980s and for decades after, Pembroke Hall was best known as the home of Career Services. A 2006 review of university buildings describes this period in the building’s history: “Pembroke College was not fully absorbed by Brown until the 1970s, by which time Pembroke Hall had been turned into administrative space for the College. Currently the building houses offices, including those of Career Services, with the library space on the top floor largely underutilized” (“Campus Heritage,” 71).

It wasn’t until 2008 that several Pembroke Center offices were relocated in Pembroke Hall, alongside the Cogut Center for the Humanities (now the Cogut Institute). The renovation, led by architect Toshiko Mori and undertaken in 2005, added the entrance at the rear of Pembroke Hall and the elevator. Mori’s team restored the building’s exterior and modernized the interior, bringing daylight into the space through extensive use of glass and a minimalist palette. Cogut and much of the Pembroke Center staff occupied the building for the next 16 years. The Cogut Institute’s subsequent relocation to the renovated Andrews House in 2024 provided Leela Gandhi, Shauna McKee Stark ’76, P’10 Director of the Pembroke Center, with an opportunity to reimagine how Pembroke Hall might better serve the growing needs of the Center. 

Of utmost urgency was moving the Pembroke Center Archives, which had remained in Alumnae Hall after the 2008 move, creating several problems for the expanding collection. The Archives’ offices were located on the third floor, and the lack of elevator access created physical challenges for visitors as well as for archivists who had to move and process materials. In addition, the offices were not climate controlled, so many items in the collection could not safely be stored there. 

Today, the Archives have been relocated to Pembroke Hall, where a spacious workshop was designed for processing archival materials and accommodating class visits, and a small reading room can accommodate research visits. The new location makes the collections more physically accessible to staff, students, and other visitors.

The 2008 renovation of Pembroke Hall created modern offices and meeting rooms and updated facilities. The 2025 upgrade refreshed study/lounge areas with comfortable seating and lighting and created a spacious, light-filled kitchen for Pembroke Center staff, faculty, fellows, and affiliates. Similarly, the new first-floor library (formerly an office) plays host to small class discussions. The library features the personal book collection of Ann duCille MFA ’73, A.M. ’88, PhD ’91, founder of the Black Feminist Theory Project at the Pembroke Center.

Other notable changes to Pembroke Hall can be found in room 305, the large third-floor multipurpose room. Designed in 1897 to host student activities, physical education classes, and once-mandatory Pembroke College chapel services, the room has served many purposes in the years since. The 2025 renovation enhanced acoustics, upgraded audiovisual systems and lighting, and offered new furnishings that have significantly improved the experience of attending an event there. The space is in high demand by departments and units across campus for their events.