The Bryn Mawr School for Girls of Baltimore City was founded in 1885 by five young Baltimore women, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Mamie Gwinn, Bessie King, and Julia Rogers, collectively known as the "Friday Evening" Group, who sought to provide an education for girls equal to that available to boys. Their families were involved in the creation of the Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, of which M. Carey Thomas was to be first dean and later president. In her 1883 letter to James E. Rhoads (the first president of the college), M. Carey Thomas shared her concern for how they would find young women prepared for the unprecedented rigorous standards of the new college: "The absence of the regularly organized preparatory schools that exist for boys greatly embarrasses a girl who means to enter college." The school that these young women created in Baltimore was the first to offer only a college preparatory program. They set their standards high, insisting upon a well-educated faculty which was predominantly female and a curriculum that required Latin and French, German and Greek, laboratory sciences, history, literature, advanced mathematics, elocution, and art. The students underwent examinations by professors from leading universities including Johns Hopkins and Cornell, and to graduate had to pass the exceedingly difficult entrance exam for the Bryn Mawr College.