In discussing woman's relation to formal education we are really
examining her ability to master and teach certain intellectual
exercises, for in our modern industrial democracies our efforts are
confined almost exclusively to training the mind and to stocking it with
information. Each year we talk more and more about physical, moral,
political, social and industrial education; but requirements for
entrance into schools, promotions in them, and graduation from their
courses, still rest almost entirely on information acquired; and in a
less degree, on intellectual ability displayed.
Even in selecting and certifying teachers, the emphasis is all laid on
intellectual equipment. On the physical, moral, or social sides we at
most demand that the candidates shall not be too bad; on the political
side we do not demand even this, since nearly 80 per cent. of our whole
teaching force is declared legally unfit to vote or hold office, and is
yet employed to train our future citizens. But on the intellectual side
we demand positive proof of fitness. Thus it is fair to say that our
modern education deals almost exclusively with knowledge.
Knowledge, in the past, has nearly always been considered much as we
consider dynamite to-day. It was a dangerous force, useful to a ruling
class, and hence preserved in the hands of a cult, generally a
priesthood; but it was thought capable of working endless mischief in
the hands of ignorant people. Through all the pages of history we find
individuals, and weaker groups, driven away from the accumulated
treasure; and if detected in their desire to know, especially if they
sought knowledge through original investigation, they were branded with
such titles of disgrace as "wizard" or "heretic;" and, as a warning to
others, they were often burned in the public square or buried alive.
Women, as an inferior class, were especially restrained from learning.
Knowledge would breed discontent in them; it would make them question
the binding power of the conventions and beliefs which held them in
their place; and it would show them how to achieve their freedom, and
might even encourage them to assume leadership. Here and there,
individual women gained the training necessary for leadership, as in the
cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but the great mass of women was
sternly repressed. Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who, across
the ages, have paid a great price for their desire to eat of the tree of
knowledge. For herself, she might have paid the price but, with subtle
understanding of women, the penalty was made to involve all whom they
loved; the terrors of that price have held the sex in restraint ever
since. Eurydice, Pandora, Eve, Lot's wife and Bluebeard's wife have in
turn served as awful warnings. After a time it came to be understood by
women that they should fix their eyes on their husbands and never look
forward or backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag those whom they
loved after them to destruction.
Of course, if women could not learn they could not teach; at least, they
could not teach where it was necessary to impart knowledge; and so their
share in formal education has been slight, until our own time. Young
children have been considered their special charge, and the care and
culture of infancy and young childhood have always rested in the hands
of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond these early
years, however, woman's part has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly
with girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen and church.
These were the conditions which prevailed through early Oriental and
Classical times. Christianity brought women some degree of intellectual
freedom, but it also imposed new forms of restraint. Its fundamental
teachings, based as they were on a belief in individual values, were
favorable to the extension of knowledge and to the opening of
opportunity for all. The Church, however, shaped under the
half-civilized conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly took knowledge
into her own keeping, forbade its extension, and increasingly held
before woman, as her highest ideal, the negative virtues of the
cloister.
The humanistic and theological changes which came with the awakening of
the European mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did much to set free
the accumulated treasures of knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting
individual judgment and insisting on the necessity of each one reading
and judging the sacred records for himself, made it possible for even
women to enter into the heritage of the ages. At least, the key to
learning, reading, was given into her hands. Later Protestant sects
broke down the limits of sacerdotalism, until women found that they
could look forward a little way without losing their Edens, or could
even glance backward without being turned into pillars of reproach.
The political revolutions of the eighteenth century also affirmed in
their point of view the same intellectual freedom for women as for men.
It has taken a long time to make the practical adjustments, but they are
now well under way. Since 1870, women have had very great freedom in
their approach to knowledge; and having knowledge, they have been
allowed to impart it to others.
In America, freedom for women to study has moved more rapidly than in
Europe. Even in the colonial period, there were emancipated women, as
we have seen; and in the last half of the eighteenth century several
schools were opened for girls, which were more than polite finishing
schools. Notable among these institutions were the seminary at
Bethlehem, Pa., opened in 1753 by the Moravians, and the school
established by the Society of Friends, in Providence, R.I., in 1784. But
nearly all girl's schools before 1800 were limited to terms of a few
months, where girls attended to learn needle-work, music and dancing,
and to cultivate their morals and manners.
At the close of the Revolutionary War, the leaders of public opinion
universally recognized that their new experiment in government would
succeed only if the voters were intelligent. This statement of belief
became the major premise on which all arguments for free and compulsory
education were based; and while we have practically accepted a much
wider justification for education, in connection with the care of
defectives, industrial training, and other recent movements, we have not
yet changed our formulated philosophy concerning the relation of the
state to its children. Free and compulsory education is still mainly
justified on the ground that it produced good citizens.
But the women had not full citizenship and hence the argument for
general education did not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised
after the Revolution, all educational opportunities would have been open
to them at once as a matter of course; and an immense amount of
struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction would have been saved.
But this larger view of woman's rights and powers would have required an
adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices, concerning her proper
position, too great to be undertaken by men facing a new form of
government and the material problems of a new world.
But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily
forced the women into educational activity. There were not enough men
available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be
trained for the needs of the new democracy. John Adams recognized this
when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must "teach their sons the
divine science of politics;" though he would have been one of the last
to favor admitting women to full participation in public life. He did
not realize that if women were to train men for citizenship, the
rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and
in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented. Life,
however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked. Necessity was
forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger
preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere,
failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.
Thus the work of furnishing more advanced intellectual training for
American women had to be started by the women themselves. This is
possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people
feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and
political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature,
has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through
education. The working classes of the world are doing the same thing
now; but women showed them the way. In some vague degree, American
women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass
of working men in England. "All this passion for justice will accomplish
nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong
and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but
you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave
knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win
over ignorance."[21]
[21] _The Highway_, London, Nov., 1911.
American women were fortunate, too, in having for their leaders such
women as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher. Emma Willard was
a woman of the world; she had traveled abroad and she brought to her
work a cultivated nature, wide experience of life and natural
leadership. Her personality went far toward lifting the movement to a
plane of respect. After trying a little academy in Vermont, she appealed
to the State of New York in 1814 for help. In this appeal, she wisely
adopted the prevailing view of the relation of the state to education.
The state must have good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on, "The
character of children will be formed by their mothers; and it is through
the mothers that the government can control the character of its future
citizens." The State of New York granted her articles of incorporation
for her academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her the modest sum of
five thousand dollars for which she had asked. In 1821, she established
the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she trained and led the
intellectual life of American women.
Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the common people with which she
opened Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837. Those who feared the education of
women were disarmed by the fact that in the new institution domestic
service was emphasized to the extent of having the girls do all their
own work. Another group of possible critics was won over by the fact
that religious instruction received constant care. But notwithstanding
the conserving influence of housework and religion, there went steadily
out from Mount Holyoke during the following years a strong line of
teachers demanding ever larger opportunity for themselves and for those
they taught.
Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in schools for girls a general
propaganda for woman's education, and she devised large plans for its
development. In 1852, she organized the American Woman's Educational
Association "to aid in securing to American women a liberal education,
honorable position, and remunerative employment." She helped to start
girls' schools in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking she
sowed in the hearts of women, especially in the Middle West, a
discontent with existing conditions and a deep desire to know.
From the time of this awakening in the thirties and forties, two lines
of educational activity for the advancement of woman's education
steadily developed. One was the effort of women to educate themselves in
distinctly women's schools; and the other was the movement by which
existing institutions for boys and men were gradually opened to girls
and women. These two lines of activity still remain distinct, and not
always sympathetic with each other's aims.
The effort to establish distinctly women's schools was continued after
the Civil War by Matthew Vassar, who founded in 1861, and opened in
1865, the first adequately endowed and organized college for women in
America. Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and endowed Smith
College to furnish women "with means and facilities for education equal
to those that are offered in colleges for young men." The institution
was opened in 1875; and in the same year Henry Durant established
Wellesley College.
The last Report of the United States Commissioner of Education shows
that there are now 108 institutions of higher learning to which men are
not admitted; but most of them have modeled themselves so closely upon
men's colleges that they have not been able to work out lines of
distinctive instruction specially fitted to women. One cannot help
feeling that since they do not open their doors to men they should do
something more toward working out an ideal education for women than they
have so far undertaken. When the Association of Intercollegiate Alumnæ
met in New York, in the autumn of 1911, its discussions gathered around
the possibility of adding to college courses subjects of special value
to women. Hygiene, biology and sociology were the subjects most favored;
but the matter needs attention from women and men who stand outside the
group dominated by our older college traditions. This movement to
provide distinctive schools for women had brought together, in 1910,
35,714 girl students in private secondary schools and 9,082 women
students in higher institutions of learning.
The second line of development, which sought to open up all existing
schools to girls and women, began when Boston opened a high school for
girls in 1825. New York opened a high school for girls three years
later.
It was in the West, however, that this movement took strongest root and
made most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening
equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the
frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New
Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to
hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and
ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must
teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and
so the women master the mysteries of formal education.
Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the
first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's
direction, was, however, the first institution of higher learning to
give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
Valley early established State universities. These institutions were
little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so
strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its
privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.
It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period
in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.
In that year, Michigan University, California University and the
University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering
on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the
first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same
conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the
Michigan idea at Cornell.
In the forty years since Michigan opened her doors, the advance of women
under conditions of co-education has been steady and rapid. In Harvard
and Columbia opportunity takes the form of annexes where women can
secure almost any educational opportunities they desire. In other
universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, women are admitted to
graduate study. Most of the institutions of higher education that do not
yet admit women are theological and technical schools, or small colleges
like Haverford, where there are equivalents in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr,
for women who wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can work in
almost any important university in America to-day if she cares to do so.
In 1910 there were conferred in the United States 12,590 A.B. degrees,
and women took 44.1 per cent. of them.
Meantime, there have been no important reactions in institutions which
have once opened their doors to women.[22] In 1902, Chicago University
separated men and women students, but only during the first two years of
their undergraduate work. Practically this has affected only one-half of
the women in the first year and a very much smaller proportion in the
second year.[23] When Leland Stanford Junior University was opened in
1891, 25.4% of the students were women. This proportion rose in
successive years as follows: 1892, 29.7%; 1893, 30.4%; 1894, 33.8%;
1895, 35.3%; 1896, 36.6%; 1897, 37.4%; 1898, 40.1%. Fearing that the
institution would be swamped with women, and that able men students
would stay away, Mrs. Stanford ruled that there should never be more
than five hundred women students in the university at one time. This
limit was reached in 1902, and it was then provided that women should
not be received as special students, nor in partial standing. Later, men
in partial standing were cut out, though they continued to be received
as special students. Women are now admitted in order of application,
but preference is given to juniors and seniors. This really establishes
a higher standard for women than for men, and one would expect that men
would be kept away from an institution requiring a higher standard for
women quite as much as from one where there were many women working on
an equality with men. In 1910, Tufts College decided to separate men and
women, for local reasons. The statement was made at the time that a
philanthropist had promised a gift of $500,000 for a woman's college, if
the sexes were separated.[24] The doors of Wesleyan are to be closed to
women after 1912, but this is due to local and financial reasons.
[22] HELEN R. OLIN, _The Women of a State University_, G.P. Putnam's
Sons, 1909.
[23] MARION TALBOT, _The Education of Women_, University of Chicago
Press, 1910.
[24] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, p. 132,
1910.
The movement in European universities, while not so uniform as in
America, has been in the same direction. Miss Buss, Miss Beal and Miss
Emily Sheriff led an early movement for higher secondary education of
girls similar to that which gathered around Miss Willard in America. In
1871, Miss Clough started in England the lectures for women which led
to the establishment of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, and opened
Oxford to women. Now women can study almost any subject they like at
these universities and take the same examinations as the men. They do
not receive degrees, but they have most of the other advantages of men,
and for forty years they have carried off many honors. In the newer
universities of London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and in the Welsh
University they have every advantage open to men.
In Germany, the opportunities for higher education of women have changed
from year to year; but in 1910, there were 1,856 women in the
universities as compared with 1,108 in 1909, and this notwithstanding
the Emperor's well known belief that woman's sphere should be limited to
domestic activities.
The claims advanced in opposition to the higher education of women have
largely broken down to-day. It was long maintained that her mind was
inferior to man's mind in kind and quality, and that she could not do
the work required. In the presence of thousands of young women carrying
all kinds of university work with credit and honor such charges become
absurd. The belief that woman's health could not stand the strain fails
for the same reason. The fear that she would be less likely to marry; or
marrying, would be less likely to have children, has been seen to have
some body of fact behind it; but we have seen also that university
students are recruited from groups that are not the most fecund, and
that the same danger applies to men students as to women.[25] Women in
higher education are now accepted as a regular part of our modern life.
[25] Eight hundred and eighty-one Harvard graduates, twenty-five years
after graduation, had but 1,226 children. If half were boys, we have but
613 sons for 881 Harvard graduates. HUGO MÜNSTERBERG, _The Americans_,
p. 582. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
And yet there is one objection that still remains unanswered in very
many minds. It has always been feared that women would lower the
standard of scholarship; and there is much in the quality of the present
generation of women students that may strengthen this belief. In the
seventies and eighties, the fear of being thought peculiar still kept
many ordinary women away from colleges. Now it has become fashionable,
and a woman who has been to college stands better in a community than
one who has not. Add to this the freedom and romance of "going to
college" and it follows that many young women, with increasing economic
freedom, are tempted to go up to the universities just as well-placed
young Englishmen go to Cambridge or Oxford as passmen. They have no
special interest in scholarship; but they like the life. This large body
of young women, and of men under similar conditions, will doubtless
lower the scholarship of modern college and university life as a whole.
But possibly the need of the world for all-around men and women is even
greater than its need for scholars; and in that case we may find
justification for both passmen and passwomen.
With the opening of knowledge to women it became possible for them to
instruct children in matters intellectual; and since our school learning
was almost entirely a matter of information and mental training, they
early became an important part of the teaching profession in America.
Once started, all our conditions favored the rapid increase of women
teachers. There were industrial openings for men on every side; and with
our rapid increase in population, an army of teachers was required.
Since the calling had in the past been filled by inferior members of the
clergy, broken-down soldiers, or old women, there was a tradition of
constant change, and young men on their way to permanent professions
were steadily supplanted by young women on their way to the altar.
Co-education very materially assisted this substitution. Social,
religious and economic reasons early combined to establish co-education
in elementary schools in America, and now it has become a national
custom. In cities like Philadelphia and Brooklyn there are some separate
schools; but in 1910, only 4 per cent. of all the elementary children
and only 5 per cent. of the children in public high schools were in
separate classes. In private schools, which care for less than 10 per
cent. of the children of the country, the percentage of children in
separate schools is greater.
Practically all American children are now in co-educational
institutions. Had the boys been in schools by themselves it would have
been more difficult to place women teachers over them, but in mixed
schools the question does not arise. Even where the boys and girls were
separated, however, that fact did not prevent the employment of women
teachers, though it may have retarded it. Thus in Philadelphia, in 1911,
there were 125 boys' classes, 174 girls' classes, and 894 mixed classes
in the grammar grades; still there were but 175 men teachers employed
and, of course, the girls' classes were all taught by women.
While administrative positions are less monopolized by women than
teaching posts, they are being steadily filled by them. For fifteen
years Idaho has had able women State superintendents elected by popular
suffrage; Colorado and Montana have also given this highest educational
post to women. In most of our States we have women serving as county
superintendents; and in Idaho women fill nearly all these positions.
Several of our largest cities, notably Chicago and Cleveland, have women
superintendents; while many high schools and most of our elementary
schools have women principals. In 1909, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young was
elected president of the National Education Association; and in 1911,
Miss Alice Dilley was elected president of the Iowa State Teachers'
Association. Both of these elections were victories for women won in the
face of determined opposition from many of the men.
Another feature of this monopoly of teaching by women should be
emphasized. Many boards of education require a woman to resign her
position if she marries, and married women are seldom appointed to
teaching positions, except where they are widows or separated from their
husbands. In a test case recently carried to the Supreme Court of the
State of New York a decision was rendered that the Board of Education of
New York City could not dismiss teachers for marrying; but by refusing
leave of absence to prospective mothers the Board is still able to
remove all women who dare to have children. Thus we have a modern
industrial democracy being educated almost entirely by celibate women.
But why should a woman be forced to leave teaching because she marries?
Would not married women do much to strengthen and broaden the calling?
Are not married women better fitted than celibates to deal with boys and
girls in the period of adolescence? There is doubtless a feeling that a
married woman should make way for some girl who needs the position to
help herself along; but schools should not be used for the needs of
teachers, no matter how deserving the individual may be.
There is, too, a possibility that a married woman might have a child,
and a feeling that this would shock the other teachers and the children.
Surely we have grown beyond this condition; the teacher could easily be
given a leave of absence for a few months, or for a few years; and
nowhere else could the children better meet this fact of universal
existence around which our Anglo-Saxon reticence has woven such a
shameful conspiracy of silence. At least, when a woman has passed the
period of childbearing she could bring to the school incalculable gifts
of balanced judgment and ripe understanding of life.
Meantime all the influences which have brought about the monopoly of
teaching by women are increasingly operative. Every year more able women
leave our high schools, normal schools and universities, with no
corresponding new lines of occupation open to them. The feeling of
rivalry between men and women teachers grows stronger each year.
Powerful teachers' federations, such as those in Chicago and Buffalo,
composed mainly of women, are said to be using their influence to favor
women. In New York City, the women teachers have compelled the city to
equalize the wages of men and women, at an annual expense of $3,500,000,
after a bitter fight lasting several years.
The effects of this monopoly upon the women themselves are very
difficult to estimate. Some alarmists tell us that women teachers face
the danger of a premature and loveless old age; that the celibate
communities they form in the commonwealth are marked by pettiness and
emotionalism; that the salaries paid teachers are so small that they
cannot provide for sickness and old age, and that, unless pensioned by
the state, some of them must one day eat the bread of charity.
On the other hand, we are told that education is the natural province
of women; that teaching fits them to be good mothers and helpful
citizens; that women alone can form the character of girls; and that
boys are refined and perfected by the constant contact with women.
Probably neither of these statements is wholly true. It is certain that
many women teachers do marry, do become the mothers of fine children,
and are social forces in their communities. With advancing standards of
scholarship, better salaries, old age pensions, and a popular demand for
professional efficiency in teachers, it will be increasingly difficult
for men to use the calling as a preparation for law and medicine, or for
women to use it as a preparation for matrimony. The calling doubtless
does offer a greater equivalent for marriage than most others; and many
women live their mother life vicariously for other people's children.
At the same time, however, when a woman has given fourteen years of her
life to preparation for teaching, eight years in an elementary school,
four in a high school, and from two to four in professional training,
she has made an investment and formed habits which will make her
hesitate before turning to matrimony. The independence and income will
prove attractive during young maidenhood; and matrimony can hardly yield
its best results to the woman who enters it after she is thirty. It is
certainly true that women are decreasingly willing to enter the teaching
profession; and in many parts of the country there is a chronic dearth
of trained teachers.
Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten, and are eating of the tree
of knowledge as they will. If this has driven them out of the little
paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to make the whole world
into a paradise of the present. Only through training their minds could
they have broken away from an outworn past. In this time of readjustment
there must be many mistakes and many tragedies.[26] The fool-killer will
gather a rich harvest, but if we are open-minded and eager to see the
truth, each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future generations
of women will conserve the values of the past and add to them new
treasures and new graces of knowledge and understanding.
[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in _Adolescence_, by
G. STANLEY HALL. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex
rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body,
between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms
rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman
alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion
which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The
fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all
who participate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between
these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association,
coöperation, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation,
competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and
egotistic, vapid and contemptible.