clerical, have been most friendly to this movement for the liberation
of learning. At a recent distribution of prizes at the Oxford higher
local examination, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his great
gratification that opportunities for the highest instruction were so
rapidly opening to young women.
The fortunate candidates for honors or recognition long since began to
reap substantial benefits from having received the Cambridge certificate,
not only in being preferred as teachers or governesses, but by commanding
better salaries. The standard of girls’ schools has been perceptibly
advanced, and the character of pupils elevated, “sentimentalism and
conceit being lessened, and habits of order, economy of time, and
interest in study developed, as well as a new sympathy with those who are
engaged in the graver business of life.”
So much for conservative England. What is asked of New York? To quote
from the admirable address of Dr. Storrs—“that a great, distinguished,
opulent institution of learning in the midst of this metropolitan city,
which has received, undoubtedly, large endowments from the direct gift
of women, or under their influence, should give them the opportunity
to pursue the higher branches of study, under the care of the teachers
already assembled.” Columbia cannot justify their exclusion on the
ground that Vassar and Wellesley and Smith colleges invite them. Boys
are intrusted to her care when Harvard and Yale exist, because New York
parents prefer that home influences should accompany college training;
and girls do not need these influences less. Besides, the expense of
girls’ resident-colleges is very great, compared with those of a richly
endowed institution like Columbia. It is true that the charter of that
venerable college did not contemplate the admission of girls. But it
did contemplate the enlightenment and refinement of the community. And
it would hardly be too much to say that, in the changed conditions of
our time, if it were necessary to discriminate between the sexes in the
matter of education, the cause of morality and progress would be better
served by giving the higher opportunities to women.
The question of co-education is not even to be considered—at most, it is
one of method only. If it be found convenient that boys and girls should
listen to lectures in common, as at Cambridge, it is difficult to see any
sound objection to that economy of teaching. If it be found convenient to
instruct them separately, again, as at Cambridge, criticism is equally
silenced. The President of Columbia, who heartily favors the admission
of girls, says that the college can provide for them separate entrances,
cloak-rooms, and class-rooms. It is not apprehended that a crowd will
assail the doors. It is not proposed to compel the many, who have no
desire for better opportunities, but only to invite the few, who now
stand vainly waiting.
The spirit of justice, of course, would rest woman’s claim to the highest
educational privileges on the human right to unrestricted growth, for
soul is above sex. But here, as everywhere, the way of justice is the
way of expediency. Enlightenment is not in proportion to the amount
of knowledge on deposit at any one time; it is in proportion to its
diffusion. Because of the devotion of the average American to business,
the mother and the school-mistress mould the early and sensitive years of
the child’s life to what shape they must. To the fitness of the average
mother and school-mistress for this high task, what wasted powers,
what mean ideals, what mistaken views of life bear witness! Raise her
schools, and the whole standard of woman’s existence is raised; for the
higher the few can reach, the higher the many rise. It is her perverted
love of beauty which makes woman extravagant. It is her uncultivated
desire for the higher satisfactions of art which makes our homes museums
of upholstery. It is her unenlightened loyalty to the spirit of good
which bids her cling to old abuses that were once uses, to harmful
superstitions that were once faiths, and which to-day constitutes her the
most conspicuous bar to progress. Tocqueville says that he ascribes the
treachery of some of the first leaders in the reform movements in France
to the unhappy influence of wives and sisters on husbands and brothers.
The claims of the past and their own private interests were more to them
than the welfare of the struggling millions. Their perspective was in
fault. But when a thorough culture and a trained judgment are added to
the “superlunary virtues” of women, these accusations must fall.
In the time of Cato the Censor women raised an insurrection to obtain
the privilege of riding in chariots, of decking themselves with rings,
and of wearing purple robes. To-day they demand the outlook of a broader
humanity, the jewel of high culture, the royalty of knowledge.
1883.
A REVIEW OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER.
American college education in the quarter-century since the Civil War
has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it
in a hundred years before. These changes have not occurred unnoticed. A
multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the
results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring
and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. There still
exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men’s colleges
in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper
age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system,
both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor’s
and master’s degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work—these, and
many sequents of these, touching the physical, social, and religious
life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion.
The advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties
which beset the education of men, but it has perplexities of its own in
addition. After fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and
costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we were still in
chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we
were at the beginning. No educational convention meets without a session
devoted to the difficulties in “the higher education of women,” so
important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one
system the variety of its needs. Yet chaos may be thought more chaotic
than it really is. In the din of discussion it would not be strange if
the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. We
are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college
training for girls. Some of us hope we may never find it, believing that
in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. But already three
tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear,
which it will be the purpose of this paper to explain. The nature of
each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth, in no
spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of
what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us
wiser and more patient in our future growth. What, then, are the three
types, and how have they arisen?
When to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right
of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this
growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and
as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with
the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges.
Scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most
part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment.
In nearly every State west of the Alleghanies, “Universities” had been
founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all
the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which
called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic
institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling.
“Why,” asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, “should
not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the
university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? Why should
we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our
existing colleges would be bettered by more students? By far the large
majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work
together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why
should they be separated in the lecture-room for only the four years
between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation means the doubling
of an equipment already too poor by half?”
It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of
a similar kind, co-education was established in some colleges at their
beginning, in others after debate, and by a radical change in policy.
When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an
education as their brothers, Western men carried out the principle
unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate
of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike
for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences
empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was
three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these, two hundred and thirty-seven,
or nearly two-thirds, were co-educational. Among them are all the State
universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the
Protestant sects.[2]
Hitherto I have spoken as if co-education were a Western movement; and
in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But
it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training,
in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest
incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were
from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836,
three years after the foundation of co-educational Oberlin, and in the
very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large
hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for
young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies
in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone.
It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls
should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more
conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the
dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for
the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for
private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is
said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the
process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship,
among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their
instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social
life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced
characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly.
A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the
discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman’s education in the
East.
In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women’s
colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any
in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar,
opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have
received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating
nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of
Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior
instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But
these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand,
especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too,
for training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best
equipped men’s universities were thought sufficient, and women began to
resort to the great university centres of England and Germany. In an
attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve
years ago, to provide a few women with instruction from members of the
Harvard Faculty.
Where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have
accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the
prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and
cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; in short, in
the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an
old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women
would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm for scholarship, and the
opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two
hundred and fifty years.
These, then—co-education, the woman’s college, and the annex—are the
three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of
women’s education has thus far issued. Of course they are but types—that
is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; but they are rather the
central forms to which many varieties approximate. The characteristic
features of each I must now describe, and, as I promised at the
beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each,
while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of
its qualities. To explain dangers as well as promises is the business of
the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. To this business
I now turn, and I may naturally have most in mind the University of
Michigan, my own _Alma Mater_, Wellesley College, with whose government
I have been connected for a dozen years, and the Harvard Annex, whose
neighbor I now am.
Co-education involves, as its name implies, the education of a company
of young men, and women as a single body. To the two sexes alike are
presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the
course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline,
of organization. The typical features are identical class-rooms,
libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same
instructors; and the same honors for like work. Ordinarily all the
instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are
held by women. Usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided
for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over
the one than over the other. This feature, however, is not essential.
At Cornell, Oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity,
buildings have been provided where the young women may—in some instances,
must—live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a
lady in charge. But in most of the higher co-educational institutions
the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both
sexes become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school,
and social life—especially under the ample opportunities for learning
the uses of freedom which our social habits afford—safely to undertake a
college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. Of course
all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and
they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the
class-room, the laboratory, and the thesis.
The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when
I entered there in 1872, finds her own boarding-place in one of the
quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the
two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She
makes the business arrangements for her winter’s fuel and its storage;
she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of
exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and
church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric
dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still
more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in
church on her first Sunday. Strong is the comradeship among these
ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another
in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all
rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly
introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung
upon proving that “lady Greek” involved the accents, and that women’s
minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. And
still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties
about co-education have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship
and honest rivalry between young men and women exist. It is a stimulating
atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance
which tell in after-life.
In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that
it does not meet every need of a woman’s nature. No system can—no system
that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to men,
and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly
for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her special
function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined moral
perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a human being—a
person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will
come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her
judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged,
her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained
to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large tract of her character—is
it the largest tract?—her own needs and those of the young man are
identical. Both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young
man’s education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to
the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the defenders of co-education ask, may
not the same principles apply to women? Why train a girl specifically to
be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to
be a husband and father? In education, as a public matter, the two sexes
meet on common ground. The differences must be attended to privately.
At any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the
two sides—the woman side and the human side—it will be generally agreed
that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly weak in
agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational
action. The artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence
extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept
the hard things and leave to her the easy—by these influences any
comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in
her early teens. The co-educationists think it wholesome that in her
later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial
judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and tell her as
freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother
himself is told. Co-education, as a system, must minimize the different
needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike,
and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for
individuality. The strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found
in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of
tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to
claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural,
unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. The early fear that
co-education would result in class-room romances has proved exaggerated.
These young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. Marriage
is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in
the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and
intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a
successful marriage as ball-room intercourse or a summer at Bar Harbor.
The weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths.
It does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. Refining
home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are
wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected
that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of
speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which has been encouraged in her
more tenderly nurtured sister.
The woman’s college is organized under a different and far more complex
conception. The chief business of the man’s college, whether girls are
admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available
quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed
appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement of
special investigation. The woman’s college aims to do all this, but it
aims, also, to make for its students a home within its own walls, and to
develop other powers in them than the merely intellectual. At the outset
this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as
life itself. When girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from
the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands
to them pre-eminently _in loco parentis_. It must provide resident
physicians and trained nurses, to be ready in case of illness, and, to
prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene, and sanitation,
accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its
students, but also, in large degree, of their physical power in the
future. It generally furnishes them means of social access to the best
men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral
and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous
self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction, while seeking
still to respect the varied faiths of its students. In short, the
arrangements of the woman’s college, as conceived by founders, trustees,
and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness at building
up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners,
developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the
means of sound learning.