fixed is the world’s conviction of their inferiority, that colleges
admitting them will inevitably forfeit the world’s confidence and
respect.
This chapter affords no space for the _à priori_ arguments which answer
these objections; and indeed the best answer to all objections against
co-education is found in its result. Let the following letters testify
to the fruits of experience. Extract from a letter from James B. Angell,
president of the University of Michigan, dated September 2, 1884:
“Women were admitted here (Michigan University) under the pressure of
public sentiment, against the wishes of most of the professors; but I
think no professor now regrets it, or would favor their exclusion. The
way had been well prepared. Denominational colleges had for years
admitted women; and in the high schools, which are our preparatory
schools, it was the universal custom to teach both sexes. Most of the
evils feared by those who opposed the admission of women have not been
encountered.
“We made no solitary modification of our rules or requirements. The
women did not become hoydenish; they did not fail in their studies; they
did not break down in health; they have graduated in all departments;
they have not been inferior in scholarship to the men; the careers of
our women graduates have been, on the whole, very satisfactory. They are
teachers in many of our best high schools; six or seven are in the
Wellesley College faculty.”[13]
Extract from a letter from Moses Coit Tyler, dated at Cornell
University, September 30, 1884:
“I was connected with the University of Michigan before the advent of
women there; was present during the process of their introduction; for
several years afterward watched the results; and am now entering on my
fourth year here at a co-educational university. And now, after all
these years, upon my word, I cannot recall a fact which furnishes a
single valid objection to the system; while the real utility,
convenience, and wholesomeness of it have so long been before my eyes,
that I am startled by your letter as implying that anybody still has any
doubt about it.... I do not know a member of the faculty either at
Michigan or here who would favor a return to the old plan, although,
before the adoption of the new one, many were anxiously opposed to it.
My observation has been that under the joint system the tone of college
life has grown more earnest, more courteous and refined, less flippant
and cynical. The women are usually among the very best scholars, and
lead instead of drag; and their lapses from good health are rather (yes,
decidedly) less numerous than those alleged by men. There is a sort of
young man who thinks it is not quite the thing, you know, to be in
college where women are, and he goes away, if he can, and I am glad to
have him do so. The vacuum he causes by his departure is not a large
one, and is more than made up by the arrival, in his stead, of a more
robust and a manlier sort.”
Extracts from two letters written by the Hon. Andrew D. White while
president of Cornell University, and bearing dates respectively of
August 5, 1884, and October 25, 1884:
“My own opinion is that all the good results we anticipated, and some we
did not anticipate, have followed the admission of young women; on the
other hand, not one of the prophesied evils, unless possibly some young
men may have imbibed a prejudice against the university from the
presence of young women, and so have gone elsewhere. This, of course, we
can hardly determine. I have never thought the admission of women
injured us to any appreciable extent, even in this matter. Scholarship
has certainly not been injured in the slightest degree, while order has
been improved.... There have been no scandals. Hardly any attachments
have ever grown up between the students of the two sexes.... The best
scholars are, almost without exception, men; but there is a far larger
proportion of young women than of young men who become good scholars.
Having now gone through one more year, making twelve in all since women
were admitted, I do not hesitate to say that I believe their presence
here good for us in every respect. There has not been a particle of
scandal of any sort. As to the relations between the sexes, they give us
no uneasiness.”
Extract from a letter written by John Bascom, then president of the
University of Wisconsin, dated August 20, 1884:
“Co-education is with us wholly successful. There is no difference of
opinion concerning it, either in our faculty or our board. We find no
additional difficulty in discipline; our young women do good work, and
the progress of our young men is in no way impeded. It does not seem to
us to be any longer an open question.
“I believe the character of both young men and women is helped, though
the results in this particular are difficult of proof. The advantages of
the system are manifold; the evils are none. We have ceased to think
about its fitness save as questions from abroad redirect our attention
to it.”
Extract from a letter by Joseph Cummings, president of Northwestern
University:
“The effect of co-education in this institution, upon the manners and
morals of both men and women, is only good. The history of co-education
shows that men and women trained under its influence are less open to
temptations of the passions than are those trained in separate
institutions.
“Women are less inclined to pursue long courses of study, but the
average scholarship of those who do persevere and graduate is higher
than that of the men; and women here do not retard the progress of men.”
In more than 200 letters from presidents and professors in
co-educational colleges, a part of which were written during the
Adelbert College controversy, and a larger part of which have been
received by the writer of this chapter within the last three months,
there is not one which does not give testimony to the value of the
system, similar to that above quoted.
I have chosen to quote from letters written in 1884 because the
controversy then pending impelled the writers to a fuller and more
specific statement of their experience than would be elicited by a
series of questions propounded at this date. It is only necessary to add
that in every instance letters dated in 1889 or 1890 fully accord with
those written in 1883 and 1884.
Presidents Angell, White, Bascom, and Cummings, and Professor Tyler are
quoted because of their distinguished reputation as educators, because
their experience has been in institutions universally acknowledged to
rank among the highest in our country, and because, as no one of them
has ever taken the position of an apostle of co-education, their words
will be received as the testimony of witnesses, and not as the pleadings
of advocates.
THE SOCIAL EFFECTS AND TENDENCIES OF CO-EDUCATION.
But few of all the 165 colleges in the West now open to men and women
have compiled statistics which present the records of their graduates,
prior or subsequent to the admission of women, in reference to health,
domestic state, occupation, social position, official place, financial
or other form of success. Perhaps the most important and successful
attempt to obtain such statistics is that made by the Association of
Collegiate Alumnæ, whose inquiries were limited to the women who had
graduated from the small number of institutions for either separate or
joint education, admitted to that association.
These statistics, of course, relate to women only; and, moreover, they
are too incomplete to establish any general law; but they do permit the
inference that college life confirms and improves the health of women;
and that it does not disincline them to matrimony, or render them averse
to or incapable of maternity and its consequent duties. In the absence
of statistical data one can only consider the probabilities.
That a general impression that women were intellectually inferior to men
formerly prevailed cannot be disputed.
If their work in co-educational colleges has (as, according to the
testimony of their instructors, is the case) been, on an average, better
than that of their male classmates, the young men who for four years
have witnessed daily this exhibition of an intellectual vigor and
interest equal to their own, will not be likely to entertain the
doctrine of women’s natural and therefore necessary inferiority. The
minds of the women in these colleges will be correspondingly affected;
they will acquire a respect for themselves and for their sex greater
than was formerly characteristic of women.
The intellectual association of men and women on a plane of accepted
equality, begun in college, will continue after leaving it, and will
modify the social life of every circle into which graduates of
co-educational colleges enter.
These inferred effects of co-education are already visible in Western
communities. Visitors from the Eastern States, and from over the sea,
comment upon the relative absence of prudery among women and of false
gallantry among men; they notice that sentimentality and condescension
on the one hand, and affectation and soft flatteries on the other, are,
to a degree, superseded by a mutual good understanding and respect.
Literary clubs, associations for the promotion of art and science, and
committees engaged in philanthropy, are frequently composed of men and
women; and the offices in these organizations are distributed between
the two sexes in proportion to their respective representation in the
membership. In communities where there are many graduates from
co-educational colleges, one finds that societies of the kind above
referred to have passed that transition state of mixed clubs, in which
men always held the offices of president, secretary, and treasurer,
while women held those of vice-president and corresponding secretary.
Men who have studied with women in college, almost invariably favor
their admission to county and State, medical, legal, and editorial
associations; and thus we already see that co-education prepares society
to give women welcome and patronage in business and professional life.
The growth of this cordial recognition of equality, this _bonhomie_, has
not, as it was feared would be the case, been accompanied by the
decadence of man’s reverence for womanhood and woman’s admiration for
manliness. Shrewd observers testify that both these sentiments
apparently survive intellectual acquaintance, competition, and
partnership; and that the former is expressed with more simplicity and
the latter with more frankness than formerly, or than is still usual in
sections of the country where co-education does not so generally exist.
But it is too soon for the final word on this subject to be spoken.
Statisticians, sociologists, and novelists have much new work to do in
recording the social consequences of co-education.
DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS IN THE SYSTEM OF HIGHER EDUCATION FOR WOMEN IN
THE WEST.
The ideal of higher education in the West suffers from an habitual
exaggeration of speech. Nothing is more conducive to clear and accurate
thinking than a strictly accurate vocabulary. The custom of calling
institutions which do only secondary work—some of which offer a limited
course of even this work—colleges, and of naming colleges universities,
tends to mislead and confuse the public mind as to the distinctions
between the different kinds of institutions and as to the essential
character of each. The inhabitants of the West find their defense for
this custom of giving things disproportionate names in the general
vastness of their surroundings and in the consequent vastness of their
plans and hopes. One of the simplest and surest remedies for the vague
and contradictory notions now suggested in the phrase higher education,
may be found in giving to every institution of learning a name that
frankly implies the limit of its work; and every institution would gain
in dignity through this nomenclature.
Nominal honors are too easy in Western institutions; and the conditions
upon which different institutions confer them are so various that they
have ceased to convey any fixed notion of the kind and amount of
intellectual discipline which those bearing them have received.
The remedies for this are to be found in some concerted action among the
colleges by which they will agree upon minimum requirements for
admission to any one of them. The minimum adopted by the Association of
Collegiate Alumnæ might answer this purpose. This would tend, not only
to unify but also to raise the average requirements for admission to
college, and this in turn would enable secondary schools to maintain a
higher standard than is at present common.
As almost all colleges arrange their courses of study to occupy four
years, unifying and raising the conditions of entrance would result in
unifying and raising the requirements for graduation in the various
courses; and this would tend to give to B.A., B.S., and B.L. an
intelligible and honorable significance, long since lost. Legislative
action could be taken in the different States, at least with reference
to new colleges as they shall be founded, limiting the authority to
confer degrees to those institutions adopting these improved minimum
requirements; this would elevate the public ideal of the higher
education and tend to save our young people from being betrayed by words
and alphabetical combinations.
The defects above indicated should be frankly admitted to exist, but
they are less universal and less disastrous than people living in the
Eastern States are disposed to consider them.
A large number of the professorships in Western colleges are filled by
men educated in Eastern institutions, who, after graduating from
Harvard, Yale, Princeton or some other college which receives only young
men, taught in Eastern colleges for either men or women separately
before entering into their present connection with some one of our
co-educational colleges. The experience of such men and their natural
prejudice in behalf of early associations makes their favorable
testimony to the merit of Western colleges particularly valuable.
The following extract from a letter from J. W. Bashford, of the Ohio
Wesleyan University, is a very moderate statement of views expressed by
many of my correspondents. He says: “Four women came to our university
during the last two weeks of the term last spring, and afterward visited
the leading colleges for women in New England. After personally
inspecting the advantages for education for their daughters in the East
and in the West, each of the four women decided in favor of co-education
and of our university; each came with her daughter and entered her among
our students at the opening of our university this year. Belonging to
the East myself, I have a very high idea of the work done in our Eastern
colleges, and personally do not hold that we can give students superior
scholastic advantages, or in some respects equal scholastic advantages
to those enjoyed in our best Eastern colleges. There is, however, a
greater spirit of earnestness, and possibly a more strongly developed
type of manhood and womanhood among our Western students than can be
found in our Eastern colleges.”
The cause of higher education for women suffers from the fact that life
offers fewer incentives to young women than to young men.
Dr. Smart, the President of Purdue University, and Dr. Jordan, the
President of the Indiana State University, men of distinction in their
profession, and well acquainted with educational questions, both say
that the need of the young women in their respective institutions is
that of sufficient incentive. The highest of all incentives,
self-development and the possession of culture, appeals as directly to
young women as to young men, and not less strongly; but this highest of
incentives is sufficient for only the highest order of minds; and in the
case of the average young person of either sex, must be reinforced by
incentives more immediate and tangible. In this connection the need of
improving the normal schools may be legitimately discussed. The normal
school has done much to lift the occupation of teaching into the rank of
the professions; but teaching can never be accounted one of the learned
professions until the learning which is generally considered requisite
in the doctor, the lawyer, and the clergyman is demanded in the teacher.
It is quite true that the education implied by a full college course is
not made a condition of entrance to schools of medicine, law, and
theology; but if such preliminary culture is not demanded by these
schools, it is expected by them. On the contrary, it is not only not
demanded, but not expected, that applicants for admission to a normal
school shall present a degree from some reputable college of liberal
arts.
The professions which a majority of ambitious young men with
intellectual tastes expect to enter, offer incentives to do preliminary
college work; the one profession into which young women may enter with
undisputed propriety not only does not offer incentives for taking a
preliminary college course, but by its entrance requirements and its
curriculum implies that such a course is not requisite.
Now that State universities are the direct continuance of the high
schools, it would seem desirable that at least those teachers who expect
to engage in high school work should have taken the courses of study
implied by a college degree. Could the standard of normal school
instruction and of high school preparation be thus lifted, it would act
as a powerful incentive to young women.
The growth of progressive thought in the West, concerning the social and
civil position and the industrial and professional freedom of woman,
tends to supply women with incentives to obtain the best education: and
the defects in their education hitherto caused by the absence of
incentive, promise to be remedied with increasing rapidity.
The colleges, particularly the State universities of the West, are
charged with being defective in their provisions for the development and
culture of the social qualities of their students. Many of them have no
dormitories, and the students upon entering them, women and men alike,
go into boarding-houses or private families, or form co-operative
boarding clubs, according to their own tastes and under conditions of
their own making.
If in these universities students were received for post graduate work
only, no criticism could attach to this custom of leaving every student
to regulate his or her own domestic and social affairs, for such
students are usually mature men and women. But this custom is open to
criticism in institutions, in all of which the majority, and in most of
which all the students, are undergraduates of immature age.
A study of their latest catalogues shows that, excluding the State
universities, most of these institutions which enjoy more than a local
patronage have erected or are contemplating the erection of dormitories
for the accommodation of the young women in attendance upon them.
Although some colleges, as, for example, the Ohio Wesleyan University,
continue to build dormitories large enough to accommodate one or two
hundred young women, there is a tendency favorable to the erection of
less pretentious buildings under the name of hall or cottage, each of
which shall accommodate from twenty to sixty young women. The refinement
both of college life and of subsequent social life would be enhanced by
the multiplication of these homes for moderate numbers of college
women—if each were put under the charge of a woman whose intellectual
culture, stability, and nobleness of character, and experience of life
and the world, made her the evident and acknowledged peer of every
member of the college faculty. But, if these college homes for women
students are placed under the charge of matrons who are expected to
combine motherly kindness and housewifely skill with devout piety, but
in whom no other qualities or attainments are demanded, and if the
matrons are the only women, besides the students, connected with the
institution, the influence of the college home will tend to lower the
ideal of woman’s function in society; to rob the ideal of domestic life
of all intellectual quality; and in general to diminish for young women
the incentives to study.
Every one knows that the strongest stimulus to exertion that young men
experience in college is afforded by their contact with men whose
cultivated talents, whose sound learning, whose successful experience,
and whose rich characters they admire, venerate, and emulate.
The almost universal absence of women from college faculties is a grave
defect in co-educational institutions; and negatively, at least, their
absence has as injurious an influence upon young men as upon young
women.
Under the most favorable conditions, the college home, in which a large
number of young women are brought into a common life under one roof and
one guidance, is abnormal in its organization. If, in the university
town where young women find homes in boarding-houses or in private
families, there could be a local board of ladies authorized to exercise
some supervision over the young women, the arrangement might secure the
aims of a college home under more natural conditions than the latter now
provides.
But women in the faculty, women on the board of visitors, women on the
board of trustees, holding these positions, not because of their family
connections, not because they are wives or sisters of the men in the
faculty and on the boards, but because of their individual abilities,
are the great present need of co-educational colleges. Only the presence
of women in these places can relieve the young men who are students in
these institutions from an arrogant sense of superiority arising from
their sex, and the young women from a corresponding sense of
subordination.
In a statement of the “Theory of Education in the United States of
America,” prepared by the Hon. Duane Doty and Dr. Wm. T. Harris, the
present Commissioner of Education, we read the following:
“The general participation of all the people in the primary political
functions of election, together with the almost complete localization of
self-government by local administration, renders necessary the education
of all, without distinction of sex, social rank, wealth, or natural
abilities.” Farther: “The national government and the State government
regard education as a proper subject for legislation, on the ground of
the necessity of educated intelligence among a people that is to furnish
_law-abiding_ citizens, well versed in the laws they are to obey, and
likewise _law-making_ citizens, well versed in the social, historic, and
political conditions which give occasion to new laws and shape their
provisions.”
These statements are in perfect accord with the following words of
Washington, quoted from his “Farewell Address to the American People”:
“In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public
opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”
Here is the whole argument for the existence of State universities. In
the West, these are destined to be the strongest, richest, and best
equipped institutions for the higher learning; and are likewise clearly
destined to have a determining influence upon the policy of other
colleges in respect to co-education.
The “West” remains an indefinite term; and in that part of it which the
word accurately describes, a people will be born who know nothing of
distinctions in opportunity between men and women.
A people reared under such conditions will ultimately exhibit the
influence of the “Higher Education of Women in the West.”
IV.
THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.
BY
CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.