which has kept back the education of women all over the world. Woman was
looked upon as merely an adjunct to the real human being, man, and it
was not considered desirable to give her any other education than what
sufficed to make her a good housewife and an agreeable, but not too
critical, companion for her husband. When Dr. Pierce traveled through
Georgia, in 1836–37, to collect funds for establishing the Georgia
Female College, he was met by such blunt refusals as these, from
gentlemen of large means and liberal views as to the education of their
sons: “No, I will not give you a dollar; all that a woman needs to know
is how to read the New Testament, and to spin and weave clothing for her
family”; “I would not have one of your graduates for a wife, and I will
not give you a cent for any such object.” In an address delivered before
the graduating class of the Greenboro Female College of North Carolina
in 1856, the speaker said: “I would have you shun the one [too little
learning] as the plague, and the other [too much] as the leprosy; I
would have you intelligent, useful women ... yet never evincing a
consciousness of superiority, never playing Sir Oracle, never showing
that you supposed yourself born for any other destiny than to be a
‘helpmeet for man.’” An intelligent lady who was educated in the best
schools in Richmond, just before the war, writes me: “If the principal
of the school to which I went had any high views, or any views at all,
about the education of women, I never heard her express them; and I
fancy that, consciously or unconsciously, her object was to make the
girls under her care charming women as far as possible, sufficiently
well read to be responsive and appreciative companions to men.” And this
view of the matter has not yet entirely disappeared, for, in the
catalogue for 1889 of the Norfolk College for Young Ladies, the aims of
the school are said to be molded in accordance with the principle that
“a woman’s province in life is to throw herself heartily into the
pursuits of others rather than to have pursuits of her own.” It is plain
that so long as this view of the function of women prevails they will
have little incentive and little opportunity for undertaking the severe
labors which are the necessary condition of a solid education. The
lighter graces which are supposed to result from a little training in
French and music and from some study of English literature, have for a
long time been accessible to Southern girls, both in schools of their
own and in the numerous private and fashionable schools of Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and New York. When a girl was a member of a thoroughly
cultivated family, she naturally became a cultivated woman; there was
usually a tutor for her brothers, whose instruction she was allowed to
share (the mother of Chancellor Wythe of Virginia taught her son Greek);
and there was usually, either in her own house or in the parsonage, a
large and carefully selected library of English books. If by the right
kind of family influence a girl has been thoroughly penetrated with a
love of books, something has been done for her which, of course, the
regular means of education often fail to produce. The women of New
Orleans, and Charleston, and Richmond were often cultivated women in the
best sense of the word, but of the higher education, as the modern woman
understands it, very little has hitherto existed in the Southern States.
In a long and exhaustive paper on “Colonial Education in South
Carolina,”[14] by Edward McCrady, Jr., absolutely the only mention made
of women is in the following sentences: “An education they prized beyond
all price in their leaders and teachers, and craved its possession for
their husbands and brothers and sons,” and, “These mothers gloried in
the knowledge ... of their husbands and children, and would forego
comforts and endure toil that their sons might be well instructed,
enterprising men.”[15] But in this respect South Carolina was not behind
Massachusetts. The public schools of Boston, established in 1642, were
not open to girls until 1789, and then only to teach them spelling,
reading, and composition for one half the year. The Boston High School
for girls was only opened in 1852.[16]
The beginnings of the secondary education for girls throughout so large
a territory as the entire South we have not room to trace here, and we
shall confine ourselves chiefly to a description of the existing
condition of things. But it may be mentioned that Mrs. Lincoln-Phelps
(born Almira Hart), the sister of the Mrs. Emma Willard[17] who
revolutionized the education of girls in the North, was one of the first
to introduce a better state of things in the South. In 1841 she took
charge of the Patapsco Institute, near Baltimore, and she transformed it
at once into a school of the same grade as the Troy Female Seminary,
where she had been for eight years teacher and vice-principal. She
writes:[18] “The course of instruction, besides the preparatory studies,
embraced three years: the class of rhetoric, the class of philosophy,
and the class of mathematics and natural sciences; and distributed
through each, with studies appropriate to the advancement of the
members, were the ancient and modern languages.... Besides the twelve
resident teachers, there were special teachers who came from Baltimore,
in the Italian, Spanish, German and French languages and in elocution
and general literature. To the regular classes should be added the class
of normal pupils, varying from twelve to twenty, which contributed many
accomplished governesses and teachers to the families and schools of the
South.” The natural sciences she taught herself, using her own
well-known text books in botany, geology, chemistry, and natural
philosophy.[19] “It was not easy at first to render mathematics popular
among girls, who were disposed to consider accomplishments as the great
requisite in education; but by establishing a regular course of studies
and by awarding diplomas to those only who had honorably completed this
course, ambition was awakened which led to efforts that often surprised
the pupils themselves no less than their friends. Thus the study of
algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, as well as mental and moral
philosophy, up to this time deemed by many repulsive, by degrees became
not only tolerable, but in some cases fascinating.”
A year and a half before this, namely, in January, 1839, the Georgia
Female College (now the Wesleyan Female College) was opened at Macon,
Ga. It had from the beginning the power of conferring degrees, and
eleven young women took the degree of A.B. in 1840. It is commonly said
that this is the first college for women that ever existed. That it was
called a college was doubtless merely owing to the politeness of the
Georgia Legislature. I have not been able to find out what the course of
study consisted in at that time, but at present Harkness’ First Year in
Latin is the only preparation in languages required for entering the
freshman class, and plane geometry is studied during the sophomore year.
It is not likely that the course was better than this in 1840, and hence
it is plain that then as now it was a college only in name,[20] and not
in any way superior to Mrs. Lincoln Phelps’s more modest Patapsco
Institute.
The years about 1840 seem to have been a period of general awakening in
the South in regard to the importance of the education of women. The
Judson Institute was founded by the Baptist State Convention of Alabama
in 1839; the “first incorporated college for women in North Carolina,”
the Greensborough Female College (Methodist), obtained its charter in
1838, but was not opened for the reception of students until 1846; in
Maryland, the Frederick Female Seminary was incorporated in 1840 and
opened in 1843. St. Mary’s School, at Raleigh, N. C., was opened in
1842.
But it is the Moravians in the South, as well as in the North, who have
been foremost among the religious denominations in the establishing of
schools for girls of a thorough, if of an elementary, type. The devotion
of Moravian parents to missionary enterprises made it necessary for them
to have schools in which their children might find a substitute for
family life, together with such teaching as they were thought to
require. “Parental training, thorough instruction in useful knowledge,
and scrupulous attention to religious culture were the characteristics
of their early schools,” and are the main features of the five
institutions of higher learning which are still carried on by that
Church. The Salem Female Academy, in the northwestern part of the State
of North Carolina, among the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, was opened in
1804. The curriculum consisted of reading, grammar, writing, arithmetic,
history, geography, German, plain needlework, music, drawing, and
ornamental needlework. Between six and seven thousand pupils have been
educated in this school. The course is still very low; the requirements
for admission into the junior class are arithmetic to the end of simple
interest, geometry to quadrilaterals, and one book of Cæsar. But the
instruction seems to be thorough, and the catalogue exhibits a freedom
from pretense which is very refreshing. The author of the “History of
Education in North Carolina,”[21] says: “The influence of the Salem
Academy has been widespread. For many years it was the only institution
of repute in the South for female education.... A great many of its
alumnæ have become teachers and heads of seminaries and academies,
carrying the thorough and painstaking methods of this school into their
own institutions. It is probably owing to the influence of the Salem
Academy that preparatory institutions for the education of girls are
more numerous in the South and, as a rule, better equipped than are
similar institutions for boys.”
The war was the occasion of a serious break in the education of woman in
the South and of a serious loss in the small amount of funds that had
been accumulated for their schools. The Georgia Female College, however,
went on with its work without interruption, with the exception of two or
three weeks; the Confederate authorities were at one time on the point
of seizing it for a hospital, but were restrained by an injunction from
the civil courts, on the ground that the college was the residence of
several private families, and that many of the boarding pupils were
unable to return to their homes, or even to communicate with their
parents, on account of the general disruption of the railroads.[22] The
Salem Academy, also, was overcrowded with students during the war, sent
as much for shelter and protection as for education. After the war, most
of the existing schools for girls were reopened, and a large number of
new ones have been established since that time.
COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN THE SOUTH.
Most people would probably be ready to say that except for the newly
founded Woman’s College in Baltimore and Tulane University, the
collegiate education of women does not exist in the South. But as matter
of fact, there are no less than one hundred and fifty institutions in
the South which are authorized by the Legislatures of their respective
States to confer the regular college degrees upon women. Of these,
forty-one are co-educational, eighty-eight are for women alone, and
twenty-one are for colored persons of both sexes. The bureau of
education makes no attempt to go behind the verdict of the State
Legislatures, but on looking over the catalogues of all these
institutions[23] it is, as might have been expected, easy to see that
the great majority of them are not in any degree colleges, in the
ordinary sense of the word. Not a single one of the so-called female
colleges presents a real college course, and many of the co-educational
colleges are colleges only in name. The female colleges, however, easily
fall into two distinct classes; not a few of them offer a course such
that the students who are entering upon the junior year are, in a
general way, as well fitted as those who are just admitted to the
freshman year of a regular college. This kind of college there will be
such constant occasion to speak about that it is necessary to coin a new
word for it, and I propose to call them _semi-colleges_. The course is
such that two years of the work of a regular college is done instead of
four, and by a regular college I mean one which comes up to the standard
set by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ for admission into its
ranks.
As there will be several references to the standard of scholarship set
by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, I add here the requirements for
admission into the freshman class of any college the graduates of which
are recognized as eligible for membership.
In Latin │Cæsar (four books).
„ │Æneid (six books).
„ │Cicero (seven orations).
──────────────┼───────────────────────────
In Greek[24] │Anabasis (three books).
„ │Iliad (three books).
──────────────┼───────────────────────────
In Mathematics│Arithmetic.
„ │Algebra through quadratics.
„ │Plane geometry.
The Southern colleges which attain the rank of a semi-college I shall
speak of with more detail farther on. The real colleges for women in the
South consist of the Woman’s College of Baltimore and the co-educational
colleges (including in that term those in which the management and the
degrees are the same for the men and the women, though the recitations
may be conducted separately). Of these, the University of Texas, the
Tulane University (which is the State university of Louisiana), the
University of Mississippi, and the Columbian University in Washington
are the important ones. The admission of women into all of these
universities is of very recent date, and may be taken as an indication
of a general movement in favor of a greater degree of generosity toward
women, which may, in time, sweep over the entire South. The geographical
distribution of these entering wedges is worthy of note. Baltimore and
Washington on the north, the University of Missouri on the west, the
State Universities of the three States of the extreme southwest,—add to
this the fact that the State of Florida has every one of its four
colleges for men open to women, and that it has not a single girls’
seminary of the old-fashioned type, and it may well be believed that the
modern idea of what a woman requires in the way of education is destined
to close in upon the entire Southern country, and that the contentment
which Southern women have hitherto shown with the unsubstantial parts of
learning will eventually be replaced by more far-reaching claims. The
University of Virginia is the very mold and glass of form for all the
other schools and colleges of the South, and if that were to throw down
the barriers which it now keeps up against the unobtrusive sex, it might
be considered that the battle was already won. But the University of
Virginia is far from being unimpregnable; the chairman of its faculty
writes me:
“In reply to your interesting[25] letter of November 25, ’89, I would
say that opinion is much divided both in our faculty and in our board of
visitors on the question of opening this university to women.” There is
at this moment no way in which any one who wished to benefit women could
do so more effectively than by offering this university a handsome
endowment on condition of its terminating this state of indecision in
the right way. The Johns Hopkins University has lately accepted a gift
of a hundred thousand dollars from a woman; it remains to be seen
whether it will show its appreciation of this act of generosity on the
part of the self-forgetful sex by opening its doors to women. Whatever
the result of the next few years may be upon the history of the
education of women in the South, there can be no doubt that the
situation at the present moment is far more hopeful than it was ten or
even five years ago, and far more hopeful than any one would have
believed who has not recently looked into the matter.
For the present, the Woman’s College of Baltimore is the only
representative in the South of separate education for women of a
collegiate grade. This college was established by the Methodist Church
(aided by liberal endowments from a number of enthusiastic advocates of
the higher education,—first among them the Rev. John F. Goucher) for the
purpose of providing women with the best attainable facilities for
securing liberal culture. It is the intention to increase the endowment
to two millions of dollars, exclusive of the value of the
buildings,—this is stated to be necessary in order to meet the objects
which the incorporators have in view. There are at present nine
professors and associate professors, together with other instructors;
there are laboratories and lecture-rooms, a spacious and carefully
planned boarding-hall, and a gymnasium which contains a swimming pool
and running track, and which is fitted with the best imported appliances
for both general and special gymnastic movements. The wealth of the
South is becoming so great that there is no reason why thoroughly
equipped colleges like this should not spring up in various quarters.
I have received the most emphatic testimony as to the good standing of
the women in the best of the men’s colleges to which they have been
admitted. Professor Fristoe, of Columbian University, writes me:
“In 1884 women were admitted to the medical and scientific departments
of this university, and in 1887 to the academic, except to the
preparatory school. We have eleven ladies in the academic department,
seven in the medical, and seven in the scientific. We admitted them
simply because there seemed to be a demand for it, and because we could
find no objection. The girls admitted have been, _without exception_,
superior students. They have had no injurious effect, but the reverse,
and we find no inconvenience from our course. We have had so far only
two who finished the course in the Corcoran Scientific School, but they
were very fine scholars. One of them excelled especially in mathematics,
the other in mental philosophy and such subjects. I am rather proud of
the girls.”
The italics are not mine. Professor Adison Hogue, of the University of
Mississippi, writes me:
“Women are admitted here because the board of trustees gave them the
privilege some years ago. I know of no other reason than that. Not many
avail themselves of the opportunity, especially as the State for some
years past has had, at Columbus, an industrial institute and college
solely for women. This year we have eleven in attendance here; in each
of my previous three years the number was five, Their standing averages
above that of the boys, I think. In ’85 and ’87 the first honor was
taken by young ladies; and in our present sophomore class a slender girl
is spoken of as the ‘first honor man.’ Their social standing is in no
way impaired by their coming here, although the plan of mixed education
is not greatly in favor, as the small number shows.”
Professor Halsted, of the University of Texas, says, in his report to
the Superintendent of Public Instruction: “Several young ladies have
shown marked ability in the acquirement of the newer and more abstruse
developments of mathematics, for example, quaternions.”
The president of the H. Sophie Newcomb College, which is a department of
the Tulane University of Louisiana, has a larger number of students upon
which to base his conclusions. He writes:
“When the college was inaugurated two years ago, it was discovered that
very few of the applicants for admission were qualified to undertake a
regular college course. The schools of this city (mostly private), which
they had previously attended, had not hitherto arranged their courses of
study with reference to advanced or college work, and had not therefore
adopted any fixed standard of acquirement.... The grade of the present
freshman class is fully a year and a half in advance of that which
entered two years ago, and at the same time there has been a steady
increase in numbers. The greatest gain has been shown in mathematics,
science, and Latin. Our advanced classes are doing excellent work in
calculus and analytical geometry, laboratory work in chemistry and
biology, etc.... While I can testify from experience to the equal
ability of the Louisiana young women with those in the East or elsewhere
in mathematical, scientific, or other studies, yet on account of the
social pressure, and long established customs which demand early
graduations, we must be content to see our institution develop more
slowly than it would otherwise do.”
I give in Appendix C, Table I., a list of the co-educational colleges in
the Southern States, prepared for me by the Bureau of Education from the
manuscript statistics for 1889–90. The following so-called colleges have
in no sense a proper equipment nor a proper course of study for enabling
them to deserve the name of college: Eminence, Classical and Business,
South Kentucky, (Ky.); Keachie, (La.); Florida Conference and St. John’s
River (Fla.); Western Maryland, (Md.); Kavanagh, (Miss.); Salado, Hope,
(Tex.) That leaves the following number of students who are in the
collegiate departments of real, white, co-educational colleges in the
South:
Alabama │ 1
────────────────────┼───
Arkansas │ 3
„ │ 22
────────────────────┼───
District of Columbia│ 3
„ │ 25
────────────────────┼───
Florida │ 1
„ │ 4
────────────────────┼───
Georgia │ 30
Kentucky │ 24
Louisiana │ 77
Maryland │ 25
Mississippi │ 11
North Carolina │ 53
South Carolina │ 10
────────────────────┼───
Tennessee │ 34
„ │ 16
„ │ 28
„ │ 10
────────────────────┼───
Texas │ 40
„ │ 20
„ │ 70
„ │ 40
„ │175
────────────────────┼───
West Virginia │ 32
„ │ 1
────────────────────┴───
Texas │345
Louisiana │ 77
Other States │328
│———
Total │750
This table discloses the remarkable fact that there are 750 women
studying in such men’s colleges in the South as have a decent claim to
the name of college, and also that Virginia is the only State in the
South that has not got at least some kind of a co-educational college.
The testimony in favor of co-education, by all those colleges which have
tried it, is very emphatic. The president of Rutherford College (N.C.),
says: “This school [established in 1853] is the first experiment in the
South, of which we have any information, in which an attempt has been
made to train the two sexes together in the course of a college
education. Its results prove the experiment to be a _complete success_.”
The president of Bethel College (Tenn.), says: “The mutual refining
influences of co-education, socially, mentally, and morally, upon the
sexes, is unquestionably good.”
The president of Vanderbilt University, which is the most important
university in the South after the University of Virginia, writes me
that, although co-education has not been formally adopted there, yet
women have never been refused admission into classes, that degrees would
always be conferred upon those who had taken the proper examinations,
and that one young woman had actually completed the course and received
the degree of A.M. What more can the women of the central Southern
States desire? It is not necessary that every male college should be
open to them; there may be parents who think that the conventual life is
best suited to the moral and social development of their sons, and such
parents should have an opportunity for carrying out the plan which
commends itself to them. All that women ask is that they should have
freedom of access to the _best_ men’s colleges. In that way a standard
for a woman’s education will be fixed, and every woman will be able to
reach that standard if she desires it; the second best colleges may then
be allowed to be as exclusive as they please.
There is one more bright spot in the educational outlook for Southern
women: it is announced that in the new Methodist university, which is
about to be founded in Washington, on a large scale, every department
will be open to women on exactly the same terms as to men.