illogical, and austere aspects of Sophocles's character, and even to
point out the circumstances of his life which may have shaped them,
because these were the features by which the world commonly judged
him, and was misled. One meeting him casually had little more to
judge by. So entire was his reserve, so little did he permit close
conversation, so seldom did he raise his eye in his slow walks on the
street, so rarely might a stranger pass within the bolted door of his
chamber, that to the last he bore to the average college student the
character of a sphinx, marvellous in self-sufficiency, amazing in
erudition, romantic in his suggestion of distant lands and customs,
and forever piquing curiosity by his eccentric and sarcastic sayings.
All this whimsicality and pessimism would have been cheap enough, and
little worth recording, had it stood alone. What lent it price and
beauty was that it was the utterance of a singularly self-denying and
tender soul. The incongruity between his bitter speech and his kind
heart endeared both to those who knew him. Like his venerable cloak, his
grotesque language often hid a bounty underneath. How many students
have received his surly benefactions! In how many small tradesmen's
shops did he have his appointed chair! His room was bare: but in his
native town an aqueduct was built; his importunate and ungrateful
relatives were pensioned; the monks of Mt. Sinai were protected against
want; the children and grand-children of those who had befriended his
early years in America were watched over with a father's love; and by
care for helpless creatures wherever they crossed his path he kept
himself clean of selfishness.
One winter night, at nearly ten o'clock, I was called to my door. There
stood Sophocles. When I asked him why he was not in bed an hour ago, "A.
has gone home," he said. "I know it," I answered; for A. was a young
instructor dear to me. "He is sick," he went on. "Yes." "He has no
money." "Well, we will see how he will get along." "But you must get him
some money, and I must know about it." And he would not go back into the
storm--this graybeard professor, solicitous for an overworked
tutor--till I assured him that arrangements had been made for continuing
A.'s salary during his absence. I declare, in telling the tale I am
ashamed. Am I wronging the good man by disclosing his secret, and saying
that he was not the cynical curmudgeon for which he tried to pass? But
already before he was in his grave the secret had been discovered, and
many gave him persistently the love which he still tried to wave away.
Toward dumb and immature creatures his tenderness was more frank, for
these could not thank him. Children always recognized in him their
friend. A group of curly-heads usually appeared in his window on Class
Day. A stray cat knew him at once, and, though he seldom stroked her,
would quickly accommodate herself near his legs. By him spiders were
watched, and their thin wants supplied. But his solitary heart went out
most unreservedly and with the most pathetic devotion toward fragile
chickens; and out of these uninteresting little birds he elicited a
degree of responsive intelligence which was startling to see. One of his
dearest friends, coming home from a journey, brought him a couple of
bantam eggs. When hatched and grown, they developed into a little
five-inch burnished cock, which shone like a jewel or a bird of
paradise, and a more sober but exquisite hen. These two, Frank and Nina,
and all their numerous progeny for many years, Sophocles trained to the
hand. Each knew its name, and would run from the flock when its
white-haired keeper called, and, sitting upon his hand or shoulder,
would show queer signs of affection, not hesitating even to crow. The
same generous friend who gave the eggs gave shelter also to the winged
consequences. And thus it happened that three times a day, so long as he
was able to leave his room, Sophocles went to that house where Radcliffe
College is now sheltered to attend his pets. White grapes were carried
there, and the choicest of corn and clamshell; and endless study was
given to devising conveniences for housing, nesting, and the promenade.
But he did not demand too much from his chickens. In their case, as in
dealing with human beings, he felt it wise to bear in mind the limit and
to respect the foreordained. When Nina was laying badly, one springtime,
I suggested a special food as a good egg-producer. But Sophocles
declined to use it. "You may hasten matters," he said, "but you cannot
change them. A hen is born with just so many eggs to lay. You cannot
increase the number." The eggs, as soon as laid, were pencilled with the
date and the name of the mother, and were then distributed among his
friends, or sparingly eaten at his own meals. To eat a chicken itself
was a kind of cannibalism from which his whole nature shrank. "I do not
eat what I love," he said, rejecting the bowl of chicken broth I pressed
upon him in his last sickness.
For protecting creatures naturally so helpless, sternness--or at least
its outward seeming--became occasionally necessary. One day young
Thornton's dog leaped into the hen-yard and caused a commotion there.
Sophocles was prompt in defence. He drew a pistol and fired, while the
dog, perceiving his mistake, retreated as he had come. The following day
Thornton Senior, walking down the street, was suddenly embarrassed by
seeing Sophocles on the same sidewalk. Remembering, however, the old
man's usually averted gaze, he hoped to pass unnoticed. But as the two
came abreast, gruff words and a piercing eye signalled stoppage. "Mr.
Thornton, you have a son." "Yes, Mr. Sophocles, a boy generally
well-meaning but sometimes thoughtless." "Your son has a dog." "A
nervous dog, rather difficult to regulate." "The dog worried my
chickens." "So I heard, and was sorry enough to hear it." "I fired a
pistol at him." "Very properly. A pity you didn't hit him." "The pistol
was not loaded." And before Mr. Thornton could recover his wits for a
suitable reply Sophocles had drawn from his pocket one of his long
Sinaitic sweetmeats, had cut off a lump with his jack-knife, handed it
to Mr. Thornton, and with the words, "This is for the boy who owns the
dog," was gone. The incident well illustrates the sweetness and savagery
of the man, his plainness, his readiness to right a wrong and protect
the weak, his rejection of smooth and unnecessary words, his rugged
exterior, and the underlying kindness which ever attended it.
If in ways so uncommon his clinging nature, cut off from domestic
opportunity, went out to children and unresponsive creatures, it may be
imagined how good cause of love he furnished to his few intimates
among mankind. They found in him sweet courtesy, undemanding gentleness,
an almost feminine tact in adapting what he could give to what they
might receive. To their eyes the great scholar, the austere monk,
the bizarre professor, the pessimist, were hidden by the large and
lovable man. Even strangers recognized him as no common person, so
thoroughly was all he did and said purged of superfluity, so veracious
was he, so free from apology. His everyday thoughts were worthy
thoughts. He knew no shame or fear, and had small wish, I think, for
any change. Always a devout Christian, he seldom used expressions of
regret or hope. Probably he concerned himself little with these or
other feelings. In the last days of his life, it is true, when his
thoughts were oftener in Arabia than in Cambridge, he once or twice
referred to "the ambition of learning" as the temptation which had drawn
him out from the monastery, and had given him a life less holy than he
might have led among the monks. But these were moods of humility
rather than of regret. Habitually he maintained an elevation above
circumstances,--was it Stoicism or Christianity?--which imparted to
his behavior, even when most eccentric, an unshakable dignity. When I
have found him in his room, curled up in shirt and drawers, reading the
"Arabian Nights," the Greek service book, or the "Ladder of the
Virtues" by John Klimakos, he has risen to receive me with the bearing
of an Arab sheikh, and has laid by the Greek folio and motioned me
to a chair with a stateliness not natural to our land or century. It
would be clumsy to liken him to one of Plutarch's men; for though
there was much of the heroic and extraordinary in his character and
manners, nothing about him suggested a suspicion of being on show. The
mould in which he was cast was formed earlier. In his bearing and
speech, and in a certain large simplicity of mental structure, he was
the most Homeric man I ever knew.
III
PAPERS BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER
While Mrs. Palmer always avoided writing, and thought--generous
prodigal!--that her work was best accomplished by spoken words, her
complying spirit could not always resist the appeals of magazine
editors. I could wish now that their requests had been even more urgent.
And I believe that those who read these pages will regret that one
possessed of such breadth of view, clearness, charm and cogency of style
should have left a literary record so meagre. All these papers are
printed precisely as she left them, without the change of a word. I have
not even ventured on correction in the printed report of one of her
addresses, that on going to college. Its looser structure well
illustrates her mode of moving an audience and bringing its mothers to
the course of conduct she approved.
XIII
THREE TYPES OF WOMEN'S COLLEGES[14]
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 are
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, coeducation 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 coeducational. Among them are
all the state universities, and nearly all the colleges under the
patronage of the Protestant sects.
Hitherto I have spoken as if coeducation 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 coeducational 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 universities of England and Germany. In an attempt
to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago,
to provide women with instruction by 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--coeducation, 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; 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.
Coeducation 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 classrooms,
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 coeducational 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 classroom, 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 coeducation have been allayed, a
healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and
women exists. 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 coeducation 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.