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 coeducationists 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 to tell her as
freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother
himself is told. Coeducation, 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 coeducation would result in classroom 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 ballroom 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 have 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 preeminently _in loco parentis_.
It must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, 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.
It may be said that a similar upbuilding of the personal life results
from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and
fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some
extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or
indirectness of aim. The woman's college puts this aim in the foreground
side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students
apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. Of
its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students
in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their
festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common
life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly
access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from
her relations with them in the classroom. In appointing these women to
the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a
candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be this, but she
should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential
character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is
to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the
presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no
less than of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils
to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing
or unbrushed his hair. They will not question their geniuses too
sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own
proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any
other woman's college could find a place in its faculty for a woman
Sophocles or Sylvester. Learning alone is not enough for women.
Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its
appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at
cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and
generous sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls,
statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the
magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the
college purse. The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls
upon the characters of one another, when they live for four years in
the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. I have
watched the ennobling process go on for many years among Wellesley
students, and I am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic,
beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls'
college community affords. That choicest product of modern civilization,
the American girl, is here in all her diverse colors. She comes from
more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political
party; from nearly every state and territory in the Union, and from
the foreign lands into which English and American missionaries,
merchants, or soldiers have penetrated. The farmer's daughter from
the western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen
mill towns of New England. The pride of a Southern senator's home
rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her
college course because her father's life was given for the Union. Side
by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm on
the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the
gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich
experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world
perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn to
"see great things large, and little things small."
This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls' college
renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.
According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities
themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement.
Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and
altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats
or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated,
and the break between college life and the life from which the student
comes is reduced to a minimum.
It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to
the girls' college. It is said that its students never escape from
themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire
a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it
desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I have
merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different
types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women.
Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a
question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth
a type, perhaps in the endeavor after clearness exaggerating a little
its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor
types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women
which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No
doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are
capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a
substantially true account of an actually existing type--a type powerful
in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in
its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the
confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their
daughters to colleges of a different type.
The third type is the "annex," a recent and interesting experiment in
the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict.
Only a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most
conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred
students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard
Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose
instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No
college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff
of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to
year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large
majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A
wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in
history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a
few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman
who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a
learned specialist some single period in the history of the language.
Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so
tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one
or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women
much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.
The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies
and gentlemen, who provide classrooms, suggest boarding-places, secure
the instructors, solicit the interest of the public--in short, manage
all the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy
feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two,
while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In
the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying
the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two
colleges, not one. No detail in the management of Harvard College is
changed by the presence in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the
corporation of Harvard should assume the financial responsibility,
supervise the government, and give the girl graduates degrees, making no
other changes whatever, the Annex would then become a school of the
university, about as distinct from Harvard College as the medical, law,
or divinity schools. The students of the medical school do not attend
the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college
undergraduates. The immediate governing boards of college and medical
school are separate. But here comparison fails, for the students of the
professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of
all its resources. This the young women cannot do. They have only the
rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and
readings of the university.
The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman's college, with no degrees,
no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made
up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, where offices,
lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in
the heart of Old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college
buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the
students. Here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the
various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold
their meetings and give their entertainments. The students lodge in all
parts of Cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly
responsible for their conduct only to themselves. The ladies of the
management are lavish in time and care to make the girls' lives happy
and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the
personal life of the students is as separate and independent as in the
typical coeducational college.
It is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the
permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly,
the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if
they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable
feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is
impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A
girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a
topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the
Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that
through pressure of other work the professor will be unable to teach in
the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not
rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and
for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own
library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed--and by none are
they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the
Annex themselves--it should be said that hitherto they have not
practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship,
eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl
succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still,
in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom
reached elsewhere.
A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex
has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently
at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women
uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so
complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life
that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this
country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its
methods vary markedly.
Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for
not all her instruction is given by Columbia's teaching force, though
Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new Woman's College
at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert
College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent
instruction.
In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in
government. Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three
years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate
neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better
equipped universities for men, whose resources they can to some extent
use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When
they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable
to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far,
however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from
the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the
ordinary woman's college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the
connection between it and the university should ever become so close
that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself,
it would become a question whether the barriers between the men's and
the women's lecture rooms could be economically maintained.
The preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman's study is
carried on inside a man's college, in the women's college outside it,
in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But
will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the
counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and
limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their
distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already
coeducational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their
girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value
intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of
the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the
one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body
of men's colleges continually find it harder to maintain their
isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.
The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of
experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of
bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so
liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better
for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one
another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish
privileges, and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to
come woman's higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by
any means it may save girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to
mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that
her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a man's college
may be persuaded to send her to a girls'. Those who find it easier to
honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be
tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of
these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the
value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do
so well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the
hour--to understand and to wait.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Published in _The Forum_ for September, 1891.
XIV
WOMEN'S EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[15]
One of the most distinctive and far-reaching movements of the nineteenth
century is that which has brought about the present large opportunities
for the higher education of women. Confining itself to no country, this
vast movement has advanced rapidly in some, slowly and timidly in
others. In America three broad periods mark its progress: first, the
period of quiescence, which ends about 1830; second, the period of
agitation, ending with the civil war; the third, though far as yet from
completion, may be called the period of accomplishment.
For the first two hundred years in the history of our country little
importance was attached to the education of women, though before the
nineteenth century began, twenty-four colleges had been founded for the
education of men. In the early years of this century private schools for
girls were expensive and short-lived. The common schools were the only
grades of public instruction open to young women. In the cities of
Massachusetts, where more was done for the education of boys than
elsewhere, girls were allowed to go to school only a small part of the
year, and in some places could even then use the schoolroom only in the
early hours of the day, or on those afternoons when the boys had a
half-holiday. Anything like a careful training of girls was not yet
thought of.
This comparative neglect of women is less to be wondered at when we
remember that the colleges which existed at the beginning of this
century had been founded to fit men for the learned professions,
chiefly for the ministry. Neither here nor elsewhere was it customary to
give advanced education to boys destined for business. The country,
too, was impoverished by the long struggle for independence. The
Government was bankrupt, unable to pay its veteran soldiers. Irritation
and unrest were everywhere prevalent until the ending of the second war
with England, in 1815. Immediately succeeding this began that great
migration to the West and South-west which carried thousands of the
most ambitious young men and women from the East to push our frontiers
farther and farther into the wilderness. Even in the older parts of
the country the population was widely scattered. The people lived for
the most part in villages and isolated farms. City life was uncommon. As
late as 1840 only nine per cent of the population was living in
cities of 8000 or more inhabitants. Under such conditions nothing more
than the bare necessities of education could be regarded.
But this very isolation bred a kind of equality. In district schools it
became natural for boys and girls to study together and to receive the
same instruction from teachers who were often young and enthusiastic.
These were as a rule college students, granted long winter vacations
from their own studies that they might earn money by teaching village
schools. Thus most young women shared with their brothers the best
elementary training the country afforded, while college education was
reserved for the few young men who were preparing for the ministry or
for some other learned profession.
From the beginning it had been the general custom of this country to
educate boys and girls together up to the college age. To-day in less
than six per cent of all our cities is there any separate provision of
schools for boys and girls. This habitual early start together has made
it natural for our men and women subsequently to read the same books, to
have the same tastes and interests, and jointly to approve a large
social freedom. On the whole, women have usually had more leisure than
men for the cultivating of scholarly tastes.
The first endowment of the higher education of women in this country was
made by the Moravians in the seminary for girls which they founded at
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. They founded another girls' seminary
at Lititz in 1794. Though both of these honorable foundations continue
in effective operation to-day, their influence has been for the most
part confined to the religious communion of their founders. In 1804 an
academy with wider connections was founded at Bradford, Massachusetts,
at first open to boys and girls, since 1836 limited to girls. From that
time academies and seminaries for girls increased rapidly. One of the
most notable was Troy Seminary, founded by Emma Hart Willard and
chartered in 1819. Miss Willard drew up broad and original plans for the
higher education of girls, laid them before President Monroe, appealed
to the New York Legislature for aid, and dreamed of establishing
something like collegiate training. More than three hundred students
entered her famous seminary, and for seventeen years she carried it on
with growing reputation. Her address to the President in 1819 is still a
strong statement of the importance to the republic of an enlightened and
disciplined womanhood.
Even more influential was the life and work of Mary Lyon, who in 1837
founded Mount Holyoke Seminary, and labored for the education of women
until her death, in 1849. Of strong religious nature, great courage and
resource, she went up and down New England securing funds and pupils.
Her rare gift of inspiring both men and women induced wide acceptance
of her ideals of character and intelligence. Seminaries patterned after
Mount Holyoke sprang up all over the land, and still remain as centres
of powerful influence, particularly in the Middle West and on the
Pacific Coast.