Women in American Higher Education
The history of women's
struggle for access to American institutions of higher education, beginning
approximately around the 1820s and evolving into the early twentieth century,
reveals a remarkable story of achievements and innovative ideas.
During its evolution, this struggle has been closely related to a number
of social and economic factors that have shaped American life. Among
these, the rapid industrialization, the urbanization, and the introduction
of formal schooling, have all contributed to the liberation of women from
expected societal roles. Historically, women's acceptance as students
has preceded their entry as administrators and faculty in the field of
higher education. Yet because education has helped women realize
potentials lying beyond their traditional roles in society and has offered
a process by which women could learn to value themselves, opposition to
it has been constantly present. As a result, women's entry into colleges
and universities has transpired gradually through various forms and institutions
of education, beginning with the establishment of the first female seminaries,
continuing with the founding of women's colleges and the introduction of
co-education, and finally spreading to all institutions of higher education.
Women's struggle for higher education continues nowadays and builds strongly
on its past achievements. Its present goals, underlined by the high
values of contemporary democratic society, are directed, above all, toward
the firm establishment of equal access and opportunities in all institutions
of higher education.
Historians usually
refer to three important phases in the development of women's movement
for advanced education: the first phase encompasses the period between
the 1820s and the 1860s, the second spans the period between the 1860s
and the 1890s, and the third covers the period between the 1890s and the
1920s. Taking into consideration the women who attended school as
a primary criteria, those who received their education between the 1870s
and the 1890s are usually considered the first generation of educated women.
While Barbara Solomon talks about two more such generations following the
first one, Lynn Gordon disagrees and points out only to one (Solomon 1985,
Gordon 1989). One reason for the selection of the post Civil War
generation of educated women as the first one can be found in the extremely
small percentage of women who attended any kind of school in the several
decades after the Revolution. However, the years before the Civil
War mark the beginnings of important developments which have provided a
variety of unexpected educational opportunities for women.
The movement toward
the higher education of women drew on a tradition of educational emancipation
existing long before the establishment of the first female academies.
Higher education on the whole was not a popular thing in colonial times.
The first colleges had the mission to train a handful of white, privileged
men for the careers of ministers, lawyers, doctors, and men of affairs.
Thus, in ordinary life, most boys and girls received some education in
their families according to their future societal positions and instruction
in domestic skills constituted the education common to all girls.
In the North, one other educational alternative for girls, as well as for
boys, were the private "dame schools" where children were taught to read
and write. Both of those skills girls could use to read the Bible
or if they would teach (Hoffman 1981, p. 6).
The Revolutionary
War witnessed the direct involvement of women in public and private spheres.
A recognition of the alternative benefits of liberal education for individual
women at that time was reflected in the writings of Mercy Otis Warren,
Abigel Adams, and Judith Murray, all of whom, though, still stressed the
importance of women's duties as wives and mothers. One other influence
came from England with the radical views of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Building on Locke's psychology, Wollstonecraft argued that "women must
be educated as rational creatures if they were to develop fully as human
beings" (Solomon 1985, p. 9-11).
A number of factors
stimulated women's movement for advanced education in post-revolutionary
America. On the one hand, the idea of Republican Motherhood, supported
strongly by Benjamin Rush, stressed the importance of mothers and wives
in the creation of the future virtuous citizens and rendered women's education
as being useful to American society (Rush 1798). On the other hand,
the ideal of the Christian wife, mother, and teacher, grounded in the religious
beliefs of the Second Great Awakening of 1790-1850, gave strong impetus
to female education. The urgent need to Christianize western frontiers
turned various religious groups towards women's education for future teaching.
In addition, the rapid industrialization in the Northeast alleviated household
work thus allowing women to devote to other activities. Education
was considered useful for women who as schoolteachers could support themselves
and help their families.
Palmieri referred
to the period between 1820-1860 as the "Romantic Period" or the "era of
Republican Motherhood" (1989, p. 147). Social and cultural changes,
summed up in the "Romantic ideology", which "equated genius with such qualities
as intuition, emotional empathy, and insight, qualities preeminently associated
with women", operated in women's behalf. Thus, "by laying claim to
special emotional and moral traits, women could cultivate intellectual
roles as teachers, translators, and social reformers" (Palmieri 1989, pp.
147-148). Although only a handful of women received their education
in these years, the period marked the beginnings of various institutions
and forms of women's education.
The pioneering institutions
for organized advanced education for women were the female seminaries:
Sarah Pierce's "respectable academy" in Litchfield, Connecticut, founded
in 1791, Emma Willard's Troy Seminary in New York, established in 1821,
Catharine Beecher's Hartford Seminary, Connecticut, started in 1828, and
Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley which opened in 1837
(Solomon 1985, pp. 17-20). Those seminaries, offering curricula which
covered most of the subjects taught in the junior and senior years at men's
colleges, became prototypes for women's institutions in the Midwest, Far
West, and the South. Moreover, graduates of those institutions soon
began teaching around the country thus spreading the educational values
of Willard, Beecher, and Lyon. Women's education, as it developed
in the early seminaries, played also an important role in the diffusion
of the feminist values beginning to spread in the nineteenth century (Scott
1995).
The growth of the
academies reached a climax in the 1850s when other educational alternatives
in the North, such as the normal schools and the public high schools, were
beginning to emerge. The academy expansion of this period coincided
with various attempts for academic reform in the field of higher education.
The old liberal arts college model, firmly established by the 1828 Yale
Report, was already being challenged by the need for more practically oriented
forms of education, issues of the education of women and minority groups,
demands of scientific experimentation, expanded libraries, and out-of-class
teaching. The first scientific schools were opened in Yale and Harvard.
Institutions at which the natural and physical sciences had already found
a place, such as the United States Military Academy at West Point and the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, already existed. Similar
trials in implementing more advanced curricula were present at women's
academies operating between 1830 and 1870.(Veysey 1965, Rudolph 1990, Thomas
Woody in Solomon 1985).
Another achievement
of this period was the introduction of co-education and the establishment
of women's colleges. In 1833, Oberlin College opened its doors to
men and women, white and black, to be "educated together to carry God's
cause on earth" (Solomon 1985, p. 21). The College had a Female Department
and a graduate of Mount Holyoke filled the position of the "Lady Principal
of the Female Department" (Hehr, 1938, p. 5, quoted in Nidiffer 1995, p.
17). The first of the several women's colleges, considered an "extension
upward of the female-seminary idea" , was the Georgia Female College at
Macon, opened in 1839 (Rudolph 1990, p. 311-312). Institutions like
these, however, were rare and it would take some more time for co-education
and women's colleges to take strong hold in higher education.
The handful of females
who acquired a portion of the liberal education at academies, seminaries,
and colleges between the 1790-1850 became known as the "Vanguard of a new
American type: the educated woman", the "Precollegiate groups" or
the "pathbreakers" (Solomon 1985, p. 27). Those women remained loyal
to the code of true womanhood combining the ideal of the republican and
Christian wife and mother. It was this generation that first encountered
the woman question in different forms, their instruction dependent on decisions
about what women should study and to what extent to follow the social traditions
of male liberal education.
It was also in this
period when women's schoolteaching received unprecedented impetus.
Rapid industrialization and urbanization opened jobs more lucrative than
teachers to man. In addition, the spread of common schools in New
England offered positions to young women giving them the opportunity to
meet both communal and personal needs. Women's apprenticeship in
this field, as one way to make teaching "an honored profession for women
who had not yet married, or who were to remain single", was strongly supported
and the first American normal school or teacher's college - Lexington Academy
in Massachusetts - opened in 1839 (Hoffman 1981, pp. 5, 12). Schoolteaching
served as a base from which women could move on to other employment or
activities, such as teaching Indians at the frontiers, participating in
a foreign mission, joining the medical profession or the field of popular
writing.
Changes in social
views were reflected in the spread of the belief that an educated wife
could be an asset for she would be able to manage the sometimes contradictory
roles in the family. Women also entered the realm of public policy
initiating moral reforms, supporting the movement for women's rights, or
joining the abolitionists. Female and anti-slavery leaders established
several schools for blacks (Solomon 1985, p. 41). The first organized
attempt to provide any kind of higher education for African-American women
was the schoolhouse for the higher education of "Negro girls" built by
Mytilla Minor in 1857 in Washington, D. C. (Noble 1956, p. 18). There
existed a link between feminism and higher education but for more women
liberal education took precedence over suffrage.
The breakthrough
in the movement for women's higher education came after the Civil War and
the overall period until the 1890s, called the "Reform Era" or "Responsible
Spinsterhood", saw the firm establishment of women's colleges and the spread
of co-education (Palmieri 1989, p. 147). The incredible extension
of women's education in this period was stimulated by a number of factors.
On the one hand, the political and social atmosphere in the country coincided
with the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877) - a time of difficult readjustment
in attempts to reunify the North and the South, to provide fair treatment
for the recently freed blacks, to restore the loyal governments to the
succeeded states, and to revitalize the damaged political, social, and
cultural life of the country (Rudolph 1990). On the other hand, rapid
industrialization, territorial expansion, technological advancement, and
numerous scientific discoveries stimulated progressive developments in
all spheres of life. The period, known as "the age of the university",
marked the expansion of university education in general (Freeland 1992,
p. 25). The most prominent examples were the state universities of
the Northwest, the South, the Midwest, and along the Pacific coast.
These institutions assumed a "central role in the life of the State" with
their successful attempts to shape public elementary and secondary education
and substitute the classical curriculum with a more practically and scientifically
oriented one (Rudolph 1990). In addition, the development of public
education was evident in the growth of common schools, high schools, and
colleges.
During the Civil
War women became actively involved in hospitals and camps, in farms and
factories. Schoolteaching continued to provide women of all backgrounds
with important ways to serve and to support themselves. In the years
during and after the Civil War some 7,000 teachers, abolitionists or Christian
in belief, went South to teach those recently freed from slavery (Hoffman
1981, p. xix). Additional need for teachers was imposed by the acceleration
of immigration and the expansion of western settlement.
The acceptance of
the Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862, according to which the states received
land to support public and private colleges and universities, gave a strong
stimulus to the extension of women's education. Coeducation had already
started to take hold at the state universities, the first one being the
University of Iowa in 1855, followed by the University of Wisconsin in
1863, and then Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, and California (Rudolph 1990,
p. 314). The struggle for co-education was "long and acrimonious"
and "the high degree of negative feelings toward women on campuses created
an environment that ranged from inhospitable to openly hostile" (Nidiffer
1995, p. 18). Geographically, the strength of co-education was clearly
in the west. Most of the Northeastern institutions, with their strong
connections to social and economic elites, were able to persist and profit
from excluding women students. As an example, co-education was not
introduced to Massachusetts until the establishment of Boston University
in 1873 (Solomon 1985, p. 51). In the South, where the ideal about
gentle womanhood had a strong hold, single-sex education remained the norm
in public institutions for white women. Since these ideals were not
extended to blacks, most black women who had gone on to secondary schooling
attended coeducational colleges. In addition, the Civil War closed
most southern institutions and although the earliest state universities
in the United States were founded in the South, their acceptance of women
came much later: in 1910 only five were coeducational (Clifford 1989,
pp. 5,6).
This period was also
characteristic with the growth of women's colleges. Four of them,
mainly Vassar in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1884,
established in the North, had a far-reaching impact on both co-educational
and single-sex institutions in the country. The classical curriculum
was established as a result of those colleges' commitment to provide collegiate
education to women equal to that of men. However, aware of the insufficient
preparation of their students, those colleges opened preparatory departments.
In addition, strong teacher-training programs and courses in the sciences
and social work were offered there (Rudolph 1990, p. 326).
The incredible expansion
of women's education in this period was also obvious in the spread of the
normal schools and the female medical colleges for both black and white
women. Small religious colleges on the Oberlin model continued to
take root, especially in the Midwest in the 1840s and 1850s and in the
black South in the late 1860s. The first Catholic women's colleges:
the College of Notre Dame in Maryland, founded in 1896, and Trinity College
in 1897 were also established in these years (Solomon 1985, Rudolph 1990).
The Ivy League institutions
resisted the admission of women the longest. One result of this development
was the introduction of co-ordinate education which represented a compromise
between co-education and a separate women's college. The co-ordinate
colleges were privately sponsored female colleges which were attached to
institutions for male students. The most prominent example is Harvard's
decision in 1874 to give examinations to women, and, as of 1879, to give
courses to women outside the university constituting what was known as
"The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women" or the so-called
Harvard Annex. It was in 1893 when the Annex was turned into Radcliffe
College (Rudolph 1990).
Graduate education
for women stayed for long at a latent phase during which women were admitted
only as "special students" without receiving a degree. Starting in
1877 and increasingly through the 1880s, several institutions began to
award doctorates to women, with Syracuse University in the lead, followed
by Boston University, the University of Wooster, Smith College, the University
of Michigan, and Cornell (Rositer 1982, pp. 159, 162). Women's opportunity
for graduate study grew with the success of Helen Magill as the first woman
to receive a Ph.D. degree from an American university in 1877, and the
availability of women with European doctorates, such as M. Carey Thomas
(Clifford 1989, p. 23).
It was in this period
also that women began entering coeducational institutions as administrators
and faculty. The entry of appreciable numbers of female students
into coeducational institutions or into particular departments, such as
English, the modern foreign languages, history, the social sciences, and
psychology, exerted pressure to engage one or more female faculty.
Substantial portions of the first women employed by coeducational institutions
were a subfaculty of part-time teachers whose principal duties were disciplinary
and social. They held titles like "matron", "lady principal", "preceptress",
"women's medical examiner" and "dean of women". Such women might,
then, be granted faculty status as well. The emergence of the post
of dean of women had the most consistent effect in bringing more women
into the professional community at coeducational institutions (Nidiffer
1995, Clifford 1989). By 1890, according to the United States Bureau
on Education's investigation on the gender of faculty in men's and coeducational
institutions as well as in normal schools and teachers' colleges, academic
women were no longer found exclusively in women's colleges (Clifford 1989,
p. 10).
The various developments
in women's education were accompanied by different social opinions and
gave rise to several conflicting debates quite often supported by scientific
theories. Darwinian evolution "relegated women to a permanently inferior
condition, physically and mentally" (Solomon 1985, p. 56). The most
famous attack, however, came in 1873 from Dr. Edward Clarke's "Sex in Education".
In his work, Clarke argued that higher education would damage women's health
and ultimately inhibit their reproductive capacity (Clarke 1873).
Although Clarke's book had an incredible impact on social views at the
time, it also stimulated the debate about women's education which additionally
heightened the revolutionary quality of the struggle for education.
The extension of
women's education in this period paralleled the beginnings and development
of African-American colleges. Nine federal black land-grant colleges
were established in the South between 1870-1890. By 1910 black colleges
were over a hundred (Anderson 1989, p. 455). Most of them admitted
black women and at least two of them, Barber-Scotia in Concord, North Carolina,
and Spelman in Atlanta, Georgia, were for women only (Noble 1956, p. 19).
Black women were given the chance to enter college because they were needed
for teaching. Their education was also influenced by developing educational
opportunities for black men and white women.
The years between
the 1890s and the 1920s are considered the period when women's education
comes to fruition. This period is also known as the "Progressive
Era" in which the first generation of college women began entering the
professions of medicine, law, social work, and academy. The first
generation of educated women were extremely conscious of their pivotal
role in proving that they were men's intellectual equals (Palmieri 1989).
The 1980s saw the establishment of two major universities that admitted
female students from the start. The University of Chicago, opened
in 1892, recruited women as undergraduates, graduates, and faculty members,
introducing a female dean and more on-campus living. The other institution,
Stanford which was reestablished in 1892, had a place for women secured
in its charter. It was also in these years that women's colleges
flourished, most of the normal schools developed into state colleges, and
several state universities grew out of state colleges.
However, the beginning
of the twentieth century saw a negative reaction toward women's education.
A major reason for it was the increase of high school female graduates
as well as the growth of the proportion of women in coeducational institutions.
The "Race Suicide Syndrome" theory, which stipulated that women's colleges
were "institutions for the promotion of celibacy" thus producing a "disappearing
class of intellectual women who were not marrying and hence were committing
race suicide", was widely spread (Felter 1906 quoted in Palmieri 1989,
p. 150). Added to that was the idea that coeducation helped to divide
the subjects of the curriculum into mail and female.
The "great turn-of-the-century"
debate focused explicitly on the social implications of co-education (Gordon
1989, p. 349). Thus, not surprisingly, strong waves of reaction were
felt above all at coeducational universities, some of which were Chicago,
Stanford, California, Wisconsin, Boston University, where segregation of
classes was institutionalized. One explanation for that reversal
was the "sex repulsion theory" developed by President Van Hise. According
to this theory, as soon as one sex dominated numerically, fear of competition
drove the other out. Thus professors in classics, philosophy, and
political science attributed the lower enrollment of men in their courses
to the overwhelming presence of women. The other justification for
the separation of sexes at college, or the "sex attraction theory", analyzed
the development of sexual urges at puberty and predicted that educated
women would become unwilling to accept the limitations of married life.
The result of those arguments rendered co-education as "second-best" to
many and pointed to female institutions as the ones to offer the best education
for women (Solomon 1985, pp. 60-61).
Despite those debates,
women's access to colleges progressed steadily. The period between
the 1870-1910 witnessed "an extraordinary movement of women taking advantage
of new opportunities not always designed for them" (Solomon 1985, p. 61).
The 1920s, the year when suffrage was legally achieved, were critical for
educated women and it was in this decade when women reached highest proportion
of the undergraduate population, of doctoral recipients, and of faculty
members (Graham 1989, p. 417).
The story of women's
struggle for access to mainstream institutions of higher education, as
well as that of various groups of people from different racial, ethnic,
or social backgrounds, is still being written. While in the 1870s
objections to women's advanced education centered on the issue of their
health and in the 1900s psychological emphasis on male and female academic
interests posed threats to equality in women's education, physiological
differences represent one contemporary reason to deny access to women at
certain institutions - military schools as an example. It is true
that today's American system of higher education sets an example in democratization
of education all over the world. It is also true, however, that this
fact presents at least one more reason for the need of all institutions
of higher education as well as the whole society, to work for the achievement
of the basic principle of democracy, mainly, equal rights and opportunities
for all of its members.
References
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EDUC 844, History of American Higher Education, Autumn, 1995.
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EDUC 844, History of American Higher Education, Autumn, 1995.
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