Part 4
=Occupations of college women=—It is probable that about 50 per cent of women graduates teach for at least a certain number of years. Of the 705 women graduates whose occupations were reported in the Association of collegiate alumnæ investigation of 1883 50.2 percent were then teaching. In 1895 of 1,082 graduates of Vassar 37.7 per cent were teaching; 2.0 per cent were engaged in graduate study and 3.0 per cent were physicians or studying medicine. In 1898 of 171 graduates (all living) of Radcliffe college, including the class of 1898, 49.7 per cent were teaching; 8.7 per cent were engaged in graduate study; .6 per cent were studying medicine; 17.5 per cent were unmarried and without professional occupation. In 1899 of 316 living graduates of Bryn Mawr college, including the class of 1899, 39.0 percent were teaching; 11.4 were engaged in graduate study; 6 per cent were engaged in executive work (including 4 deans of colleges, 3 mistresses of college halls of residence); 1.6 per cent were studying or practising medicine, and 26.6 per cent were unmarried and without professional occupation.[50]
=Coeducation vs. separate education=—It is clear that coeducation is the prevailing method in the United States; it is the most economical method; indeed it is the only possible method in most parts of the country. Now that it has been determined in America to send girls as well as boys to college, it becomes impossible to duplicate colleges for women in every part of this vast country. If, as is shown by the statistics given in the successive reports of the commissioner of education, men students in college are increasing faster far than the ratio of the population, and women college students are increasing faster still than men,[51] it will tax all our resources to make adequate provision for men and women in common. Only in thickly-settled parts of the country, where public sentiment is conservative enough to justify the initial outlay, have separate colleges for women been established, and these colleges, without exception, have been private foundations. Public opinion in the United States almost universally demands that universities supported by public taxation should provide for the college education of the women of the state in which they are situated. The separate colleges for women speaking generally are to be found almost exclusively in the narrow strip of colonial states lying along the Atlantic seaboard. The question is often asked, whether women prefer coeducation or separate education. It seems that in the east they as yet prefer separate education, and this preference is natural.[52] College life as it is organized in a woman’s college seems to conservative parents less exposed, more in accordance with inherited traditions. Consequently, girls who in their own homes lead guarded lives, are to be found rather in women’s colleges than in coeducational colleges. From the point of view of conservative parents, there is undoubtedly serious objection to intimate association at the most impressionable period of a girl’s life with many young men from all parts of the country and of every possible social class. From every point of view it is undesirable to have the problems of love and marriage presented for decision to a young girl during the four years when she ought to devote her energies to profiting by the only systematic intellectual training she is likely to receive during her life. Then, too, for the present, much of the culture and many of the priceless associations of college life are to be obtained, whether for men or women, only by residence in college halls, and no coeducational, or even affiliated, colleges have as yet organized for their students such a complete college life as the independent woman’s college. So long as this preference, and the grounds for it, exist, we must see to it that separate colleges for women are no less good than colleges for men. In professional schools, including the graduate school of the faculty of philosophy, coeducation is even at present almost the only method. There are in the United States only 4 true graduate schools for men closed to women, and only 1 independent graduate school maintained for women offering three years’ consecutive work leading to the degree of Ph. D. There is every reason to believe that as soon as large numbers of women wish to enter upon the study of theology, law and medicine, all the professional schools now existing will become coeducational.
=A modified vs. an unmodified curriculum=—The progress of women’s education, as we have traced it briefly from its beginning in the coeducational college of Oberlin in 1833, and the independent woman’s college of Vassar in 1865, has been a progress in accordance with the best academic traditions of men’s education. In 1870 we could not have predicted the course to be taken by the higher education of women; the separate colleges for women might have developed into something wholly different from what we had been familiar with so long in the separate colleges for men. A female course in coeducational colleges in which music and art were substituted for mathematics and Greek might have met the needs of the women students. After thirty years of experience, however, we are prepared to say that whatever changes may be made in future in the college curriculum will be made for men and women alike. After all, women themselves must be permitted to be the judges of what kind of intellectual discipline they find most truly serviceable. They seem to have made up their minds, and hereafter may be trusted to see to it that an inferior education shall not be offered to them in women’s colleges, or elsewhere, under the name of a modified curriculum.
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION FOR THE UNITED STATES COMMISSION TO THE PARIS EXPOSITION OF 1900
Director HOWARD J. ROGERS, Albany, N. Y.
MONOGRAPHS ON EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES
EDITED BY NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER _Professor of Philosophy and Education in Columbia University, New York_
1 EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION AND ADMINISTRATION—ANDREW SLOAN DRAPER, _President of the University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois_
2 KINDERGARTEN EDUCATION—SUSAN E. BLOW, _Cazenovia, New York_
3 ELEMENTARY EDUCATION—WILLIAM T. HARRIS, _United States Commissioner of Education, Washington, D. C._
4 SECONDARY EDUCATION—ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, _Professor of Education in the University of California, Berkeley, California_
5 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE—ANDREW FLEMING WEST, _Professor of Latin in Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey_
6 THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY—EDWARD DELAVAN PERRY, _Jay Professor of Greek in Columbia University, New York_
7 EDUCATION OF WOMEN—M. CAREY THOMAS, _President of Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania_
8 TRAINING OF TEACHERS—B. A. HINSDALE, _Professor of the Science and Art of Teaching in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan_
9 SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE AND HYGIENE—GILBERT B. MORRISON, _Principal of the Manual Training High School, Kansas City, Missouri_
10 PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION—JAMES RUSSELL PARSONS, _Director of the College and High School Departments, University of the State of New York, Albany, New York_
11 SCIENTIFIC, TECHNICAL AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION—T. C. MENDENHALL, _President of the Technological Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts_
12 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION—CHARLES W. DABNEY, _President of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee_
13 COMMERCIAL EDUCATION—EDMUND J. JAMES, _Professor of Public Administration in the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois_
14 ART AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION—ISAAC EDWARDS CLARKE, _Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C._
15 EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES—EDWARD ELLIS ALLEN, _Principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, Overbrook, Pennsylvania_
16 SUMMER SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITY EXTENSION—HERBERT B. ADAMS, _Professor of American and Institutional History in the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland_
17 SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES AND ASSOCIATIONS—JAMES MCKEEN CATTELL, _Professor of Psychology in Columbia University, New York_
18 EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO—BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, _Principal of the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama_
19 EDUCATION OF THE INDIAN—WILLIAM N. HAILMANN, _Superintendent of Schools, Dayton, Ohio_
Footnote 1:
That their admission was due in large part to the stress of circumstances is shown by the fact that in the very states in which these coeducational schools had been established there was manifested on other occasions a most illiberal attitude toward girls’ education. In the few cities of the Atlantic seaboard, where European conservatism was too strong to allow girls to be taught with boys in the new high schools, and where there were boys enough to fill the schools, girls had to wait much longer before their needs were provided for at all, and then most inadequately. In Boston, where the boys’ and girls’ high schools were separated, it was impossible until 1878 for a Boston girl to be prepared for college in a city high school, whereas, in the country towns of Massachusetts, where boys and girls were taught together in the high schools, the girl had had the same opportunities as the boy for twenty-five or thirty years. Indeed, it was not until 1852 that Boston girls obtained, and then only in connection with the normal school, a public high-school education of any kind whatsoever. In Philadelphia, where boys and girls are taught separately in the high schools, no girl could be prepared for college before 1893, neither Latin, French, nor German being taught in the girls’ high school, whereas, for many years the boys’ high school had prepared boys for college. In Baltimore the two girls’ high schools are still, in 1900, unable to prepare girls for college, whereas the boys’ high school has for years prepared boys to enter the Johns Hopkins university. The impossibility of preparing girls for college is only another way of stating that the instruction given is very imperfect.
Footnote 2:
The magnitude of this fact will be apparent if we reflect that here for the first time the girls of a great nation, especially of the poorer classes, have from their earliest infancy to the age of eighteen or nineteen received the same education as the boys, and that the ladder leading, in Huxley’s words, from the gutter to the university may be climbed as easily by a girl as by a boy. Although college education has affected as yet only a very few out of the great number of adult women in the United States, the free opportunities for secondary education have influenced the whole American people for nearly two-thirds of a century. The men of the poorer classes have had, as a rule, mothers as well educated as their fathers, indeed, better educated; to this, more than to any other single cause, I think, may be attributed what by other nations is regarded as the phenomenal industrial progress of the United States. Our commercial rivals could probably take no one step that would so tend to place them on a level with American competition as to open to girls without distinction all their elementary and secondary schools for boys. In 1892, girls formed 55.9 per cent, and in 1898, 56.5 per cent of all pupils in the public and private secondary schools of the United States.
Footnote 3:
In 1870 women formed 59.0 per cent; in 1880, 57.2 per cent; in 1890, 65.5 per cent; and in 1898, 67.8 per cent (in the North Atlantic Division 80.8 per cent) of all teachers in the public elementary and secondary schools of the United States (U. S. ed. rep. for 1897–98, pp. xiii, lxxv). It has been frequently remarked that the feminine pronouns “she” and “her” are instinctively used in America in common speech with reference to a teacher. Moreover more women than men are teaching in the public and private secondary schools of the United States (in 1898, women formed 53.8 per cent of the total number of secondary teachers, see U. S. ed. rep. for 1897–98, pp. 2053, 2069); whereas in all other countries the secondary teaching of boys is wholly in the hands of men.
Footnote 4:
In many cases in the west women made their way into the universities through the normal department of the university, being admitted to that first of all. The summer schools of western colleges, chiefly attended by teachers, among whom women were in the majority, served also as an entering wedge. (See Woman’s work in America, Holt & Co., 1891, pp. 71–75.)
Footnote 5:
Antioch college opened, however, with only 8 students in its college department, all the rest, 142, belonging to its secondary school.
Footnote 6:
In every case I give the date when full coeducation was introduced; West Virginia, for example, admitted women to limited privileges in 1889.
Footnote 7:
In discussing coeducation I shall, therefore, disregard the divisions into north Atlantic, south Atlantic, north central, south central and western, employed by the U. S. census and the U. S. bureau of education. The New England, middle and southern states are all, of course, eastern, and, with the exception of Vermont, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, are all seaboard states, Pennsylvania being counted as a seaboard state on account of its close river connection with the sea. It will be noted that the inland southern states are rather western than eastern in their characteristics. The northern middle states belong on the whole by their sympathies to New England, the southern middle to the southern states. Missouri, having been a slave state and settled largely by southerners, is still southern in feeling. The District of Columbia also may conveniently be counted with the southern states.
Footnote 8:
Two of the three next largest colleges in Virginia—Richmond and Roanoke—admit women, but the advance in women’s education in that state has been very recent. Until the establishment of the State normal school in 1883 there was not a scientific laboratory in the state accessible to women; in 1893 the Randolph-Macon Woman’s college opened with several laboratories, see Prof. Celestia Parrish, Proceedings 2d Capon Springs conference for education in the south, 1899, p. 68. I am much indebted to the author of this paper for valuable data in regard to coeducation in the south.
Footnote 9:
The Massachusetts institute of technology is classified by the U. S. ed. reps. among technical schools.
Footnote 10:
The commissioner of education does not feel himself at liberty to discriminate among the colleges chartered by the different states, but it is well known that in most states the name of college, or preferably that of university, and the power to confer degrees are granted to any institution whatsoever without regard to endowment, scientific equipment, scholarly qualifications of the faculty or adequate preparation of the students. The majority of the so-called colleges and universities of the south and west are really secondary schools. In most of them not only are the greater part of the students really pupils in the preparatory or high school department, but most of the students in the collegiate departments are at graduation barely able to enter upon the sophomore or second year work of the best eastern colleges. Throughout this monograph I have used the word college in speaking of institutions for undergraduate education, except when quoting their official titles, and this whether the college in question is, or is not, included in a larger institution providing also three years of graduate instruction. The terms college and university are used in America without any definite understanding, even among colleges and universities themselves, as to how they shall be differentiated. Probably the most commonly accepted usage is to call an institution a university if it has attached to it various departments, or schools, without regard to the standing of these departments, the preparation of the students entering them, or the work done in them. In this sense all the state universities of the west are called universities because, although many of them are really high schools, they have attached to them schools of pharmacy, veterinary science, agriculture, and sometimes medicine or law. It is in this sense that many institutions for negroes are called universities, because they include various departments of industrial art as well as a high school department. Until very recently the requirements for admission to the departments of law, medicine, dentistry, etc., have been so low that it has been a positive disadvantage to have such schools attached to the college department, and when lately the graduates of Harvard college decided not to allow the graduates of its affiliated schools to vote with them for representatives on the board of trustees, they claimed with justice that the illiberal education of the majority of these graduates would tend to lower the standard of Harvard college. The use of the word university should be strictly limited to institutions offering at least three years of graduate instruction in one or more schools.
Footnote 11:
In this list of fifty-eight colleges I have included: first, the twenty-four colleges (indicated in the list by “a”) whose graduates are admitted to the Association of collegiate alumnæ; second, the twenty-three colleges (24 are included in the Federation, but Barnard has ceased to be a graduate school, see page 28) included in the Federation of graduate clubs (indicated by “b”); third, the fifty-two colleges (indicated by “c”) included in the 1899–1900 edition of Minerva, the well-known handbook of colleges and universities of the world published each year by Truebner & Co.; and fourth, the colleges which, according to the U. S. education report for 1897–98, have at least $500,000 worth of productive funds (indicated by “d”), and also three hundred or more students (indicated by “e”). In the case of state universities the money they receive annually from national and state appropriations may reasonably be regarded as a sort of supplementary endowment; I have, therefore, included the state universities of Maine, Iowa and West Virginia, whose productive funds do not amount to $500,000. This list of fifty-eight colleges, arranged according to the different sections of the country, and as far as possible in the order of the numbers in their undergraduate departments, is as follows: _New England and 3 northern middle states_: Harvard (bcde), Yale (bcde), Cornell (abcde-coed.), Massachusetts institute of technology (acde-coed.), Smith (acde-woman’s college), Princeton (bcde), Pennsylvania (bcde), Columbia (bcde), Brown (bcde), Wellesley (abce-woman’s college), Vassar (acde-woman’s college), Syracuse (acde-coed.), Dartmouth (cde), Boston (acde-coed.), Amherst (cde), Radcliffe (abce-affiliated), Williams (cde), Lehigh (cde), Maine (e-coed.), Wesleyan (acde-coed.), Vermont (c-coed.), Lafayette (c), Bryn Mawr (abed-woman’s college), New York University (cd), Barnard (a-affiliated), Hamilton (c), Colgate (cd), Clark (bcd-no undergrad. department). _Southern and 2 southern middle states_: Missouri (bcde-coed.), Texas (cde-coed.), Columbian (bce-coed.), West Virginia (e-coed.), Tulane (cd), Vanderbilt (bcd-coed.), Virginia (c), Johns Hopkins (bcd), Washington (St. Louis) (cd-coed.), Georgetown (c-Catholic), Catholic university (cd-no undergrad. department). _Western states_: Minnesota (abcde-coed.), Michigan (abcde-coed.), California (abcde-coed.), Wisconsin (abcde-coed.), Chicago (abcde-coed.), Leland Stanford (abcde-coed.), Nebraska (ace-coed.), Ohio state university (de-coed.), Indiana (cde-coed.), Illinois (ce-coed.), Kansas (ace-coed.), Ohio Wesleyan (cde-coed.), Iowa (e-coed.), Northwestern (acde-coed.), Oberlin (acde-coed.), Cincinnati (cd-coed.), Colorado (c-coed.), Western reserve (bcd), College for Women of western reserve (a-affiliated).
The only attempt hitherto made in America to discriminate between colleges of true college grade and others has been made by the Association of collegiate alumnæ. This association was organized in 1882 for the purpose of uniting women graduates of the foremost coeducational colleges and colleges for women only into an association for work connected with the higher education of women. In the early years of the association there was appointed a committee on admissions, and the admission of each successive college in the association has been carefully considered, both with regard to its entrance requirements, the training of its faculty and its curriculum. The Association of collegiate alumnæ concerns itself, of course, only with colleges admitting women, but there is no doubt that the fifteen coeducational colleges and seven colleges for women only admitted to the association would, in the estimation of every one familiar with the subject, rank among the first fifty-eight colleges of the United States.
The Federation of graduate clubs is an association of graduate students of those colleges whose graduate schools are important enough to entitle them to admission to the federation. The colleges in the Federation of graduate clubs are the only colleges in the United States that do true university work.
Footnote 12:
In only two instances, so far as I know, has coeducation once introduced been abandoned or restricted in any way. The private college of Adelbert of Western reserve, coeducational from 1873, opened a separate woman’s college and excluded women in 1888. As the college department was very small and the state of Ohio in which the college was situated the most eastern in feeling of all western states, the change was seemingly to be attributed to a bid for students through undergraduate novelty. The Baptist college of Colby, in Maine, coeducational from 1871, has taught women in separate classes in required work since 1890. Women are not allowed to compete with men for college prizes or for membership in the students’ society, which elects its members on account of scholarship. Complete separation, which was at first planned, has proved impracticable and from the beginning of the sophomore year women and men recite together in all elective work.
Footnote 13:
In an investigation made several years ago in the University of Wisconsin, which has been open to women since 1874, it was found that the women ranked in scholarship very considerably beyond the men. In the University of Michigan, where women have been educated with men since 1870, President Angell has repeatedly laid stress on their excellent scholarship. When in 1893–94 a committee of the faculty of the University of Virginia asked the officers of a large number of coeducational colleges especially in regard to this point the testimony received was very remarkable. In England it should be noted that the question of the success of women in collegiate studies has been put beyond a doubt by the published class lists of the competitive honor examinations of Oxford and Cambridge. In the discussions in regard to granting women degrees at Cambridge, it was freely admitted that women’s minds were “splendid for examination purposes.”
Footnote 14: