Part 10

The growth of progressive thought in the West, concerning the social and civil position and the industrial and professional freedom of woman, tends to supply women with incentives to obtain the best education: and the defects in their education hitherto caused by the absence of incentive, promise to be remedied with increasing rapidity.

The colleges, particularly the State universities of the West, are charged with being defective in their provisions for the development and culture of the social qualities of their students. Many of them have no dormitories, and the students upon entering them, women and men alike, go into boarding-houses or private families, or form co-operative boarding clubs, according to their own tastes and under conditions of their own making.

If in these universities students were received for post graduate work only, no criticism could attach to this custom of leaving every student to regulate his or her own domestic and social affairs, for such students are usually mature men and women. But this custom is open to criticism in institutions, in all of which the majority, and in most of which all the students, are undergraduates of immature age.

A study of their latest catalogues shows that, excluding the State universities, most of these institutions which enjoy more than a local patronage have erected or are contemplating the erection of dormitories for the accommodation of the young women in attendance upon them. Although some colleges, as, for example, the Ohio Wesleyan University, continue to build dormitories large enough to accommodate one or two hundred young women, there is a tendency favorable to the erection of less pretentious buildings under the name of hall or cottage, each of which shall accommodate from twenty to sixty young women. The refinement both of college life and of subsequent social life would be enhanced by the multiplication of these homes for moderate numbers of college women—if each were put under the charge of a woman whose intellectual culture, stability, and nobleness of character, and experience of life and the world, made her the evident and acknowledged peer of every member of the college faculty. But, if these college homes for women students are placed under the charge of matrons who are expected to combine motherly kindness and housewifely skill with devout piety, but in whom no other qualities or attainments are demanded, and if the matrons are the only women, besides the students, connected with the institution, the influence of the college home will tend to lower the ideal of woman’s function in society; to rob the ideal of domestic life of all intellectual quality; and in general to diminish for young women the incentives to study.

Every one knows that the strongest stimulus to exertion that young men experience in college is afforded by their contact with men whose cultivated talents, whose sound learning, whose successful experience, and whose rich characters they admire, venerate, and emulate.

The almost universal absence of women from college faculties is a grave defect in co-educational institutions; and negatively, at least, their absence has as injurious an influence upon young men as upon young women.

Under the most favorable conditions, the college home, in which a large number of young women are brought into a common life under one roof and one guidance, is abnormal in its organization. If, in the university town where young women find homes in boarding-houses or in private families, there could be a local board of ladies authorized to exercise some supervision over the young women, the arrangement might secure the aims of a college home under more natural conditions than the latter now provides.

But women in the faculty, women on the board of visitors, women on the board of trustees, holding these positions, not because of their family connections, not because they are wives or sisters of the men in the faculty and on the boards, but because of their individual abilities, are the great present need of co-educational colleges. Only the presence of women in these places can relieve the young men who are students in these institutions from an arrogant sense of superiority arising from their sex, and the young women from a corresponding sense of subordination.

In a statement of the “Theory of Education in the United States of America,” prepared by the Hon. Duane Doty and Dr. Wm. T. Harris, the present Commissioner of Education, we read the following:

“The general participation of all the people in the primary political functions of election, together with the almost complete localization of self-government by local administration, renders necessary the education of all, without distinction of sex, social rank, wealth, or natural abilities.” Farther: “The national government and the State government regard education as a proper subject for legislation, on the ground of the necessity of educated intelligence among a people that is to furnish _law-abiding_ citizens, well versed in the laws they are to obey, and likewise _law-making_ citizens, well versed in the social, historic, and political conditions which give occasion to new laws and shape their provisions.”

These statements are in perfect accord with the following words of Washington, quoted from his “Farewell Address to the American People”: “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

Here is the whole argument for the existence of State universities. In the West, these are destined to be the strongest, richest, and best equipped institutions for the higher learning; and are likewise clearly destined to have a determining influence upon the policy of other colleges in respect to co-education.

The “West” remains an indefinite term; and in that part of it which the word accurately describes, a people will be born who know nothing of distinctions in opportunity between men and women.

A people reared under such conditions will ultimately exhibit the influence of the “Higher Education of Women in the West.”

IV. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.

BY

CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.

The education of women in the South has suffered from the same cause which has kept back the education of women all over the world. Woman was looked upon as merely an adjunct to the real human being, man, and it was not considered desirable to give her any other education than what sufficed to make her a good housewife and an agreeable, but not too critical, companion for her husband. When Dr. Pierce traveled through Georgia, in 1836–37, to collect funds for establishing the Georgia Female College, he was met by such blunt refusals as these, from gentlemen of large means and liberal views as to the education of their sons: “No, I will not give you a dollar; all that a woman needs to know is how to read the New Testament, and to spin and weave clothing for her family”; “I would not have one of your graduates for a wife, and I will not give you a cent for any such object.” In an address delivered before the graduating class of the Greenboro Female College of North Carolina in 1856, the speaker said: “I would have you shun the one [too little learning] as the plague, and the other [too much] as the leprosy; I would have you intelligent, useful women ... yet never evincing a consciousness of superiority, never playing Sir Oracle, never showing that you supposed yourself born for any other destiny than to be a ‘helpmeet for man.’” An intelligent lady who was educated in the best schools in Richmond, just before the war, writes me: “If the principal of the school to which I went had any high views, or any views at all, about the education of women, I never heard her express them; and I fancy that, consciously or unconsciously, her object was to make the girls under her care charming women as far as possible, sufficiently well read to be responsive and appreciative companions to men.” And this view of the matter has not yet entirely disappeared, for, in the catalogue for 1889 of the Norfolk College for Young Ladies, the aims of the school are said to be molded in accordance with the principle that “a woman’s province in life is to throw herself heartily into the pursuits of others rather than to have pursuits of her own.” It is plain that so long as this view of the function of women prevails they will have little incentive and little opportunity for undertaking the severe labors which are the necessary condition of a solid education. The lighter graces which are supposed to result from a little training in French and music and from some study of English literature, have for a long time been accessible to Southern girls, both in schools of their own and in the numerous private and fashionable schools of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. When a girl was a member of a thoroughly cultivated family, she naturally became a cultivated woman; there was usually a tutor for her brothers, whose instruction she was allowed to share (the mother of Chancellor Wythe of Virginia taught her son Greek); and there was usually, either in her own house or in the parsonage, a large and carefully selected library of English books. If by the right kind of family influence a girl has been thoroughly penetrated with a love of books, something has been done for her which, of course, the regular means of education often fail to produce. The women of New Orleans, and Charleston, and Richmond were often cultivated women in the best sense of the word, but of the higher education, as the modern woman understands it, very little has hitherto existed in the Southern States.

In a long and exhaustive paper on “Colonial Education in South Carolina,”[14] by Edward McCrady, Jr., absolutely the only mention made of women is in the following sentences: “An education they prized beyond all price in their leaders and teachers, and craved its possession for their husbands and brothers and sons,” and, “These mothers gloried in the knowledge ... of their husbands and children, and would forego comforts and endure toil that their sons might be well instructed, enterprising men.”[15] But in this respect South Carolina was not behind Massachusetts. The public schools of Boston, established in 1642, were not open to girls until 1789, and then only to teach them spelling, reading, and composition for one half the year. The Boston High School for girls was only opened in 1852.[16]

The beginnings of the secondary education for girls throughout so large a territory as the entire South we have not room to trace here, and we shall confine ourselves chiefly to a description of the existing condition of things. But it may be mentioned that Mrs. Lincoln-Phelps (born Almira Hart), the sister of the Mrs. Emma Willard[17] who revolutionized the education of girls in the North, was one of the first to introduce a better state of things in the South. In 1841 she took charge of the Patapsco Institute, near Baltimore, and she transformed it at once into a school of the same grade as the Troy Female Seminary, where she had been for eight years teacher and vice-principal. She writes:[18] “The course of instruction, besides the preparatory studies, embraced three years: the class of rhetoric, the class of philosophy, and the class of mathematics and natural sciences; and distributed through each, with studies appropriate to the advancement of the members, were the ancient and modern languages.... Besides the twelve resident teachers, there were special teachers who came from Baltimore, in the Italian, Spanish, German and French languages and in elocution and general literature. To the regular classes should be added the class of normal pupils, varying from twelve to twenty, which contributed many accomplished governesses and teachers to the families and schools of the South.” The natural sciences she taught herself, using her own well-known text books in botany, geology, chemistry, and natural philosophy.[19] “It was not easy at first to render mathematics popular among girls, who were disposed to consider accomplishments as the great requisite in education; but by establishing a regular course of studies and by awarding diplomas to those only who had honorably completed this course, ambition was awakened which led to efforts that often surprised the pupils themselves no less than their friends. Thus the study of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, as well as mental and moral philosophy, up to this time deemed by many repulsive, by degrees became not only tolerable, but in some cases fascinating.”

A year and a half before this, namely, in January, 1839, the Georgia Female College (now the Wesleyan Female College) was opened at Macon, Ga. It had from the beginning the power of conferring degrees, and eleven young women took the degree of A.B. in 1840. It is commonly said that this is the first college for women that ever existed. That it was called a college was doubtless merely owing to the politeness of the Georgia Legislature. I have not been able to find out what the course of study consisted in at that time, but at present Harkness’ First Year in Latin is the only preparation in languages required for entering the freshman class, and plane geometry is studied during the sophomore year. It is not likely that the course was better than this in 1840, and hence it is plain that then as now it was a college only in name,[20] and not in any way superior to Mrs. Lincoln Phelps’s more modest Patapsco Institute.

The years about 1840 seem to have been a period of general awakening in the South in regard to the importance of the education of women. The Judson Institute was founded by the Baptist State Convention of Alabama in 1839; the “first incorporated college for women in North Carolina,” the Greensborough Female College (Methodist), obtained its charter in 1838, but was not opened for the reception of students until 1846; in Maryland, the Frederick Female Seminary was incorporated in 1840 and opened in 1843. St. Mary’s School, at Raleigh, N. C., was opened in 1842.

But it is the Moravians in the South, as well as in the North, who have been foremost among the religious denominations in the establishing of schools for girls of a thorough, if of an elementary, type. The devotion of Moravian parents to missionary enterprises made it necessary for them to have schools in which their children might find a substitute for family life, together with such teaching as they were thought to require. “Parental training, thorough instruction in useful knowledge, and scrupulous attention to religious culture were the characteristics of their early schools,” and are the main features of the five institutions of higher learning which are still carried on by that Church. The Salem Female Academy, in the northwestern part of the State of North Carolina, among the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, was opened in 1804. The curriculum consisted of reading, grammar, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, German, plain needlework, music, drawing, and ornamental needlework. Between six and seven thousand pupils have been educated in this school. The course is still very low; the requirements for admission into the junior class are arithmetic to the end of simple interest, geometry to quadrilaterals, and one book of Cæsar. But the instruction seems to be thorough, and the catalogue exhibits a freedom from pretense which is very refreshing. The author of the “History of Education in North Carolina,”[21] says: “The influence of the Salem Academy has been widespread. For many years it was the only institution of repute in the South for female education.... A great many of its alumnæ have become teachers and heads of seminaries and academies, carrying the thorough and painstaking methods of this school into their own institutions. It is probably owing to the influence of the Salem Academy that preparatory institutions for the education of girls are more numerous in the South and, as a rule, better equipped than are similar institutions for boys.”

The war was the occasion of a serious break in the education of woman in the South and of a serious loss in the small amount of funds that had been accumulated for their schools. The Georgia Female College, however, went on with its work without interruption, with the exception of two or three weeks; the Confederate authorities were at one time on the point of seizing it for a hospital, but were restrained by an injunction from the civil courts, on the ground that the college was the residence of several private families, and that many of the boarding pupils were unable to return to their homes, or even to communicate with their parents, on account of the general disruption of the railroads.[22] The Salem Academy, also, was overcrowded with students during the war, sent as much for shelter and protection as for education. After the war, most of the existing schools for girls were reopened, and a large number of new ones have been established since that time.

COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN THE SOUTH.

Most people would probably be ready to say that except for the newly founded Woman’s College in Baltimore and Tulane University, the collegiate education of women does not exist in the South. But as matter of fact, there are no less than one hundred and fifty institutions in the South which are authorized by the Legislatures of their respective States to confer the regular college degrees upon women. Of these, forty-one are co-educational, eighty-eight are for women alone, and twenty-one are for colored persons of both sexes. The bureau of education makes no attempt to go behind the verdict of the State Legislatures, but on looking over the catalogues of all these institutions[23] it is, as might have been expected, easy to see that the great majority of them are not in any degree colleges, in the ordinary sense of the word. Not a single one of the so-called female colleges presents a real college course, and many of the co-educational colleges are colleges only in name. The female colleges, however, easily fall into two distinct classes; not a few of them offer a course such that the students who are entering upon the junior year are, in a general way, as well fitted as those who are just admitted to the freshman year of a regular college. This kind of college there will be such constant occasion to speak about that it is necessary to coin a new word for it, and I propose to call them _semi-colleges_. The course is such that two years of the work of a regular college is done instead of four, and by a regular college I mean one which comes up to the standard set by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ for admission into its ranks.

As there will be several references to the standard of scholarship set by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, I add here the requirements for admission into the freshman class of any college the graduates of which are recognized as eligible for membership.

In Latin │Cæsar (four books). „ │Æneid (six books). „ │Cicero (seven orations). ──────────────┼─────────────────────────── In Greek[24] │Anabasis (three books). „ │Iliad (three books). ──────────────┼─────────────────────────── In Mathematics│Arithmetic. „ │Algebra through quadratics. „ │Plane geometry.

The Southern colleges which attain the rank of a semi-college I shall speak of with more detail farther on. The real colleges for women in the South consist of the Woman’s College of Baltimore and the co-educational colleges (including in that term those in which the management and the degrees are the same for the men and the women, though the recitations may be conducted separately). Of these, the University of Texas, the Tulane University (which is the State university of Louisiana), the University of Mississippi, and the Columbian University in Washington are the important ones. The admission of women into all of these universities is of very recent date, and may be taken as an indication of a general movement in favor of a greater degree of generosity toward women, which may, in time, sweep over the entire South. The geographical distribution of these entering wedges is worthy of note. Baltimore and Washington on the north, the University of Missouri on the west, the State Universities of the three States of the extreme southwest,—add to this the fact that the State of Florida has every one of its four colleges for men open to women, and that it has not a single girls’ seminary of the old-fashioned type, and it may well be believed that the modern idea of what a woman requires in the way of education is destined to close in upon the entire Southern country, and that the contentment which Southern women have hitherto shown with the unsubstantial parts of learning will eventually be replaced by more far-reaching claims. The University of Virginia is the very mold and glass of form for all the other schools and colleges of the South, and if that were to throw down the barriers which it now keeps up against the unobtrusive sex, it might be considered that the battle was already won. But the University of Virginia is far from being unimpregnable; the chairman of its faculty writes me:

“In reply to your interesting[25] letter of November 25, ’89, I would say that opinion is much divided both in our faculty and in our board of visitors on the question of opening this university to women.” There is at this moment no way in which any one who wished to benefit women could do so more effectively than by offering this university a handsome endowment on condition of its terminating this state of indecision in the right way. The Johns Hopkins University has lately accepted a gift of a hundred thousand dollars from a woman; it remains to be seen whether it will show its appreciation of this act of generosity on the part of the self-forgetful sex by opening its doors to women. Whatever the result of the next few years may be upon the history of the education of women in the South, there can be no doubt that the situation at the present moment is far more hopeful than it was ten or even five years ago, and far more hopeful than any one would have believed who has not recently looked into the matter.

For the present, the Woman’s College of Baltimore is the only representative in the South of separate education for women of a collegiate grade. This college was established by the Methodist Church (aided by liberal endowments from a number of enthusiastic advocates of the higher education,—first among them the Rev. John F. Goucher) for the purpose of providing women with the best attainable facilities for securing liberal culture. It is the intention to increase the endowment to two millions of dollars, exclusive of the value of the buildings,—this is stated to be necessary in order to meet the objects which the incorporators have in view. There are at present nine professors and associate professors, together with other instructors; there are laboratories and lecture-rooms, a spacious and carefully planned boarding-hall, and a gymnasium which contains a swimming pool and running track, and which is fitted with the best imported appliances for both general and special gymnastic movements. The wealth of the South is becoming so great that there is no reason why thoroughly equipped colleges like this should not spring up in various quarters.

I have received the most emphatic testimony as to the good standing of the women in the best of the men’s colleges to which they have been admitted. Professor Fristoe, of Columbian University, writes me: