The preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman’s study is carried on inside a man’s college, 335 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 336 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:
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 338 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. 339 Under such conditions nothing more than the bare necessities of education could be regarded.