The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

The main point, however, lies not in the similarity of instruction, but in the bringing together of boys and girls. It is true that the success of expensive private schools in large cities proves that there is considerable desire among parents to have their sons go to school with boys and their daughters only with girls; but the nation, as a whole, does not take this point of view, but believes that boys and girls, growing up as they do together in the home and destined to live together as adults, should become accustomed to one another during the formative period of school instruction. The girls, it is said, are made stronger by actually working with the boys; their seriousness is emphasized and their energy developed, while the boys are refined by contact with the gentler sex—induced to be courteous, and influenced toward æsthetic things. And if theorists were actually to fear the opposite result—that is, that the boys should be made weak and hysterical and the girls rough and coarse—they would need only to look to practical experience, which speaks unanimously to the contrary.

A still less well-grounded fear is that of those who wish to separate the sexes especially during the adolescent period. So far as this exceedingly complicated question admits of a brief summing up, the nation finds that the sexual tension is decreased by the contact in the school; the common intellectual labour, common ambitions, and the common anxieties awaken comradeship and diminish all ideas of difference. Boys and girls who daily and hourly hear one another recite their lessons, and who write together at the black-board, are for one another no objects of romantic longing or seductive mystery. Such a result may be deplored from another point of view—namely, that for reasons not connected with the school, such romanticism is desirable; but one must admit that the discouragement of unripe passion in the years of development means purer and healthier relations between the sexes, both physically and mentally. All regrettable one-sidedness is done away with. Just as in the stereoscope a normal perception of depth is brought out by the combination of two flat pictures, so here the constant combination of the masculine and feminine points of view results in a normal feeling of reality.

Then, too, the school in this wise prepares the way for later social intercourse. Boys and girls are brought together without special supervision, innocently and as a matter of course, from the nursery to early manhood and womanhood. It is only the artificial separation of the two sexes, the American says, which produces that unsound condition of the fancy that makes the relation of the sexes on the European Continent so frivolous and dubious. The moral atmosphere of the United States is undoubtedly much freer from unhealthful miasms. A cooler and less sensual temperament contributes much to this, but the comradely intercourse of boys and girls from the early school days to the time of marriage is undoubtedly an equally purifying force. The small boy very early feels himself the natural protector of his weaker playmate, and the girl can always, whether in the nursery or as a young lady in her mother’s parlour, receive her friends alone, even when her parents are not at home. A little coquetry keeps alive a certain sense of difference, always, but any least transgression is entirely precluded on both sides. The boy profoundly respects his girl friend as he does his own sister, and she could not be safer than in his protection. The gallantry of the European is at bottom egotistic. It is kind in order to win, and flatters in order to please; while the gallantry of the American is not aimed to seduce, but to serve; it does not play with the idea of male submission, but sincerely and truly gives the woman first place.

The only logical consequence, when boys and girls enjoy not only equivalent but absolutely equal school training, is that their further education shall go on parallel. We have seen the peculiar position of the American college; how it is almost incomparable with any German institution, being a sort of intermediate member between the high school and true university—the scene of a four-year intellectual activity, resembling in some respects the German school, and in others the German university. We have seen how the college removes the young man from the parental influences from his eighteenth to twenty-second years, and places him in a new, small, and academic world of special ideals which is centred around some beautiful college yard. We have seen how two things happen in these years; on the one hand, he is prepared for his future occupation, especially if he is to enter a professional faculty of the university, and on the other he receives a broad, humanitarian training. We have seen also that these hundreds of colleges form a scale of very small gradations, whose different steps are adapted to the different social needs of various sections of the country; that the better colleges are like a German Prima, with three or four semesters in the philosophical faculty of a university, and that the inferior colleges hardly reach the level of the Unterprima. In such an institution, we have found the source of the best that is in American intellectual life. Now this institution opens wide its doors to women.

Here, in truth, co-education is less prominent. The conservative tendency of Eastern colleges has worked against the admission of women into the better of them, and the advantages of colleges for none but women are so well attested that the East at least will hardly make a change, although the Middle and Western States look on it virtually as a sin against inborn human rights, to establish colleges for anything but the education of both sexes alike. It was easier to oppose mixed education in the college sphere than in the school, because the common elementary training was needed at the outset for both sexes, while the demand for college training for women came up much later, when the tradition of colleges for men was already well established. Harvard College was already two hundred years old when, for the first time, an American college as an experiment admitted women; this was Oberlin College in Ohio, which began the movement in 1833. The first women’s college was established, three years later, in Georgia—a pioneer institution in the South.

But progress was slow. It was not until 1862 that the government gave ten million acres of land for educational institutions; and then higher institutions became much more numerous, especially in the West, and from that time it was agreed that women should have equal privileges with men in these new colleges. Since then co-education in college and university has grown to be more and more the rule, except in the East. All state colleges and universities are open to women, and also the endowed universities—Brown, Chicago, Cornell, Leland Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania; some few others, as Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, allow women to attend the graduate schools or the professional faculties, but not the college. Statistics for all the colleges in the country show that, in the year 1880, only 51 per cent. were co-educational; in 1890 there were 65 per cent., and in 1900, 72 per cent. Practically, however, the most significant form of female college education is not the co-educational, but one which creates a special college paradise for young women, where there are no male beguilements and distractions.

There are six principal institutions which have taken the lead in making the college life of women the significant thing that it now is. Vassar College was the first, established on the Hudson River in 1861; then came Wellesley College, near Boston; Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia; Smith College, in Northampton; Radcliffe College, in Cambridge; Barnard, in New York. There is a large number of similar institutions, as Holyoke, Baltimore, and others in ever-diminishing series down to institutions which are hardly distinguishable from girls’ high schools. The number of girls attending strictly women’s colleges in the whole country, in 1900, was 23,900; while in mixed colleges and in the collegiate departments of universities there were 19,200 women students—just a quarter of the total number of college students. It is notable here that the students in women’s colleges since 1890 have increased by 700, and in mixed colleges by 9,000. It may be mentioned, in passing, that there are 35,000 women students in normal schools.

The instruction in women’s colleges is mostly by women, who number 1,744—that is, about 71 per cent. of the instructors—while in mixed colleges the 857 women are only 10 per cent. of the teaching staff. In the leading co-educational universities, like Chicago, Ann Arbor, Leland Stanford, Berkeley, and others, the women are almost wholly taught by men. The leading women’s colleges pursue different policies. Wellesley has almost exclusively women; Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Smith have both; Radcliffe and Barnard are peculiar, in that by their by-laws Radcliffe is taught only by Harvard instructors, and Barnard only by instructors in Columbia University. This identification with the teaching staffs of Harvard and Columbia assures these two women’s colleges an especially high intellectual level. And the same thing is accomplished, of course, for women by their being admitted to full privileges in Chicago, Stanford, and in the large state universities, such as Ann Arbor. But one can realize the whole charm and poetry of women’s colleges only on a visit to the quiet groves of Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, or Smith.

In broad, handsomely kept parks there lie scattered about attractive villas, monumental halls of instruction, club-houses and laboratories; and here some thousand girls, seldom younger than eighteen nor older than twenty-five, spend four happy years at work and play, apart from all worldly cares. They row, play tennis and basket-ball, and go through gymnastic exercises; and, as a result, every girl leaves college fresher, healthier, and stronger than when she entered it. And the type of pale, over-worked neurasthenic is unknown. These girls have their own ambitions in this miniature world—their positions of honour, their meetings, their clubs and social sets; in which, however, only personality, talent, and temperament count, while wealth or parental influence does not come in question. The life is happy; there are dancing, theatrical performances, and innumerable other diversions from the opening celebration in the fall to the festivities in June, when the academic year closes. And the life is also earnest. There is no day without its hours of conscientious labour in the lecture hall, the library or study, whether this is in preparation for later teaching, for professional life or, as is more often the case, solely for the harmonious development of all the student’s faculties. One who looks on these fresh young girls in their light costumes, the venerable English mitre-caps on their heads, sitting in the alcoves of the library or playing in the open air, or in their formal debates, in the seminary or in the festive procession on class-day,—sees that here is a source of the purest and subtlest idealism going out into American life.

On such a foundation rests the professional training of the real university. Since the girl students in all the colleges of the country outdo the men in their studies, win the highest prizes, and attend the most difficult lectures, the old slander about deficient brain substance and mental incapacity can no longer serve as a pretext for closing the university to competing womanhood. In fact, the graduate schools, which correspond to the advanced portion of a German philosophical faculty, and the legal and medical faculties of all state universities and of a few private universities are open to women. But one is not to suppose that the number of women who are thus preparing for the learned professions, as that of medicine, law, or the ministry, is very large. There are to-day 44,000 women college students, but only 1,253 women graduate students; and in 1890 there were only 369. There are hardly more than a thousand in the purely professional faculties, and these form only 3 per cent. of the total number of students. The American women study mostly in colleges, therefore, and their aim is generally to get a well-grounded, liberal education, corresponding to a Gymnasium training, together with a few semesters in the philosophical faculty. But there are no limitations by principle; woman as such is denied no “rights,” and the verdict is unanimous that this national experiment is technically successful. There is no indication of moral deterioration, of a lowered level of instruction, or of a mutual hindrance between men and women in the matter of study. The university, in short, opens the way to the learned professions.