[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.)
[5]. Antioch college opened, however, with only 8 students in its college department, all the rest, 142, belonging to its secondary school.
[6]. In every case I give the date when full coeducation was introduced; West Virginia, for example, admitted women to limited privileges in 1889.
[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.
[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.
[9]. The Massachusetts institute of technology is classified by the U. S. ed. reps. among technical schools.
[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.