In 1889–90 there were the following women students: College, Department of Music, 11, not candidates for a degree; Biology, 12, not candidates for a degree; Auxiliary Department of Medicine, 1, candidate for Sc.B. Total, 24.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered in 1861. By a special vote of the Corporation in December, 1870, a graduate of Vassar College was admitted as a special student in chemistry. In June, 1873, the lady took the final examinations, covering two years of professional work. As no tuition fee was charged no precedent was established by this action. In 1873, at the request of the Woman’s Educational Association, and with its co-operation, the woman’s laboratory for chemistry and botany was established, to which women came as special students. Although they had not been recognized during their course as regular students, two women received the Institute Degree in 1881–82.
In 1883 final action was taken, opening all the courses to women on precisely the same terms as to men. Women now go into the laboratories with the regular classes.
The foregoing sketch of woman’s educational progress, while extended beyond due limit, leaves out the most encouraging record,—as it is the latest,—the story of what women are doing for themselves, and, no less, for humanity. No one can fairly estimate the educational forces of the coming decades who does not take into consideration the varied means of growth outside of both school and college; means which do not displace the need of these, but rather emphasize it. We may not even touch upon these here, but from a moment’s comprehensive glance backward we may dimly conceive the forward outlook.
It is not yet a century from the time when New England towns were voting “not to be at any expense to school girls,” and lo! as a type of to-day, Wellesley College, with a million and a half dollars wisely invested to entice girls from the remotest islands of the sea, to love and to get learning. For the unlettered housekeeper, filching time from her heavy labors to gather the children about her knee in the “Dame school,” we have the young but learned president of the college of nearly 700 students; or the woman directing, as its head, the orderly movement of a thousand or more pupils in the great city grammar school, which may represent a half score of nationalities. For the girl accustomed to denial, and deprecatingly asking for a little instruction when the boys shall have had their fill, we have the bright-faced, trustful young woman who expects and will get ere long the best the world has to offer.
In a country which finds its safety in the intelligence of its people and its peril in their ignorance, it behooves its thinkers to consider whether it is not too great a risk to leave four fifths of the instruction of youth in the hands of a sex of inferior education. The distinguished president of Harvard College, called attention some two years since, in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, to the condition of inferiority of our secondary schools, and he proposed remedying it by displacing a part of the female teachers. It would seem more in accordance with the spirit of the time, and certainly more practicable, to open to them the closed doors of opportunity and fit them to meet the demand made upon them.
The terror of the learned woman which, in one form or another, has had its many victims, has well nigh passed. Even the more timid and conservative are learning that it is the ignorant, not the instructed woman, that confuses affairs and works disaster. “A little knowledge is,” beyond doubt, “a dangerous thing”; but only because it is little.
It is told of Saint Avila that she gained her renown by this marvel. At one time, when frying fish in the convent, she was seized with a religious ecstacy, yet so great were her powers of self control that she did not drop the gridiron, nor let the fish burn!
So the educated woman of the nineteenth century has quieted many grave apprehensions as to the consequences of much learning to her sex. After the manner of Saint Avila, she does not permit her intellectual ecstacy to blind her to her simple duties. She has abundantly proved that she can carry the triple responsibility of loving and serving and knowing.