Woman's work in America

by Unknown

Now that State universities are the direct continuance of the high schools, it would seem desirable that at least those teachers who expect to engage in high school work should have taken the courses of study implied by a college degree. Could the standard of normal school instruction and of high school preparation be thus lifted, it would act as a powerful incentive to young women.

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: