Alabama 1
Arkansas 3
22
District of Columbia 3
25
Florida 1
4
Georgia 30
Kentucky 24
Louisiana 77
Maryland 25
Mississippi 11
North Carolina 53
South Carolina 10
Tennessee 34
16
28
10
Texas 40
20
70
40
175
West Virginia 32
1
Texas 345
Louisiana 77
Other States 328
Total 750

This table discloses the remarkable fact that there are 750 women studying in such men’s colleges in the South as have a decent claim to the name of college, and also that Virginia is the only State in the South that has not got at least some kind of a co-educational college.

The testimony in favor of co-education, by all those colleges which have tried it, is very emphatic. The president of Rutherford College (N.C.), says: “This school [established in 1853] is the first experiment in the South, of which we have any information, in which an attempt has been made to train the two sexes together in the course of a college education. Its results prove the experiment to be a complete success.” The president of Bethel College (Tenn.), says: “The mutual refining influences of co-education, socially, mentally, and morally, upon the sexes, is unquestionably good.”

The president of Vanderbilt University, which is the most important university in the South after the University of Virginia, writes me that, although co-education has not been formally adopted there, yet women have never been refused admission into classes, that degrees would always be conferred upon those who had taken the proper examinations, and that one young woman had actually completed the course and received the degree of A.M. What more can the women of the central Southern States desire? It is not necessary that every male college should be open to them; there may be parents who think that the conventual life is best suited to the moral and social development of their sons, and such parents should have an opportunity for carrying out the plan which commends itself to them. All that women ask is that they should have freedom of access to the best men’s colleges. In that way a standard for a woman’s education will be fixed, and every woman will be able to reach that standard if she desires it; the second best colleges may then be allowed to be as exclusive as they please.

There is one more bright spot in the educational outlook for Southern women: it is announced that in the new Methodist university, which is about to be founded in Washington, on a large scale, every department will be open to women on exactly the same terms as to men.

It lies with Southern women to decide whether they shall accept the large privileges which are now open to them. It is hard for mothers who did not go to college themselves, and who have still lived what seemed to them to be happy lives, to feel that something different is desirable for their daughters; but may there not be fathers who, having tasted the pleasures of intellectual activity for themselves, will be minded to lead their daughters into the same fields which they have found to be attractive?

THE SEMI-COLLEGES.

I give in Appendix C, Table II., the list of semi-colleges, as determined from their catalogues. Of course, it cannot be inferred from the fact that the course is a good one that it is well carried out: but if the course is very limited, if the text-books used are poor, if there is no indication that the school has any library nor any scientific apparatus, it can be inferred that the school is not of a high grade; the above list may therefore be taken as a superior limit of the semi-colleges in the South. On the other hand, it may happen that the teachers of the classics and of English literature are persons of culture and of wide learning, and that a greater number of authors are read than the course laid down demands.

In the Mary Sharp College (Winchester, Tenn.), in 1887–88, four young ladies completed the following post graduate course in the first half year[[26]]: Seneca’s Essays, Œdipus Tyrannus, Dindorf’s Metres, Colloquia in Latin, etc.; in the second half year two of them read Lycias’ Orations,—against Eratosthenes, concerning the sacred olive, and the funeral oration,—the Panegyric of Isoscrates, Xenophon’s Symposium, Lucian’s Charon, and Plutarch’s Delay of the Deity; and one of them, Miss Ada Slaughter, read, in addition, the Ajax of Sophocles, Plato’s Apology and Crito, Iliad (three books), Lucian’s Dream, Seneca’s Epigrammatica, Seneca’s Letters, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (nine books), Cicero de Officiis, Pliny’s Letters, Sallust’s Jugurtha, and Eutropius. This college was founded in 1850, and for many years “it maintained a course of study, a method of instruction, and plan of government far in advance of any college in America for women.”[[27]] From the beginning it has required both Latin and Greek for graduation, and a very respectable amount of both; it thus deserves, more than the Georgia Female College, the name of the first college exclusively for women in the country. It has over three hundred graduates, and in 1887–88 it had 182 pupils.

The Nashville College for Young Ladies seems to be one of the most important of the colleges of this grade in the South. It has frequent lectures from the professors of Vanderbilt University, and students in the scientific department attend lectures in the laboratories and cabinets of that university. A teacher of the school is present, and examines the class afterward. The professor quizzes in the daily lecture course, but is not responsible for the examinations. The president of the school writes me: