Educating Women

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Educating Women

Inroads. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women made a significant push into higher education. The popularization of schooling for everyone, evident in the growth of common schools, high schools’ and colleges, meant that more women and men had access to education. The Civil War had initiated new opportunities as well, since women had to assume places in schools as teachers when men went away to war. Furthermore, because so many men had died during the war, a large proportion of women could not expect to marry, and these women sought opportunities to support themselves. As immigration to the United States accelerated and the expansion west continued, both urban and rural areas required more schoolteachers. In addition, advocacy for female education had political dimensions; some of the same reformers who had previously backed abolitionism supported the collegiate education of women.

Need for Jobs. Since very few women could afford a full liberal arts education, advocates of female education also favored intermediate institutions offering vocational or professional training. Significantly, by 1890 more girls than boys were being graduated from high school. Economist Susan Carter attributes this trend to the fact that high school attendance gave women access to better jobs, especially teaching. Young women teachers could go right into the grammar school classroom after graduation. Normal schools, which provided a briefer and less expensive preparation for teaching the higher grades than did college, expanded significantly during the 1880s. Several female medical colleges opening at this time did not require collegiate education for admission.

Choices. Men still outnumbered women in the colleges, but as more women finished high school, they slowly made inroads into higher education. Many types of collegiate institutions grew: the private women’s college, the religiously oriented coeducational college, :he secular coeducational college, and the public single-sex vocational institution. Four private women’s colleges, which became nationally known institutions, opened during the postwar decades: Vassar in 1865, Wellesley and Smith Colleges in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885. The trustees of the latter school agreed with its

ambitious president, Martha Carey Thomas, that the emphasis of Bryn Mawr should be academic. Thomas, an early graduate of Cornell, resolved to make her college the equal of the best men’s colleges. In the South several seminaries gradually became serious academic colleges in the 1880s; the Woman’s College of Baltimore (known as Goucher), Mary Baldwin in Virginia, and Agnes Scott in Georgia are notable examples. Several prestigious colleges accommodated women by opening a female annex: Harvard chartered Radcliffe in 1894 as a degree-granting institution offering the equivalent of a Harvard degree, and Barnard College was opened as an adjunct of Columbia University in 1889.

Coeducation. Economy necessitated coeducation in areas other than the South, where tradition held firm and women seeking an education were relegated to women’s schools. Most state institutions discovered that they could not delay the admission of women. The female presence was not a legal requirement under the Morrill Land Grant Act, but the act did not specifically exclude women. That act, first signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, made public lands available to states to endow colleges for instruction in agriculture and the mechanical arts. The second Morrill Act of 1890, which required federal allocations to be “fairly divided between Negroes and Whites,” enlarged college rolls. By the 1890s most land-grant colleges as well as state institutions outside the South were coed, and two major universities opened that admitted female students from the start. In 1892 both Stanford and the University of Chicago actively recruited women as undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of women enrolled in institutions of higher learning increased nearly eightfold, from eleven thousand to eighty-five thousand. The number of women as a percentage of all students rose from 21 percent to at least 35 percent during these thirty years, and by 1900 there were more than twice as many women in coeducational institutions as in the separate women’s colleges.