Chapter III: Part 3

How, then, shall we make the most of that great indeterminate factor of the new civilization—the feminine intelligence? It would seem self-evident that those studies which have taken their place in the higher education of man, because philosophy and experience found in them the surest and readiest means of symmetrical mental development, must be equally valuable to woman. If the languages, mathematics, modern science, logic, metaphysics, psychology, best train the faculties of observation, comparison, reflection; if they give flexibility and strength to the mind, and mould it to be always progressive, always acquiring more knowledge by thoughtful experience—ought not their salutary discipline, as administered in college, to be extended to girls?

It is answered, first, that girls, being different, do not need the same training as boys; second, that they already have it; third, that they could not endure it. But whether likeness or difference predominates can never be known until like training develop the one or emphasize the other. “As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt and trundle hoops together,” wrote Sydney Smith, “they are precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” Teachers of mixed classes agree that what profits the one profits the other. Seneca advocated the study of the Greek philosophy for women, who, he said, needed it as a restraint upon their more impulsive temperament; and Plutarch urged upon his countrywomen the study of the Greek language and literature for a like reason. No less forcible is Doctor Johnson’s plea for this culture—that whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings.

The education of women is notoriously defective in the cultivation of definite ideas and the training of the judgment. Familiarity with scientific methods of study would dissipate their general and perilous confidence in “luck,” and in that impossible condition known as “about right.” Of directly practical value, also, would they find the capacity to deduce a conclusion from its premises, to estimate the worth of evidence, and understand the nature of proof. In every household affairs come daily to judgment requiring more or less scientific knowledge and a scientific habit of thought. An exact mental training would mitigate the evils and enlarge the best possibilities of woman’s existence.

This training both private schools and high-schools must fall short of. Girls’ high-schools afford four years of what is projected as an eight years’ term, and girls are expected to be satisfied with what is merely a preparatory course for their brothers. Private schools necessarily reflect the indefinite and various demands of their patrons. Undue stress must be laid upon accomplishments, undue cramming must be encouraged, the period of study being far too short; the methods of teaching must be empirical rather than scientific, and the end aimed at temporary and unreal, having no relation to life beyond the examination and the class-room. Our best private schools are indeed admirable, but there is no recognized standard of worth, and the bad are as ten to one. Besides, in apparatus, cabinets, libraries, and professorships, the richest among them is poor, compared with the richer colleges. There is but so much first-rate teaching capacity existent at any one time, and the larger salaries, honors, and pleasant conditions of the colleges inevitably absorb the most of it. Agassiz thought that a young student would gain more from coming into contact for a single month with a man of really profound knowledge on any subject than he could from many months spent under the tutelage of one who himself knows but very little more than he attempts to teach. But the majority of teachers fall into this latter classification. Even the women’s colleges, proposing the same curriculum as the men’s, deserving the most sincere respect for their aims and their successes, must long be hampered by the difficulty of securing the ablest teaching talent and appliances. The best high-class boys’ schools are conceded to be those which send the best equipped candidates to the universities. Were pupils from the girls’ schools admitted to the same examinations, there is no doubt that their standards and their methods of teaching would immediately advance.

If, however, the health of our girls is threatened by hard study, further opportunities of self-immolation must, of course, be denied them. The average health of boarding-schools is indeed low. From the graded and normal schools girls are withdrawn more frequently than boys by reason of physical inability. But the monstrousness of the prevailing curriculum, the high pressure, bad dressing, bad diet, external distractions, and the almost total want of healthful exercise among girls, explain this difference. The experience of twelve years at Ann Arbor, of eight at Cornell, of nine at Boston University, of much longer terms at the Ohio colleges, and of the entire existence of Vassar and Smith, testifies to a constant improvement in the health of their girls, and a wholesome and preservative power in severe study, provided the conditions are right.

If it be true that the higher the civilization, the more nearly is companionship of the sexes reached, it seems a paradox that they should be united everywhere except in study, the most refining and least self-conscious of employments. Yet there is a general feeling that some vague danger, to manners if not to morals, lurks in the demand for the admission of girls to the precincts of the college. When the trustees of Cornell were debating the wisdom of accepting the munificent Sage endowment, with its conditions, their committee gathered the opinions of nearly all the educators of note in the country as to the feasibility and propriety of opening the classes to women. The speculations of the officers of the older colleges (inheriting their traditions from semi-monastic institutions, founded and administered by men vowed to celibacy, and dreading the influence of women,) almost uniformly discouraged and disapproved such a step. The testimony of the colleges already open to both sexes, of academies and high-schools, in the hands of men touching life at more points, with equal uniformity encouraged it. In theory it was averred that the girls would become mannish, or the boys effeminate; that the standard of scholarship would be lowered in concession to feminine limitations; and that sentimentalism would be developed, with a consequent deterioration of morals. In practice it was proved that while the boys acquired finer manners, the girls advanced in truthfulness, sincerity, and courage; that the standard of scholarship was raised, and that the predicted period of sentimentalism, though everywhere overdue, had persistently failed to appear. Cornell took the forward step, and President White adds the great weight of his own approval to the side of the innovators.

By some subtle process of reasoning, quite inscrutable to the ordinary mind, it is maintained, however, that though co-education may do for the bucolical regions of Michigan and Cornell universities, the metropolis, as represented by Columbia College, cannot with propriety extend her lectures and examinations to girls. But what, then, shall be thought of Cambridge? For, after all, the experience of the great English university offers the best precedent, since the demand upon her was almost identical with that made to-day upon Columbia. It is, perhaps, twenty-five years since the English advocates of the higher education of women began to feel that their educational advantages could never equal those of men, until not only the subjects taught should be the same, but the teachers of equal and equally acknowledged ability. In ten years this feeling organized itself into the opening to them of the Cambridge local examinations, which are simply for standing. A little later the famous Girton College was founded, its object being “to hold in relation to girls’ schools and to home teaching a position analogous to that occupied by the universities toward the public schools for boys,” and “to obtain for the students of the college admission to the examinations for degrees of the University of Cambridge, and generally to place the college in connection with that University.” It was understood that the immediate instruction should be given daily by the professors, lecturers, and fellows of the University and its colleges.

The new college went into operation with six students, in a hired building, in October, 1869. It now possesses a building of its own, and even in its first decade recorded the admission of eighty-six candidates, of whom nineteen were graduated with honors, according to the university standard, and eleven passed the examinations which qualify for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. These examinations, however, presented only an honor standard, and it was not until February, 1881, that the liberal action of the Senate placed women students of Cambridge, for all practical purposes, upon an equal footing with men. In 1875 Newnham Hall was erected for the accommodation of women students coming to Cambridge to avail themselves of the new opportunities. Newnham Hostel was presently added, and the two, constituting Newnham College, to-day overflow with students.

Following on the Cambridge success came the opening, at Oxford, of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College, the free admission of women to the examinations of the University of London, and the granting of liberal opportunities on the part of Edinburgh, Dublin, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Durham, and St. Andrews. The University of London is a young institution, unhampered by the prejudices and restrictions of its elders. “Hence it has been able to take a more decisive step than any other university in the direction of improvement in women’s education. For several years it tried the experiment of a special examination for women, with a curriculum framed in supposed deference to special feminine needs. But though many women availed themselves of this examination, it soon became evident that the successes they won were all on the old lines—in classics, science, mathematics, literature; in fact, the subjects which belong to an ordinary course of liberal education, and not in any of the special studies which were presumed to be appropriate for them as women. Moreover, it was manifest that a distinctly feminine examination was not what women wanted; for the public believed that it was inferior, or specially lenient, whereas female students desired to have their knowledge and intellectual cultivation tested by the ordinary and recognized standards, and asked for no special tenderness or favor. Accordingly, after much discussion, it was determined, in 1877, to obtain from the crown a new charter, _admitting women on exactly the same footing as men to all the degrees in all the faculties_—arts, laws, medicine, science, music—and permitting them to receive the same honors and degrees. An increasing number of women has each year come up for matriculation and graduation, and some of the successes they have attained have been remarkable. The gold medal in anatomy—one of the chief and most coveted prizes in the medical profession—was won last year by a woman. Another came out first in mental and moral philosophy, and the proportion of women who pass _well_ in the examinations is much greater than that of the men. This, however, is easily accounted for by the fact that at present the numbers are much smaller, and are necessarily made up of students of exceptional ability and enterprise; whereas the crowds of men, of course, include a large number of the rank and file of those who are treading the usual path towards professional life, and who have no special aptitude or enthusiasm for study.” This is the testimony of J. G. Fitch, Esquire, inspector of schools, member of the senate of London University, and one of the most distinguished educators of England.

Professor Jackson, of Trinity College, Cambridge, writes:

“Having taken classes of ladies through the Ethics and part of
the Metaphysics of Aristotle, and the ‘Republic,’ the ‘Phaedo,’
and the ‘Philetus’ of Plato, I can speak in the very highest
terms of their industry and capacity. I put their attention to
a severe test, as I sometimes lectured for an hour and a half,
and even for an hour and three-quarters without interruption.
As a proof of their capacity, I may mention that at the end of
the Academic year, 1877-78, I examined some of my lady pupils
in the Aristotle papers, which I was giving to the Trinity
men who graduated in 1879, and the Plato papers which I was
giving to the Trinity men who graduated in 1880, and that one
of the ladies was third in Aristotle and first in Plato. In the
following year another lady was second in my Aristotle paper.
In both cases these ladies had among their competitors some of
the very best men of the time.”

J. P. Postgate, Esquire, M.A., Fellow of Trinity, and Professor of University College, London, writes:

“The performances of women in examinations at Cambridge and
elsewhere I look upon as wholly encouraging. The standard by
which I should test them is an absolute one, and judged by
that they show work which is intrinsically good and worth
doing. I have been surprised at the numbers of first-class and
other distinctions that they have gained. Both at Cambridge
and at University College the women not unfrequently beat
the men in the lists. Last year two-thirds of those examined
in Comparative Philology were women; and a woman was easily
first in the paper, beating another very good candidate, a
man who has since taken a scholarship at Oxford, I believe.
She did extremely well in the paper, and has been working at
the subject since, and showing a very remarkable linguistic
aptitude not merely in ancient, but in modern languages. The
third candidate was a young lady who has since brought out a
Hebrew grammar, which I believe is very well done. She also
distinguished herself in Greek and Latin.”

From the other colleges come equally favorable reports of feminine application, persistency, and accomplishment. Here, then, are some hundreds of women doing the same tasks as men, submitting to the same tests as men, showing at least as good work as men, without injury to their health. For no complaint of physical inability comes from any source; while at Girton the pleasant apartment thoughtfully provided as a hospital for the delicate women who were to break down under the strain of constant brain-work has never been used except as a room for examinations. Equally satisfactory is the testimony to the moral safety of the new system, not the slightest suggestion of impropriety having arisen.

From the beginning the most distinguished men in England, both lay and clerical, have been most friendly to this movement for the liberation of learning. At a recent distribution of prizes at the Oxford higher local examination, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his great gratification that opportunities for the highest instruction were so rapidly opening to young women.

The fortunate candidates for honors or recognition long since began to reap substantial benefits from having received the Cambridge certificate, not only in being preferred as teachers or governesses, but by commanding better salaries. The standard of girls’ schools has been perceptibly advanced, and the character of pupils elevated, “sentimentalism and conceit being lessened, and habits of order, economy of time, and interest in study developed, as well as a new sympathy with those who are engaged in the graver business of life.”

So much for conservative England. What is asked of New York? To quote from the admirable address of Dr. Storrs—“that a great, distinguished, opulent institution of learning in the midst of this metropolitan city, which has received, undoubtedly, large endowments from the direct gift of women, or under their influence, should give them the opportunity to pursue the higher branches of study, under the care of the teachers already assembled.” Columbia cannot justify their exclusion on the ground that Vassar and Wellesley and Smith colleges invite them. Boys are intrusted to her care when Harvard and Yale exist, because New York parents prefer that home influences should accompany college training; and girls do not need these influences less. Besides, the expense of girls’ resident-colleges is very great, compared with those of a richly endowed institution like Columbia. It is true that the charter of that venerable college did not contemplate the admission of girls. But it did contemplate the enlightenment and refinement of the community. And it would hardly be too much to say that, in the changed conditions of our time, if it were necessary to discriminate between the sexes in the matter of education, the cause of morality and progress would be better served by giving the higher opportunities to women.

The question of co-education is not even to be considered—at most, it is one of method only. If it be found convenient that boys and girls should listen to lectures in common, as at Cambridge, it is difficult to see any sound objection to that economy of teaching. If it be found convenient to instruct them separately, again, as at Cambridge, criticism is equally silenced. The President of Columbia, who heartily favors the admission of girls, says that the college can provide for them separate entrances, cloak-rooms, and class-rooms. It is not apprehended that a crowd will assail the doors. It is not proposed to compel the many, who have no desire for better opportunities, but only to invite the few, who now stand vainly waiting.

The spirit of justice, of course, would rest woman’s claim to the highest educational privileges on the human right to unrestricted growth, for soul is above sex. But here, as everywhere, the way of justice is the way of expediency. Enlightenment is not in proportion to the amount of knowledge on deposit at any one time; it is in proportion to its diffusion. Because of the devotion of the average American to business, the mother and the school-mistress mould the early and sensitive years of the child’s life to what shape they must. To the fitness of the average mother and school-mistress for this high task, what wasted powers, what mean ideals, what mistaken views of life bear witness! Raise her schools, and the whole standard of woman’s existence is raised; for the higher the few can reach, the higher the many rise. It is her perverted love of beauty which makes woman extravagant. It is her uncultivated desire for the higher satisfactions of art which makes our homes museums of upholstery. It is her unenlightened loyalty to the spirit of good which bids her cling to old abuses that were once uses, to harmful superstitions that were once faiths, and which to-day constitutes her the most conspicuous bar to progress. Tocqueville says that he ascribes the treachery of some of the first leaders in the reform movements in France to the unhappy influence of wives and sisters on husbands and brothers. The claims of the past and their own private interests were more to them than the welfare of the struggling millions. Their perspective was in fault. But when a thorough culture and a trained judgment are added to the “superlunary virtues” of women, these accusations must fall.

In the time of Cato the Censor women raised an insurrection to obtain the privilege of riding in chariots, of decking themselves with rings, and of wearing purple robes. To-day they demand the outlook of a broader humanity, the jewel of high culture, the royalty of knowledge.

1883.

A REVIEW OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.

BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER.

American college education in the quarter-century since the Civil War has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it in a hundred years before. These changes have not occurred unnoticed. A multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. There still exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men’s colleges in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system, both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work—these, and many sequents of these, touching the physical, social, and religious life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion.

The advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties which beset the education of men, but it has perplexities of its own in addition. After fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we were still in chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we were at the beginning. No educational convention meets without a session devoted to the difficulties in “the higher education of women,” so important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one system the variety of its needs. Yet chaos may be thought more chaotic than it really is. In the din of discussion it would not be strange if the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. We are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college training for girls. Some of us hope we may never find it, believing that in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. But already three tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear, which it will be the purpose of this paper to explain. The nature of each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth, in no spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us wiser and more patient in our future growth. What, then, are the three types, and how have they arisen?

When to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. Scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment. In nearly every State west of the Alleghanies, “Universities” had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. “Why,” asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, “should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? Why should we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our existing colleges would be bettered by more students? By far the large majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why should they be separated in the lecture-room for only the four years between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation means the doubling of an equipment already too poor by half?”

It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, co-education was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate, and by a radical change in policy. When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, Western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these, two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two-thirds, were co-educational. Among them are all the State universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the Protestant sects.[2]

Hitherto I have spoken as if co-education were a Western movement; and in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of co-educational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship, among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly. A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman’s education in the East.

In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women’s colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar, opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best equipped men’s universities were thought sufficient, and women began to resort to the great university centres of England and Germany. In an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago, to provide a few women with instruction from members of the Harvard Faculty.

Where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; in short, in the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm for scholarship, and the opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two hundred and fifty years.

These, then—co-education, the woman’s college, and the annex—are the three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of women’s education has thus far issued. Of course they are but types—that is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; but they are rather the central forms to which many varieties approximate. The characteristic features of each I must now describe, and, as I promised at the beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each, while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of its qualities. To explain dangers as well as promises is the business of the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. To this business I now turn, and I may naturally have most in mind the University of Michigan, my own _Alma Mater_, Wellesley College, with whose government I have been connected for a dozen years, and the Harvard Annex, whose neighbor I now am.

Co-education involves, as its name implies, the education of a company of young men, and women as a single body. To the two sexes alike are presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline, of organization. The typical features are identical class-rooms, libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same instructors; and the same honors for like work. Ordinarily all the instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are held by women. Usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over the one than over the other. This feature, however, is not essential. At Cornell, Oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity, buildings have been provided where the young women may—in some instances, must—live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a lady in charge. But in most of the higher co-educational institutions the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both sexes become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school, and social life—especially under the ample opportunities for learning the uses of freedom which our social habits afford—safely to undertake a college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. Of course all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the class-room, the laboratory, and the thesis.

The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when I entered there in 1872, finds her own boarding-place in one of the quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She makes the business arrangements for her winter’s fuel and its storage; she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in church on her first Sunday. Strong is the comradeship among these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung upon proving that “lady Greek” involved the accents, and that women’s minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. And still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties about co-education have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and women exist. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life.

In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that it does not meet every need of a woman’s nature. No system can—no system that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined moral perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a human being—a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large tract of her character—is it the largest tract?—her own needs and those of the young man are identical. Both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young man’s education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the defenders of co-education ask, may not the same principles apply to women? Why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? In education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. The differences must be attended to privately.

At any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the two sides—the woman side and the human side—it will be generally agreed that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly weak in agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational action. The artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept the hard things and leave to her the easy—by these influences any comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in her early teens. The co-educationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. Co-education, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. The strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural, unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. The early fear that co-education would result in class-room romances has proved exaggerated. These young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. Marriage is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a successful marriage as ball-room intercourse or a summer at Bar Harbor.

The weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths. It does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. Refining home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which has been encouraged in her more tenderly nurtured sister.

The woman’s college is organized under a different and far more complex conception. The chief business of the man’s college, whether girls are admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement of special investigation. The woman’s college aims to do all this, but it aims, also, to make for its students a home within its own walls, and to develop other powers in them than the merely intellectual. At the outset this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as life itself. When girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands to them pre-eminently _in loco parentis_. It must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, to be ready in case of illness, and, to prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene, and sanitation, accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its students, but also, in large degree, of their physical power in the future. It generally furnishes them means of social access to the best men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction, while seeking still to respect the varied faiths of its students. In short, the arrangements of the woman’s college, as conceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness at building up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners, developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the means of sound learning.

It may be said that a similar up-building of the personal life results from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or indirectness of aim. The woman’s college puts this aim in the foreground side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. Of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from her relations with them in the class-room. In appointing these women to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be this, but she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed his hair. They will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any other woman’s college could find a place in its faculty for a woman Sophocles or Sylvester. Learning alone is not enough for women.

Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse. The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon the characters of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. I have watched the ennobling process go on for many years among Wellesley students, and I am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls’ college community affords. That choicest product of modern civilization, the American girl, is here in all her diverse colors. She comes from more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political party; from nearly every State and Territory in the Union, and from the foreign lands into which English and American missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated.[3] The farmer’s daughter from the Western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of New England. The pride of a Southern senator’s home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her college course because her father’s life was given for the Union. Side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn to “see great things large, and little things small.”

This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum.

It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to the girls’ college. It is said that its students never escape from themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women. Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth a type, perhaps, in the endeavor after clearness, exaggerating a little its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a substantially true account of an actually existing type—a type powerful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of a different type.

The third type is the “annex,” a recent and interesting experiment in the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. Only a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a learned specialist some single period in the history of the language. Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.

The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who provide class-rooms, suggest boarding-places, secure the instructors, solicit the interest of the public—in short, manage all the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one. No detail in the management of Harvard College is changed by the presence in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the corporation of Harvard should assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give the girl-graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the Annex would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from Harvard College as the medical, law, or divinity schools. The students of the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college undergraduates. The immediate governing boards of college and medical school are separate. But here comparison fails, for the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of all its resources. This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the University.

The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. Here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give their entertainments. The students lodge in all parts of Cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct only to themselves. The ladies of the management are lavish in time and care to make the girls’ lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is as separate and independent as in the typical co-educational college.

It is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly, the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that through pressure of other work, the professor will be unable to teach in the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed—and by none are they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the Annex themselves—it should be said that hitherto they have not practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still, in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom reached elsewhere.

A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its methods vary markedly.

Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by Columbia’s teaching force, though Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new woman’s college at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction.

In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in government. Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better equipped universities for men, whose resources they can, to some extent, use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far, however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the ordinary woman’s college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the connection between it and the university should ever become so close that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself, it would become a question whether the barriers between the men’s and the women’s lecture-rooms could be economically maintained.

The preceding survey has shown how in co-education a woman’s study is carried on inside a men’s college, in the women’s college outside it, in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already co-educational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body of men’s colleges continually find it harder to maintain their isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.

The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges, and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to come woman’s higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by any means it may save girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a men’s college may be persuaded to send her to a girls’. Those who find it easier to honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the hour—to understand and to wait.

BOXFORD, MASS, 1889.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1887-88, Chapter xi.

[3] See the President’s Report of Wellesley College for 1889-90.

THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES.

BY PROFESSOR LUCY M. SALMON, VASSAR COLLEGE.

Copyright, 1890, by George A. Bacon.

The old Greek legend representing the muse of history as of divine lineage, and the eldest of her sisters, rested on a philosophic as well as a poetic basis. With dim perceptions of the nature of a future life, men early sought it in the record of their earthly deeds, hoping thus to win immortality in spite of death.