College: For Men Only?

In the 1870s, some said too much education would hurt a woman's health

FEMALES KEEP OUT. That message might have been posted at colleges in this country's earliest years, had it not been thought too obvious to need saying. A woman's place was in the home, and higher education--like the vote--was the province of the male.

In the 19th century, however, colleges for women began to be established, and other new colleges opened their doors to both sexes. The change sparked an earnest public debate. One question in dispute--in an era when housework itself was brutal toil: How much study could female bodies bear without damage?

Arguments for educating women had been heard since the beginning of the Republic. "If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen, and Philosophers, we should have learned women," wrote Abigail Adams, who would become the wife of one President and the mother of another, in 1776.

The early 1800s saw the rise of seminaries and academies for well-to-do young girls, modeled after English finishing schools. These institutions taught religion, etiquette, singing, drawing, and piano playing. But they focused on girls under 18, and at first many of them neglected "male" subjects such as math, science, history, and geography.

Emma Willard, a Connecticut teacher who had taught herself geometry at 13, wanted to establish a broader curriculum. In 1819, she asked the New York State Legislature for funds to start a school for girls. The Legislature said no, but the town council of Troy, New York, gave Willard $4,000 to start the Troy Female Seminary, which opened in 1821 with a full range of courses. The school brought its founder national renown.

Some historians call Troy the first college for women; others give that distinction to Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, begun in 1836. Females marked another gain in 1837, when the new Oberlin College in Ohio became coeducational--that is, included both sexes. Women were excused from classes on Mondays to do laundry, and men did heavier chores.

At mid-century, however, Americans were still arguing over whether women belonged in college at all--at least college as men knew it.

A brewer named Matthew Vassar thought they did. He donated land in Poughkeepsie, New York, to found a women's college that, unlike Troy and Mount Holyoke, would be specifically modeled on the top male institutions. Opening its doors in 1865, Vassar College tried to reassure parents and forestall critics by enforcing a rigid schedule, from a 6 a.m. wake-up to lights out at 10 p.m. Students had to attend morning and evening prayer sessions and change their dresses for dinner.

The college's declared aim was "to maintain a just appreciation of the dignity of women's home-sphere." But the logic of the curriculum won out, and administrators soon came to support the notion that a woman might choose not just family or a teaching career, but other careers, too.

Skeptics, however, feared that too much learning would make women unfeminine. And Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a physician at Harvard University, gave the doubters new ammunition. His 1873 book Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls said women should have a lighter educational load than men because of their developing physiology and the "catamenial function" (monthly periods). Clarke didn't say women couldn't meet men's academic standards, just that they would pay the price later in health problems, perhaps losing their ability to have children. He declared:

... identical education of the two sexes is a crime before God and humanity, that physiology protests against, and that experience weeps over.

Clarke aimed special wrath at the coed classroom, describing sexual energy but making it sound vaguely industrial:

Put a boy and girl together upon the same course of study ... and there will be awakened within them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not excite. The unconscious fires that have their seat deep down in the recesses of the sexual organization will flame up through every tissue, permeate every vessel, burn every nerve, flash from the eye, tingle in the brain, and work the whole machine at highest pressure. There need not be, and generally will not be, any low or sensual desire in all this elemental action.... [but] the first sex to suffer ... is the female sex.

Clarke's warnings were taken seriously. Said a New York Times editorial:

The whole current of public utterances for the past few years has been in favor of the most extreme experiments in regard to the education of women. But the appearance of Dr. Clarke's book at once set the community to thinking whether they were not going too fast.

Supporters of higher education for women, however, were not cowed. "I challenge the United States to produce 400 girls as healthy as those of our college," declared Vassar's male president. And the writer Eliza B. Duffey wrote a rebuttal volume that played on the title of Clarke's book:

We have tried "Sex in Education" [that is, discriminating by sex] ever since the world began.... Let us now adopt a system which recognizes no sex in education and gives to boys and girls an equal chance, and see if the results will not prove advantageous to both.

History shows that Duffey won the argument. "Extreme experiments" in college education for women continued, and female enrollments grew. By 1880, almost one-third of all college students were women. And in the 1999-2000 school year, men picked up only 43.7 percent of the bachelor's degrees given by U.S. colleges. Maybe they just weren't tough enough.

FOCUS: When Some Experts Feared That Too Much Study Would Harm Women

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To acquaint students with the 19th-century debate about whether women should attend college, focusing on a controversy about the physical effects of education.

Discussion Questions:

* Why do you think some experts saw women as especially vulnerable to physical harm from too much study?

* Was this view universally accepted when it was put forth in 1873?

* How would such an argument be received today?

* What do you believe accounts for the shift away from that belief?

* Do you believe women now enjoy full equality in the United States?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Before Reading: Tell students that relatively few people, men or women, went to college until well into the 20th century.

Critical Thinking: Note a point made in the second paragraph of the article, that women's work--housework--was brutal toil in the 19th century. Ask: Are cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and doing other chores--all without electric appliances--less physically taxing than studying? (Share this old adage with students: "Man works from sun to sun, but women's work is never done.")

You might have students write a note to Dr. Edward H. Clarke, in which they compare the rigors of housework in the 19th century to the rigors of academic study. How would they counter his argument?

Next, imagine the year is 1810--11 years before Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, and 110 years before women were allowed to vote.

How is the education of girls and women different from what it will be in 2001? Do those differences tell anything about women's expected rote in society? (Girls' schools taught etiquette, drawing, and music, but many of them slighted math, science, history, and geography.) If you're a teenage girl in 1810, what goals are you supposed to aspire to?

Web Watch: For information on the history of women in science, the Civil War and World War II, the suffragist movement, and the National Women's Hall of Fame, log onto www.great-valley.k12.pa.us /promos/womensmonth.html