Separation, coordination, and coeducation: Southern Baptist approaches to women's higher education, 1880-1920.

Even before the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 1845, Baptists in the South played a significant role in American higher education.

Although originally suspicious of higher learning, Southern Baptists have demonstrated their dedication to college and university education through commitments of money, facilities, professors, and students. In fact, in the South, education was second only to missions as the major impetus for organizing Baptist state conventions.

Further, Baptists in the South have contributed much to the education of women. For varying reasons and by differing paths, Baptists in each southern state have sought to educate their daughters as well as their sons, first in grade-school academies and then in postsecondary institutions. This article examines the specific ways women gained access as students in Southern Baptist sponsored colleges during the years 1880-1920. During these decades, the standard mode of collegiate education in the United States, including Southern Baptist higher education, became the coeducational institution. Both separate colleges for women and coordinate colleges, however, served to establish access for women to higher education and prove their intellectual equality with men. (1)

Coeducation was practiced in only a half dozen American colleges before the Civil War, (2) but due to societal shifts and unique cultural characteristics in the western United States, the majority of colleges founded in this region after 1880 opened as coeducational. These institutions served as models for the eventual transforming of single-sex colleges in the East and South.

During the loosely defined period 1880-1920, three types of Southern Baptist higher educational institutions developed: coeducational, coordinated, and separate women's colleges. (3) The type of education offered women was determined by several factors: some societal, some practical, and some unique to Southern Baptist life. (4) By providing women increased access to and choice in postsecondary education, Southern Baptists maintained competitive colleges and universities that continue to contribute to society.

Early Efforts to Educate Women--Pre-Civil War

Within nineteenth-century Southern Baptist higher education, the issue of women as students emerged creating controversy in some circles and excitement in others. Prior to 1800, no postsecondary institution existed for women. (5) The colonial view held that women were intellectually inferior to men and educating them was not worthwhile. The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and necessity led to changing attitudes regarding the educability of women. (6)

Certain unique circumstances also existed in the pre-Civil War South regarding women in higher education. The prevailing attitude that opposed secular education and favored church schools led to denominational control of academies and postsecondary schools to a greater extent than in the North. (7) In general, southern schools tended to oppose coeducation, so separate women's academies and colleges were established. (8) By the Civil War, general consensus held that women were able to be educated up through secondary school. (9) Yet, concerns over the impact that educated women might have on society prevailed. The chief fear was that "women might forsake their infants for quadratic equations." (10)

The Woman's Education Movement Progresses Among Baptists--Post-Civil War

In the post-Civil War South, several factors, including the missions movement, provided significant motivation among Southern Baptists for educating women. According to Leon McBeth, no institution suffered more as the result of the Civil War than higher education. The dearth of students during the war coupled with the destruction in the South led many colleges to close their their doors permanently. (11) The Civil War also disrupted prevailing social values. Crossover in gender roles during the war allowed women to access careers not traditionally available to them. (12) These factors, coupled with an abundance of women (with tuition dollars), led many male colleges to welcome female students for the first time.

Women had been serving with their husbands as missionaries, but by 1872, the SBC was appointing single women to the mission field. (13) The need for education in the Bible led to the admission of women in the early 1900s to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, through the Missionary Training School opened there. (14)

Although they considered missionary work appropriate for women, Southern Baptists tended to resist any movement that would elevate women from their traditional role in society. From their perspective, women's delicate physique coupled with God's plan of male leadership made many roles inappropriate for women. Literature of the late 1880s indicates that Baptists spoke almost monolithically against women preachers, coeducation, and women being allowed to vote or to speak in assemblies with men present. (15)

The role of women in Southern Baptist organized life became an issue in 1885 at the SBC meeting, when Arkansas sent two women, former missionaries, as messengers to the annual meeting. The women were challenged, and the convention voted to exclude them as well as all women from serving as messengers. Women continued to be officially banned until 1918 when the convention voted overwhelmingly to allow them to participate. (16) The prevailing attitudes of Southern Baptists were supported by the larger American society.

Separation: Women's Schools

Because the attitudes of Southern Baptists toward women affected their approaches to female higher education, the first answer of Baptists in the South to the women's education question was to provide separate institutions for women. Many Baptism felt coeducation was inappropriate due to the intellectual inferiority of women and also the possibility of immoral or at least scandalous behavior due to the close proximity of young men and women. These sentiments reflected the greater society, and during the late 1700s and early 1800s, the female seminary idea had drawn increasing support in the United States. The seminary offered women more of a liberal education than the grade-school academies. (17) Mount Holyoke became a model for women's seminaries in the nineteenth century. T. Laine Scales describes key elements of the model:

   Academic subjects to train the mind as an instrument of reason;
   domestic work and a carefully regulated day to meet material needs
   and to protect health; a known, clear sequence of each day to lend
   order and predictability; a corps of transformed teachers who
   provided proper models for imitation; and a building shaped like a
   dwelling house as the proper setting for study, prayer, work and
   rest. (18)

Critics of the seminary argued that it did not offer substantial subjects, and the woman's college idea stemmed in large measure from criticism of the female seminary.19 The first Baptist experiment in female collegiate education was the Georgia Female College at Macon chartered in 1836. (20)

Other institutions founded by Baptists in the South before the Civil War included the Judson Female Institute in Alabama, Mary Sharpe College in Tennessee, Stephens College and Baptist College for Women in Missouri, and Keachie Female College in Louisiana. (21) After the Civil War, Mary Hardin-Baylor College was established in 1866 separate from Baylor University, after Baylor had experimented earlier with coeducation and coordination. Later, Baptists in Georgia help found Bessie Tift College and Shorter College. Meredith College was established in North Carolina, and in Mississippi, influential Baptists General Mark Lowrey and J. B. Gambrell led the way in establishing Blue Mountain College. (22) Many of these colleges are no longer in existence or have since admitted men. Both Shorter and Mary Hardin-Baylor eventually adopted the coeducational model to survive financially. (23) Judson in Marion, Alabama, and Meredith in Raleigh, North Carolina, remain as colleges for women only.

Coordination

Somewhat of a compromise between a separate college for women and full-fledged

coeducation, coordination became a viable option for the education of women. Coordinated schools consisted of a men's and women's college under a single administration and board of trustees. Schools theoretically maintained separate identities. In the late 1870s, Frederick A. P. Barnard questioned whether the best way to educate women was through improving the seminaries or founding separate institutions. He concluded that neither was in the best interest of women. The seminaries, he argued, could not be improved "except by reconstruction," and women's colleges could in no way provide the quality that the well-endowed, best men's colleges could. He claimed it was "unjust to young women, when admitting their right to liberal education, to deny them access to the best." (24) One solution for a struggling woman's college was to coordinate it with a men's college or university.

Baptists used the coordinate plan to educate women in Virginia and South Carolina. Richmond College was coordinated with newly established Westhampton College, and Furman University was coordinated with the reluctant Greenville Woman's College. (25)

Coeducation

Although both separate colleges for women and coordinate colleges served to establish access for women to higher education, the characteristic institution of higher education for women soon became the coeducational college. (26) Oberlin College, established in 1833, is considered to be the oldest college in the United States to practice coeducation consistently and continuously. Coeducation continued to be rare before the Civil War. Baylor University, established in 1845 by Texas Baptists, was among the half dozen American colleges practicing coeducation before 1860. (27)

The prevailing Southern Baptist assumptions regarding coeducation are illustrated in an 1868 Biblical Recorder article. The author stated that coeducation is "evidently in conflict with common sense" and the idea has "no doubt been fostered by the assumption that the mental endowments of the sexes are equal." The author held that men and women have been designed differently stating: "Men need vigor of "mind" as well as body to fit them to cope with other men in the great battle of life, but as the sphere in which woman is appointed to move, involves no conflict with others, she needs refinement and not vigor, intelligence and not learning." (28)

Advantages to coeducation, however, soon became clear to many in Baptist cirles. When many in the East continued to stand against coeducation, some prominent Southern Baptists began touting it. For example, after Carson College for men and Newman College for women joined to become coeducational Carson-Newman College in 1889, the catalogue listed the following advantages of coeducation:

   Uniting Carson and Newman Colleges into one institution ... gives
   us the opportunity to unite the entire strength of our denomination
   on one college, thus enabling us to bring it up to the highest
   standard of excellency.... Besides, in our judgment, there are
   peculiar advantages connected with coeducation, difficult if not
   impossible to attain in any other way. Among these, the stimulus
   to study from the desire to each sex to excel the other; the
   refining and elevating influence upon both, a very essential part
   of education; and the better knowledge of each other to be obtained
   nowhere so well as by long years in the classroom, thus preventing
   foolish and inconsiderate marriages. (29)

The most prominent reason for the move toward coeducation was financial. The tuition dollars brought by women students to newly coeducational institutions prevented many former men's colleges from closing after the Morrill Act of 1862 established state educational institutions. (30)

Despite such advantages, regions of the country differed in their adoption of coeducation. In New England, few institutions compromised their male tradition for the financial gain of admitting women students. (31) In the South, major obstacles to coeducation included an inefficient and nonstandardized public education system, a lack of valuing education, and a long-standing prejudice against both genders attending the same schools. (32)

Coeducation first took hold in the West. The vast majority of new colleges emerging in the western United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century began as coeducational. At that time, more women were completing secondary school and women's status in society was improving. (33) New colleges were not hindered by tradition of male-only schools. The new schools in the West needed women's tuition dollars to gain a stronghold. In 1872, ninety-seven coeducational colleges existed in the country; sixty-seven of these were in the West, seven in the South, eight in the mid-Atlantic states, and only five in New England. Despite initial hesitations, coeducation quickly became accepted practice. By 1880, 30 percent of all American colleges practiced coeducation; by 1900, 71 percent were coeducational. (34)

Between 1880 and the turn of the century, Southern Baptists also addressed the issue of coeducation. Although some men's schools did not adopt coeducation until much later, many others welcomed women along with their tuition dollars during this period. Southern Baptist colleges founded before 1900 but which did not become coeducational officially until that time included William Jewell College, Howard College, Wake Forest College, and Mississippi College.

All of these institutions had been founded before 1850, making it difficult for them to overcome a long history of failing to serve women. William Jewell reluctantly admitted women in 1921, after the nearby Liberty Ladies College was destroyed by fire. (35) Howard College graduated its first woman in 1896, but the college did not officially claim to be coeducational until 1913. (36) Wake Forest, influenced primarily by the hesitancy to offend its traditional relationship with Meredith College, waited until 1944 to admit women as regular undergraduate students. Baptists in Mississippi did not approve coeducation at Mississippi College until 1946. (37) Georgetown College in Kentucky was unusual in that it was established relatively early in 1829 and adopted coeducation fairly early, in 1893, when it merged with Georgetown Female Seminary. (38)

Some colleges deferred coeducation during the latter part of the 1800s by considering the "annex" scheme, a plan that enabled women to take courses at a university that was not coeducational. (39) Under this plan, women were allowed to take only certain courses of study. Mercer University and Union University both adopted this plan.

Southern Baptist schools founded in the last two decades of the nineteenth century were more open to coeducation. Stetson University, founded in 1883, was coeducational. The Florida Baptist Convention resolved to establish a women's university; after finding the DeLand Academy already operating as coeducational, the convention took control of the school and did not change its coeducational status. (40) In the West, Ouachita Baptist College, Howard Payne College, and Hardin-Simmons College followed Baylor University's initial plan of coeducation.

Conclusion

The study of the history of women as students in Southern Baptist higher education yields interesting results. In 1880-1920, whether women were educated in separate, coordinated, or coeducational Southern Baptist institutions was determined by societal factors, practical concerns, and situations unique to Southern Baptist life.

With regard to Baptists and their provision of higher education for women, several common themes emerge. First, an institution's founding date played a role in its treatment of women as students. For those established early, as Wake Forest College and Mississippi College, admitting women was a difficult break with tradition. Many of these institutions deferred enrolling women until mandated by outside circumstances, such as the dearth of male students created after both World Wars I and II.

Second, finances played a significant role in the acceptance of women. State conventions had a difficult time supporting both male and female colleges of high quality. All of the women's colleges established by Southern Baptists were funded poorly and had difficulty surviving. Coordination and coeducation came to be seen as the primary economical ways to educate women in post-secondary institutions. The establishment of state institutions as a result of the Morrill Act of 1862 and the decrease in available male students after the Civil War and the two World Wars threatened to shut down many Southern Baptist colleges. The admission of tuition-paying women was a necessity for survival in many cases.

Despite initial hesitations among Southern Baptists, the higher education of women was termed a success by society, and the main venue for women to obtain a college degree became the coeducational college. According to Frederick Rudolph, "The suspicion would long linger that coeducation deprived women of some of their infinite charm and gentleness and robbed men of the sternness and ruggedness on which society depended for its protection." (41) This suspicion, however, proved to be false. By providing women increased access and choice to post-secondary education, Southern Baptists maintained competitive colleges and universities that continue to contribute much to society.

Appendix
Women Students in Colleges and Universities
Under Southern Baptist Auspices 1823 to Present:
Separation, Coordination, or Coeducation (42)

                      Date Women    Date           Notes
                      Admitted      Founded (43)

Coeducation

Baylor University     1845          1845

Union University      1883          1823

Stetson University    1883          1883

Mercer University     1894          1833           Admitted to School
                                                   of Pedagogy only

Ouachita Baptist      1886          1886
College

Howard Payne          1889          1889
University

Carson-Newman         1889          1851           Carson College for
College                                            men merged with
                                                   Newman College for
                                                   women.

Hardin-Simmons        1891          1891
University

Georgetown College    1893          1829           Merged with
                                                   Georgetown Female
                                                   Seminary.

Samford University    1896          1841           Not officially co-ed
                                                   until 1913.

William Jewell        1921          1849
College

Wake Forest           1944          1834
University

Mississippi College   1946          1826           Opened as co-ed;
                                                   woman's department
                                                   closed when Baptists
                                                   took control of
                                                   school in 1850.

Shorter College       Woman's       1873           Became coed in
                      College.                     mid-1950s

University of Mary    Woman's       1845           Established as a
Hardin-Baylor         College                      separate college
                                                   from Baylor
                                                   University in
                                                   1867. Became coed
                                                   in 1971

Coordination

University of Rich-   U. of Rich-   1830/1914      University of
  mond/ West-         mond--1898/                  Richmond
  hampton College     Coordi-                      discontinued coed
                      nated in                     policy in 1914 when
                      1914                         schools were
                                                   coordinated.

Furman University/    Furman--      1825/1854      Furman remained coed
Greenville Women's    1893/Coor-                   during the years
College               dinated in                   1893-1900.
                      1920s

Separation

Judson College        Woman's       1838
                      College

Meredith College      Woman's       1891
                      College

Blue Mountain         Woman's       1873           Men now admitted as
College               College                      special students.

Bessie Tift College   Woman's       1849           Merged with Mercer
                      College                      in 1986.

(1.) Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), 320.

(2.) Ibid., 311.

(3.) See Appendix for the comprehensive typology.

(4.) The scope of this paper is limited to an examination of only four-year colleges founded before 1900 and controlled by Baptists in 1880-1920.

(5.) Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: Octagon Books, 1980), 137.

(6.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 309.

(7.) T. Laine Scales, All That Fits a Woman: Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907-1926 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 84-85.

(8.) Woody, A History of Women's Education, 253.

(9.) Ibid., 310.

(10.) Ibid., 138.

(11.) H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 443.

(12.) Patricia Palmeri, "From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the Higher Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920," in Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wecshler, eds., The ASHE Reader On the Higher Education of Women (Ginn Press, 1989), 147-48.

(13.) Leon McBeth, Women in Baptist Life (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1979), 127.

(14.) Ibid., 106-07.

(15.) Ibid., 112-13.

(16.) Ibid., 109-12.

(17.) Woody, A History of Women's Education, 138.

(18.) Scales, All That Fits a Woman, 141.

(19.) According to Rudolph, two groups of critics of the woman's seminary emerged. The first group, which included Emma Willard who founded a seminary at Troy in 1821, did not favor a college education for women but argued that the seminary should focus more on substance and less on accomplishment. The second group, of which Catherine Beecher who began a seminary at Hartford in 1828 was part, proposed an institution that would be analogous to the men's college. See The American College and University, 311.

(20.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 311.

(21.) I. M. E. Blandin, History of Higher Education in the South Prior to 1860 (New York: The Neale Publishing Co., 1909), 18.

(22.) Robbie Neal Sumrall, A Light on a Hill: A History of Blue Mountain College (Nashville: Benson Printing Company, 1947), 18-20.

(23.) Statement by Alice Taylor-Colbert, Shorter Historian, personal interview, July 18, 2002.

(24.) Woody, A History of Women's Education, 304.

(25.) The actual coordination between Furman University and Greenville Woman's College took place beyond the primary years addressed in this paper.

(26.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 320.

(27.) Ibid, 311.

(28.) Biblical Recorder, "Female Education," (August 26, 1868).

(29.) Isaac Newton Carr, History of Carson-Newman College (Jefferson City, Tenn.: Carson-Newman College, 1959), 51. Quoted from Catalogue, Carson-Newman College, 1888-89, 12-13.

(30.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 323.

(31.) Ibid., 322.

(32.) Woody, A History of Women's Education in the South, 253.

(33.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 324.

(34.) Ibid., 252.

(35.) H. I Hester, Jewell Is her Name: A History of William Jewell College (Liberty, Mo.: William Jewell College, 1967), 107-08.

(36.) James F. Sulzby, Toward a History of Samford University (Birmingham, Ala.: Samford University Press, 1986), 345; Elizabeth C. Wells, Samford Special Collection Librarian, personal interview, July 22, 2002.

(37.) Mississippi College, founded in 1826 as a coeducational institution, graduated its first two women in 1832, years before the first females graduated from Oberlin. When Mississippi Baptists voted to take control of the college in 1850 after it lost legislative support to the University of Mississippi, they also discontinued the practice of coeducation and dismissed the women. See Blandin, 186-87. See also Richard Aubrey McLemore, A History of the Mississippi Baptists 1780-1970 (Mississippi Baptist Convention Board), 308.

(38.) Bill Sumners, "Baptist Educational Institutions," in Directory, www.baptistheritage.com, accessed April 18, 2002.

(39.) Elizabeth Barber Young, A Study of the Curricula of Seven Selected Women's Colleges of the Southern States (New York: Teachers College, 1932), 3.

(40.) Harry C. Garwood, Stetson University and Florida Baptists (Deland: Florida Baptist Historical Society, 1962).

(41.) Rudolph, The American College and University, 327-28.

(42.) Included are four-year colleges founded before 1900 and controlled by Southern Baptists from 1880 to 1920.

(43.) Bill Summers, "Baptist Educational Institutions," in Directory, www.baptistheritage.com, accessed April 18, 2002.

Lori Bland Bateman is lecturer and course coordinator, Baylor Interdisciplinary Core Program, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.