I Can Do Anything You Can Do Better: Women at Universities
Women’s early education had been relegated to the home; from birth they were learned in the arts of homemaking, child rearing, and protecting the sanctuary of the family42 . While throughout the 18th and 19th centuries women contributed to household labor, particularly on farms, there was a social expectation that women should not work unless they have to43 . The Civil War disrupted assumptions that women should remain within the private sphere of the home. During the war, women ran hospitals, took over farms, and went to work in the factories44 . Akin to the women of WWII, these women gained sensations of freedom in the workplace which led them to demand for greater labor and educational opportunities. Furthermore, massive expansions in the immigrant populations, the settlement of the west, and the emancipation of African Americans in the South meant that there was a greater need for qualified teachers following the war45 . Women had already carved out reputations as skilled and competition teachers in the antebellum and wartime eras, further allowing them to pursue professions in these areas46 . Finally, the deaths of so many young men left many women widowed or without many prospects for marriage, forcing them to pursue alternative life pathways47 .
Women’s colleges were soon established with the idea that they should promote protestant ideas of “true womanhood” while also providing for an academically rigorous curricula and preparation for professionalism48 . Rogersville Female College (charter pictured left) was established in 1869 to educate the young ladies of Rogersville, TN with the goal of “such a distribution of subjects will be made, and such an arrangement of classes adopted, as will meet the wants of every pupil”. This demonstrates the tensions between ideas that women should primarily be mothers and caregivers in the home as well as that they could be intellectual and qualified workers in the public sphere49 . According to a Smith College president: “The college is not intended to fit woman for any particular sphere or profession but to develop by the most carefully devised means all her intellectual capacities, so that she may be a more perfect woman in any position”50 .
The development of women’s colleges coincided with the development of coeducational (“coed”) schools51. Many schools found it less expensive to have one school that catered to both men and women52. This was true for both religious institutions like Oberlin College, the alma mater of first female college graduate in the United States, and HBCUs like Fisk and Howard53. In terms of technical schools, on the left, the list of alumni from the 1892 course catalogue of Arkansas Industrial University lists both men and women. Coeducation though does not always mean equal education or equal experiences. Solomon notes that women could be segregated into separate classes or were not given the full liberal arts course work54. To the left, a description of the Arkansas Industrial University dormitories states that women will live in a house to be run by the president of the university and his wife. The description makes no note of housing for male students.
According to Solomon, the number of women enrolled in colleges grew by nearly eightfold between 1870 and 1900 (from eleven to eighty-seven thousand students)55 . Twenty years later, women made up almost half (47.3%) of all enrolled college students in the United States and had grown to a rank of 283,00056 . By 1900, most women were enrolled in coeducational institutions of higher education57 . The growth in women’s attendance at college led to the publication of several books - both fiction and nonfiction - on the subject. The American Girl at College by Linda Rose McCabe (1893, featured above) gives a fervent argument for women’s higher education. On the first page she states that “The higher education of woman has ceased to be a conundrum. Woman has solved it. Statistics refute almost every objection raised against her highest intellectual development”. She continues on to describe the quality of women’s colleges, women’s increasing achievement of degrees, and refutes the idea that women are incapable of working. McCabe represents the clamoring voice for increased education and educational opportunity parity between men and women. Her College Days by Mrs. Clarke Johnson (featured above), on the other hand, is a narrative fiction novel which focuses on the development of relationships, particularly between women at college.
Historian Rebecca Edwards writes in her book New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age” 1865-1905 that in the post-war period more and more women joined the workforce. In 1900, the United States employed approximately half a million teachers, 70% of which were women58 . While education was a profession now dominated by women, women began to occupy other spaces previously dominated by men. They began to work as clerks and stenographers, they opened their own businesses, and were writers and editors59 . The cartoon below from around 1899 shows women being educated as doctors. The growth of career women was made possible by the expansion of educational opportunities as well as the growth of professional opportunities - both created by the aftermath of the Civil War and women’s personal ambitions. While these greater opportunities were larger expressions of freedom, they were also wrought with tensions from social constraints and definitions of womanhood.
FOOTNOTES
42. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 2
43. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page xx
44. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 45
45. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 45
46. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 45
47. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 45
48. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 49
49. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 49
50. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 49
51. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 50
52. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 50
53. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 50
54. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 50
55. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 58
56. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 63
57. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1985. page 58
58. Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. page 73
59. Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. page 73-75