The Morris County chronicle. [volume] (Morristown, N.J.) 1877-1915, 1901-08-30
EDUCATION OF GIRLS
THE LONG FIGHT OF WOMEN FOR
KNOWLEDGE NOT YET ENDED.

tiYes to Coeducation-The West
Has Always Been More Progressive
Than the East.
Coeducation is the great social achieve
ment of the nineteenth century. A hum
bred years ago there was no public provi-
sion anywhere in the world for the higher
education of women. 'Why do you want
to go to the academy?' said shrewd,
matter of fact New England farmer,
Francis Stone, in 1885, to his bright, as
piring daughter, Lucy. "Your mother
learned just enough arithmetic to count
her eggs and chickens and figure up her
butter money. She has got along well
enough. What was good enough for her
ought to be good enough for you" SO he
refused to give Lucy money to go to
seminary, and Lucy had to teach coun-
try school at 81 week, year after year,
to pay her way at Quabog and Wilbra-
learn Greek and Hebrew and algebra"
said her brother, when Lucy expressed
her wish to go with him to college.
So Lucy had to save up $40 to
enable her to travel across the state of
New York to Buffalo, and thence las
a deck passenger on Lake Erie
steamer to Toledo in order to reach the
brave western college bearing the hon
ored name of the missionary Oberlin,
which alone in the whole round world
admitted women to equal educational
opportunities. Graduating there in 1917,
she began her divinely appointed work
for woman's equality in the same year,
at the age of 30. 1t had cost her 10
years of toll and privation to gain what
the twentieth century girls enjoy with
out the asking.
But the wave Of sympathy and appre-
citation of what Father Shepherd, the
founder of Oberlin in 1882, justly called
''the misjudged and neglected SEX sus-
tanned Miss Willard and Mary Lyon and
Catherine Beecher in their efforts to fit
women to be the wives of missionaries
and the companions of scholarly men.
The persuasive eloquence of Frances
Wright and Ernestine j.. Rose and Luz
cretia Mott and Abby Kelly and the sis
tiers Grimke won for women the priceless
privilege of free speech, and prepared
the way for Lucy Stone and Antoinette
l.. Brown and Paulina Davis and Eliza
beth Cady Stanton and Susan B. An
thony, as they in their turn blazed the
path for Julia Ward Howe and Mary A.
Livermore and an army of women lee
turers and reformers who followed.
Every state west of Pennsylvania, from
Ohio to California, opened its colleges
and universities to women. Geneva col
lege in 1915 was the first medical school
In the world to admit a woman as a stu
dent, and in 1S47 / had the pleasure of
seeing my sister, Elizabeth Blackwell,
receive her diploma, and hear her pro-
nounced by the faculty to be the leader
in every department of study of her class
of $50 young men. But it had cost her
seven years heroic effort to get what
hundreds of young women now obtain
every year without opposition.
But conservatism dies hard. Failing
to prevent coeducation by direct methods,
it has resorted to compromises. To meet
the growing demand by women for higher
education the aristocratic east, with it's
class distinctions and inherited preju-
dices, has combated coeducation by flank
movements. Women's colleges were
established at Vassar, Smith, Wellesley
and Bryn Mawr. Graduates of coeduca-
tional colleges were employed in many
cases as presidents, professors and in
structors in these institutions.
more subtle form of compromise has
recently been devised in order to stave
off the inevitable. Western Reserve ana
Brown and Columbia and Harvard have
practically instituted women's depart
ments under such titles as Barnard, Rad
cliffe, etc. which have been endowed by
rich men and women. In these, women
similar cfuHioc in 10 nj
under the professors of mems colleges,
receiving diplomas certified by the presi-
dents of these colleges as indicative of
equal proficiency. And now a new step
in differentiation is proposed Physicians
have ceased to predict physical deteriora-
ton of women as a result of college stud
les, but certain presidents and professors
Of mems colleges now seek to ward off
coeducation by asserting that classical
education and the higher mathematics
unfit women to be wives and mothers.
A sympathetic crusade against coeduca-
ton had gradually been initiated by east
ern Dame Partingtons. G. Stanley Hall,
president of Clark university, of Wor-
cester, Mass, has stirred western edu-
Gators by his misleading utterances at
Chicago.
President Hall, describing "The Ideal
School" to his summer school at Worces-
ter. is actually reported as saying:
There are many people who never
ought to be educated, and who would be
better in morals if they never had been
to school. We are coming TO under
stand the vanity of scholarship"
And, again, he proposes to segregate
the sexes after the girls are thirteen and
the boys eleven years of age. He says:
"Boys can hereafter rarely do their
best work under female teachers, because
they feel thei, manhood, and the sexes
will pretty much part company. The
girls need reverent exemption from COM
petition. In soul and body girls are
more conservative. while boys are more
radical. Facts ideas. laws, principles
should be in their atmosphere, and they
are of vital importance. They have en-
tered the stage of apprenticeship to life"
So it appears that facts. ideas, laws,
and principles" are not adapted to wo-
men. What a mistake nature has made
in putting boys and girls as brothers and
sisters into the same families. since they
need to part company so early! Presi-
dent Clark's address is a surprising mix
ture of sense and nonsense, containing
many admirable suggestions, but assum-
ing that the sexes are so intellectually
distinct that they require different edu-
cational diet at separate tables This is
IN modern form the old assault upon the
principle of coeducation
But the Atlantic ocean will not be
driven back by few apostles OF exclu-
Biveness and class distinction The great