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Separate Spheres?: Women’s Education
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• male seminaries – preparation for ministry; female seminary preparation for teaching & motherhood.
• public high schools:
• "fit wives for educated men"
• NY's Female HS: "I would not wish to be understood as advocating
their [girls’] attention to any abstract branch of science. Such
knowledge is not necessary for them."
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• 1833 Oberlin - founded on evangelical principles - students as
religious moralists and reformers; pioneered accepting female and
African-American students. Empowerment of African-American
women, preparing them as teachers & thus agents of AfricanAmerican uplift.
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• Oberlin first women’s degrees 1842.
• Alumnae Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell (first female
ordained minister of a recognized US denomination)
1855 Oberlin
female graduates
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• But Oberlin limits - female graduates trained in oratory, yet banned
from presenting own graduate speeches in public.
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• coeducation 1860s Iowa & Wisconsin,
• 1870s Michigan, Maine & Cornell.
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• all-women's schools - Seven Sisters:
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• 1837 Mary Lyon establishes Mount Holyoke (South Hadley, Mass) schoolteacher herself age 17. Campaign for funds. Curriculum
equivalent to men’s, serious entrance exams. Low tuition. Humanities
and sciences.
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• Students do domestic work (cooking, laundry) to keep tuition low.
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• Faculty live in dorm; student-teacher relation echo mother-daughter
link.
• One main building, resembling house.
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• Holyoke students strict rules (required one-mile walk after breakfast),
long day (5 a.m. wakeup bell; 9:15 p.m. bedtime)
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• Holyoke as preparation for New England teachers
• 82.5% graduates before 1850 taught school;
• missionaries & homemakers;
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• 1860 Vassar, first endowed women's college (Poughkeepsie, NY)
• Matthew Vassar, rich brewer:
And so you see, to old V.C.
Our love shall never fail.
Full well we know that all we owe
To Matthew Vassar's ale.
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• "to build & endow a College for young women which shall be to them
what Yale & Harvard are to young men."
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• fear - education "unsexing" women
• Founder: "lest by too close an imitation of studies of ordinary
colleges, we should impair womanliness in our students & encourage
the formation of those mannish tastes & manners which are so
disgusting to every right mind."
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• No standardized secondary schools for girls; many early Vassar students
unprepared, need preparatory class
• Two degree paths - classical (Greek) or scientific (botany, zoology, geology,
astronomy) - everyone Latin, math, literature, geography, chemistry, logic,
physiology, and philosophy
• Soon 100-200 students
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• medical lecture room, geology collections, astronomical observatory
(2nd building on campus)
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•
•
•
•
Maria Mitchell – discovered new comet 1847.
gold medal from King of Denmark.
Elected first woman member American Academy of Arts & Sciences;
first woman American Association for Advancement of Science;
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• 1865 Mitchell first professor hired for Vassar,
• "the best educated women in the world.”
• Took students to observe eclipses in IA & CO (field experience then
rare even for male science students), published observations.
• Led discussions of politics, women’s issues.
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• Mitchell and Vassar’s first astronomy class:
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• Mitchell: "the perceptive faculties of women are more acute than those of men.
Women would perceive the size, form & color of an object more readily & would
catch an impression more quickly. The training of girls (bad as it is) leads them
to develop these faculties. The fine needlework & the embroidery teach them to
measure small spaces. The same delicacy of eye & touch is needed to bisect the
image of a star as to piece delicate muslin. The small fingers too come into play
with a better adaptation to delicate micrometer screws."
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• Mitchell trained & mentored whole generation of America’s first female
astronomers
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• 1875 Wellesley (outside Boston)
• women presidents, trustees, all-female faculty;
• Henry Durant
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• "What would Massachusetts be if our 9000 women teachers were all of
them educated Christians?"
• Motto: “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister”
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• "we revolt against the slavery in which women are held by the
customs of society - the broken health, the aimless lives, the
subordinate position, the helpless dependence, and shams of socalled education. The higher education of women is the cry of the
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oppressed slave, the assertion of absolute equality, the war of Christ."
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• 1875 Smith College (Northampton, Mass)
• Sophie Smith (inherited fortune)
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• "design to furnish for my own sex means & facilities for education
equal to those which are afforded now to young men. It is my opinion
that by the education of women,… their ‘wrongs’ will be redressed,
their wages adjusted, their weight of influence in reforming the evils of
society will be greatly increased, as teachers, as writers, as mothers,
as members of society, their power for good will be incalculably
enlarged.”
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• “It is not my design to render my sex any the less feminine, but to
develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood & furnish
women with means of usefulness, happiness & honor now withheld
from them."
• "It is to preserve her womanliness that this College has been
founded… More time will be devoted than in other colleges to
aesthetical study, to the arts of drawing and the acquisition of musical
skill."
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• "Is it mere prejudice which causes so general a feeling of aversion to
some women whose energy, heroism & ability we cannot but admire?
Has not their training repressed their amiable qualities & made them
very frequently excessively conceited?"
• Didn't want "the gentlewoman to be lost in the strongminded."
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• "What if the same forces which develop all that is most manly in one
sex repress & dwarf all that is most womanly in the other?"
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• 1885 Bryn Mawr (PA) – first US graduate degrees for women
• 2nd president M. Carey Thomas – Cornell degree 1877. Not allowed to attend
Johns Hopkins graduate seminars. Went to Univ. Leipzig - forced to sit behind
screen not to distract male students. Transfer to Univ. Zurich for Ph.D. 1882
• Advocate of women’s
rights, suffrage
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• M. Carey Thomas
by John Singer
Sargent
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• Thomas, 1901: "Should the Higher Education of Women Differ from That of
Men?": "Women… ought to have the broadest possible education. This college
education should be the same as men's, not only because there is but one best
education, but because men's and women's effectiveness and happiness and the
welfare of the generation to come after them will be vastly increased if their
college education has given them the same intellectual training and the same
scholarly and moral ideals."
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• Bryn Mawr model on German higher education, world’s finest
research, highest teaching standards.
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• 1878 Radcliffe - Arthur Gilman
• Harvard Annex - "The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of women"
• "to afford to women opportunities for carrying their studies
systematically forward further than it is possible for them now to do in
this country."
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• "a number of professors in Harvard have consented to give private tuition to
properly qualified young women who desire to pursue advanced studies in
Cambridge. No instruction will be provided of a lower grade than that given in
Harvard."
• Soon attracts 27 students;
• official limbo – no buildings, no faculty;
• "our students quietly pursue their occupations as unnoticed as the daughters of
any Cambridge residents."
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• 1889 Barnard - annex to Columbia; rented brownstone
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• Opens with 14 regular students, plus 22 taking science classes
(chemistry and biology)
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• Women’s college life - traditions
• Wellesley -May Day graduating seniors’ hooprolling race - winner “first
to marry” (now “first CEO”)
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• Women’s college life - organizations
• Bryn Mawr
plays women in
men’s
roles (1907)
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• 1891 over 10,000 women in colleges - over 33% all students in college;
• 1881 Association of Collegiate Alumnae;
• isolated - "few ways outside the home in which such equipment of
knowledge might be utilized to advantage."
• expand opportunities, provided network;
• now American Association of University Women;
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•
•
•
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health of college women - on trial
Harvard doctor Edward Clarke;
1873 Sex in Education: or, a Fair Chance for the Girls
Not against girls going to college - but cannot study as hard or same
things as boys.
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• Clarke: “Miss G___ worked her way through New-England primary,
grammar, and high schools to a Western college, which she entered
with credit to herself, and from which she graduated,… leading the
male and female youth alike…. She worked as a student, continuously
and perseveringly, through the years of her first critical epoch,…
without any regard to the periodical type of her organization.”
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• “Not a great while after graduation, she began to show signs of failure, and some
years later died under the writer's care. A post-mortem examination disclosed no
disease in any part of the body, except in the brain, where the microscope
revealed commencing degeneration…. She was unable to make a good brain,
that could stand the wear and tear of life, and a good reproductive system that
should serve the race, at the same time that she was continuously spending her
force in intellectual labor. Nature asked for a periodical remission, and did not
get it.”
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• “And so Miss G___ died, not because she had made the acquaintance of Kant
and ventured to explore the secrets of chemistry, but because, while pursuing
these studies, she steadily ignored her woman's make. Believing that woman
can do what man can, she strove with noble but ignorant bravery to compass
man's intellectual attainment in a man's way, and died in the effort...."
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• Analogies comparing body to economic system - limited resources;
• women's nature defined in terms of reproductive capacity;
• 1870 doctor, "as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken
the uterus and built up a woman around it."
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• Menstruation, child-bearing, menopause;
• 1900 president American Gynecology Society, "Many a young life is
battered & forever crippled on the breakers of puberty; if it crosses these
unharmed & is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still
ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, & lastly upon the
final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters
of the harbor beyond reach of sexual storms."
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• popular health manuals, "We cannot too emphatically urge the
importance of regarding these monthly returns [menstruation] as
period of ill health, when ordinary occupations are to be suspended or
modified. Long walks, dancing, shopping, riding & parties should be
avoided at this time of month under all circumstances."
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• Danger of too intense education - gynecologist: "A woman
may be highly cultured & accomplished, but her future
husband will discover too late that he has married a large
outfit of headaches & backaches instead of a woman fitted to
take up the duties of life."
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• Advice targeting upper-class or middle-class women; doctors
concluded lower-class women more "coarse";
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•
•
•
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Illness fashionable 1800s:
corsets, death in childbirth;
"Little Women" – Beth;
Age of hysterical woman - ultimate in fragility - ultra-sensitive, hyperemotional;
• women's way of fighting back, claim attention, avoid sex;
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• Popularity of "rest cure";
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1880s "nervous disease" – doctor told her,
"Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the
time. Lie down an hour after each meal. have but two hours
intellectual life a day, and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as
you live." Gilman: "I came perilously close to losing my mind."
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• 1895 study only 28% women college grads married, compared to 80%
total women.
• "Colleges may come to be training stations for the sterile woman aunt, maiden, nun, schoolteacher or unmarried woman."
• Concern – eugenics (“good in birth”)
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• Wellesley "large gymnasium where students are instructed in
calisthenics."
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• course in human anatomy & hygiene;
• "Few of us who were put through our course in the little old cramped & battered
College Hall gymnasium have ever worn unnatural shoes, gone deliberately
without sleep, or grown round-shouldered without a guilty sense of having fallen
below Miss Hill's standard of intelligent living."
• "women who will make the next generation strong, who are strong themselves &
able to cope with the struggles of the workaday world."
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• Extracurricular sports – rowing, tennis, bicycling, archery, golf,
baseball & basketball - sports "develop a young girls' character while
she develops her muscles."
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• Vassar golf 1894, skating 1898
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• Worry too competitive, unfeminine. "Overstraining might defeat the
goal of skill & grace in sports. What we aim at is to keep the girls’
physical beings on a par with their intellectual beings."
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• Senda Berenson Abbott, director of Physical Education at Smith 1890s; heard
about new game basketball, adapted game for women (cooperation rather than
competition; players stay in zones to avoid overexertion,
only 3 dribbles,
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can’t steal ball)
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• Health reformer Dudley Sargent quantitative study of human body,
data on over 10,000 men & women - charts of "normal" body.
• Fear athletics making women more masculine;
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• 1886 study showed 78% college women good or excellent health
• 1900 study showing college women had healthier kids.
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• Idea balance physical health & femininity;
• Catherine Beecher: the "perfectly healthy woman" was one "who can through
the whole day be actively employed on her feet in all kinds of domestic duties
without injury, & constantly & habitually has a feeling of perfect health & perfect
freedom from pain."
• idea of "able-bodied womanhood"
• Close connection between issues of women's health & women's rights;
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