III PAPERS BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER

While Mrs. Palmer always avoided writing, and thought—generous prodigal!—that her work was best accomplished by spoken words, her complying spirit could not always resist the appeals of magazine editors. I could wish now that their requests had been even more urgent. And I believe that those who read these pages will regret that one possessed of such breadth of view, clearness, charm and cogency of style should have left a literary record so meagre. All these papers are printed precisely as she left them, without the change of a word. I have not even ventured on correction in the printed report of one of her addresses, that on going to college. Its looser structure well illustrates her mode of moving an audience and bringing its mothers to the course of conduct she approved.

XIII THREE TYPES OF WOMEN’S COLLEGES[14]

American college education in the quarter-century since the Civil War has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it in a hundred years before. These changes have not occurred unnoticed. A multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. There still exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men’s colleges in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system, both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work—these, and many sequents of these, touching the physical, social, and religious life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion.

The advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties which beset the education of men, but it has perplexities of its own in addition. After fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we are still in chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we were at the beginning. No educational convention meets without a session devoted to the difficulties in “the higher education of women,” so important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one system the variety of its needs. Yet chaos may be thought more chaotic than it really is. In the din of discussion it would not be strange if the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. We are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college training for girls. Some of us hope we may never find it, believing that in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. But already three tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear, which it will be the purpose of this paper to explain. The nature of each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth in no spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us wiser and more patient in our future growth. What, then, are the three types, and how have they arisen?

When to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. Scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment. In nearly every state west of the Alleghanies, “universities” had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. “Why,” asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, “should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? Why should we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our existing colleges would be bettered by more students? By far the large majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why should they be separated in the lecture room for only the four years between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation means the doubling of an equipment already too poor by half?”

It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, coeducation was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate and by a radical change in policy. When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two thirds, were coeducational. Among them are all the state universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the Protestant sects.

Hitherto I have spoken as if coeducation were a western movement; and in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of coeducational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship, among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly. A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman’s education in the East.

In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women’s colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar, opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best equipped men’s universities were thought sufficient, and women began to resort to the great universities of England and Germany. In an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago, to provide women with instruction by members of the Harvard Faculty.

Where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; in short, in the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm for scholarship, and the opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two hundred and fifty years.

These, then—coeducation, the woman’s college, and the annex—are the three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of women’s education has thus far issued. Of course they are but types—that is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; they are rather the central forms to which many varieties approximate. The characteristic features of each I must now describe, and, as I promised at the beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each, while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of its qualities. To explain dangers as well as promises is the business of the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. To this business I now turn, and I may naturally have most in mind the University of Michigan, my own Alma Mater, Wellesley College, with whose government I have been connected for a dozen years, and the Harvard Annex, whose neighbor I now am.

Coeducation involves, as its name implies, the education of a company of young men and women as a single body. To the two sexes alike are presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline, of organization. The typical features are identical classrooms, libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same instructors; and the same honors for like work. Ordinarily all the instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are held by women. Usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over the one than over the other. This feature, however, is not essential. At Cornell, Oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity, buildings have been provided where the young women may—in some instances, must—live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a lady in charge. But in most of the higher coeducational institutions the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both sexes become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school, and social life—especially under the ample opportunities for learning the uses of freedom which our social habits afford—safely to undertake a college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. Of course all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the classroom, the laboratory, and the thesis.

The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when I entered there in 1872, finds her own boarding-place in one of the quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She makes the business arrangements for her winter’s fuel and its storage; she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in church on her first Sunday. Strong is the comradeship among these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung upon proving that “lady Greek” involved the accents, and that women’s minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. And still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties about coeducation have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and women exists. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life.

In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that it does not meet every need of a woman’s nature. No system can—no system that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined moral perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a human being—a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large tract of her character—is it the largest tract?—her own needs and those of the young man are identical. Both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young man’s education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the defenders of coeducation ask, may not the same principles apply to women? Why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? In education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. The differences must be attended to privately.

At any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the two sides—the woman side and the human side—it will be generally agreed that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly weak in agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational action. The artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept the hard things and leave to her the easy—by these influences any comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in her early teens. The coeducationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and to tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. Coeducation, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. The strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural, unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. The early fear that coeducation would result in classroom romances has proved exaggerated. These young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. Marriage is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a successful marriage as ballroom intercourse or a summer at Bar Harbor.

The weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths. It does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. Refining home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which have been encouraged in her more tenderly nurtured sister.

The woman’s college is organized under a different and far more complex conception. The chief business of the man’s college, whether girls are admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement of special investigation. The woman’s college aims to do all this, but it aims also to make for its students a home within its own walls and to develop other powers in them than the merely intellectual. At the outset this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as life itself. When girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands to them preëminently in loco parentis. It must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, be ready in case of illness and, to prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene and sanitation, accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its students, but also in large degree of their physical power in the future. It generally furnishes them means of social access to the best men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction while seeking still to respect the varied faiths of its students. In short, the arrangements of the woman’s college, as conceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness at building up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners, developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the means of sound learning.

It may be said that a similar upbuilding of the personal life results from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or indirectness of aim. The woman’s college puts this aim in the foreground side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. Of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from her relations with them in the classroom. In appointing these women to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be this, but she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed his hair. They will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any other woman’s college could find a place in its faculty for a woman Sophocles or Sylvester. Learning alone is not enough for women.

Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse. The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon the characters of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. I have watched the ennobling process go on for many years among Wellesley students, and I am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls’ college community affords. That choicest product of modern civilization, the American girl, is here in all her diverse colors. She comes from more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political party; from nearly every state and territory in the Union, and from the foreign lands into which English and American missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated. The farmer’s daughter from the western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of New England. The pride of a Southern senator’s home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her college course because her father’s life was given for the Union. Side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn to “see great things large, and little things small.”

This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum.

It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to the girls’ college. It is said that its students never escape from themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women. Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth a type, perhaps in the endeavor after clearness exaggerating a little its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a substantially true account of an actually existing type—a type powerful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of a different type.

The third type is the “annex,” a recent and interesting experiment in the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. Only a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a learned specialist some single period in the history of the language. Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.

The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who provide classrooms, suggest boarding-places, secure the instructors, solicit the interest of the public—in short, manage all the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one. No detail in the management of Harvard College is changed by the presence in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the corporation of Harvard should assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give the girl graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the Annex would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from Harvard College as the medical, law, or divinity schools. The students of the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college undergraduates. The immediate governing boards of college and medical school are separate. But here comparison fails, for the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of all its resources. This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the university.

The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of Old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. Here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give their entertainments. The students lodge in all parts of Cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct only to themselves. The ladies of the management are lavish in time and care to make the girls’ lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is as separate and independent as in the typical coeducational college.

It is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly, the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that through pressure of other work the professor will be unable to teach in the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed—and by none are they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the Annex themselves—it should be said that hitherto they have not practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still, in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom reached elsewhere.

A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its methods vary markedly.

Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by Columbia’s teaching force, though Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new Woman’s College at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction.

In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in government. Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better equipped universities for men, whose resources they can to some extent use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far, however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the ordinary woman’s college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the connection between it and the university should ever become so close that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself, it would become a question whether the barriers between the men’s and the women’s lecture rooms could be economically maintained.

The preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman’s study is carried on inside a man’s college, in the women’s college outside it, in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already coeducational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body of men’s colleges continually find it harder to maintain their isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.

The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges, and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to come woman’s higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by any means it may save girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a man’s college may be persuaded to send her to a girls’. Those who find it easier to honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the hour—to understand and to wait.

FOOTNOTES:

XIV WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[15]

One of the most distinctive and far-reaching movements of the nineteenth century is that which has brought about the present large opportunities for the higher education of women. Confining itself to no country, this vast movement has advanced rapidly in some, slowly and timidly in others. In America three broad periods mark its progress: first, the period of quiescence, which ends about 1830; second, the period of agitation, ending with the civil war; the third, though far as yet from completion, may be called the period of accomplishment.

For the first two hundred years in the history of our country little importance was attached to the education of women, though before the nineteenth century began, twenty-four colleges had been founded for the education of men. In the early years of this century private schools for girls were expensive and short-lived. The common schools were the only grades of public instruction open to young women. In the cities of Massachusetts, where more was done for the education of boys than elsewhere, girls were allowed to go to school only a small part of the year, and in some places could even then use the schoolroom only in the early hours of the day, or on those afternoons when the boys had a half-holiday. Anything like a careful training of girls was not yet thought of.

This comparative neglect of women is less to be wondered at when we remember that the colleges which existed at the beginning of this century had been founded to fit men for the learned professions, chiefly for the ministry. Neither here nor elsewhere was it customary to give advanced education to boys destined for business. The country, too, was impoverished by the long struggle for independence. The Government was bankrupt, unable to pay its veteran soldiers. Irritation and unrest were everywhere prevalent until the ending of the second war with England, in 1815. Immediately succeeding this began that great migration to the West and South-west which carried thousands of the most ambitious young men and women from the East to push our frontiers farther and farther into the wilderness. Even in the older parts of the country the population was widely scattered. The people lived for the most part in villages and isolated farms. City life was uncommon. As late as 1840 only nine per cent of the population was living in cities of 8000 or more inhabitants. Under such conditions nothing more than the bare necessities of education could be regarded.

But this very isolation bred a kind of equality. In district schools it became natural for boys and girls to study together and to receive the same instruction from teachers who were often young and enthusiastic. These were as a rule college students, granted long winter vacations from their own studies that they might earn money by teaching village schools. Thus most young women shared with their brothers the best elementary training the country afforded, while college education was reserved for the few young men who were preparing for the ministry or for some other learned profession.

From the beginning it had been the general custom of this country to educate boys and girls together up to the college age. To-day in less than six per cent of all our cities is there any separate provision of schools for boys and girls. This habitual early start together has made it natural for our men and women subsequently to read the same books, to have the same tastes and interests, and jointly to approve a large social freedom. On the whole, women have usually had more leisure than men for the cultivating of scholarly tastes.

The first endowment of the higher education of women in this country was made by the Moravians in the seminary for girls which they founded at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. They founded another girls’ seminary at Lititz in 1794. Though both of these honorable foundations continue in effective operation to-day, their influence has been for the most part confined to the religious communion of their founders. In 1804 an academy with wider connections was founded at Bradford, Massachusetts, at first open to boys and girls, since 1836 limited to girls. From that time academies and seminaries for girls increased rapidly. One of the most notable was Troy Seminary, founded by Emma Hart Willard and chartered in 1819. Miss Willard drew up broad and original plans for the higher education of girls, laid them before President Monroe, appealed to the New York Legislature for aid, and dreamed of establishing something like collegiate training. More than three hundred students entered her famous seminary, and for seventeen years she carried it on with growing reputation. Her address to the President in 1819 is still a strong statement of the importance to the republic of an enlightened and disciplined womanhood.

Even more influential was the life and work of Mary Lyon, who in 1837 founded Mount Holyoke Seminary, and labored for the education of women until her death, in 1849. Of strong religious nature, great courage and resource, she went up and down New England securing funds and pupils. Her rare gift of inspiring both men and women induced wide acceptance of her ideals of character and intelligence. Seminaries patterned after Mount Holyoke sprang up all over the land, and still remain as centres of powerful influence, particularly in the Middle West and on the Pacific Coast.

With this development, through the endowment of many excellent seminaries, of the primary education of girls into something like secondary or high-school opportunities, the period of quiescence comes to an end. There follows a period of agitation when the full privilege of college training side by side with men was demanded for women. This agitation was closely connected on the one hand with the antislavery movement and the general passion for moral reform at that time current; and, on the other, with the interest in teaching and that study of its methods which Horace Mann fostered. From 1830 to 1865 it was becoming evident that women were destined to have a large share in the instruction of children. For this work they sought to fit themselves, and the reformers aided them. Oberlin College, which began as a collegiate institute in 1833, was in 1850 chartered as a college. From the beginning it admitted women, and in 1841 three women took its diploma. Antioch College, under Horace Mann’s leadership, opened in 1853, admitting women on equal terms with men. In 1855 Elmira College was founded, the first institution chartered as a separate college for women.

Even before the Civil War the commercial interests of the country had become so much extended that trade was rising into a dignity comparable to that of the learned professions. Men were more and more deserting teaching for the business life, and their places, at first chiefly in the lower grades, were being filled by women. During the five years of the war this supersession of men by women teachers advanced rapidly. It has since acquired such impetus that at present more than two thirds of the training of the young of both sexes below the college grade has fallen out of the hands of men. In the mean time, too, though in smaller numbers, women have invaded the other professions and have even entered into trade. These demonstrations of a previously unsuspected capacity have been both the cause and the effect of enlarged opportunities for mental equipment. The last thirty or forty years have seen the opening of that new era in women’s education which I have ventured to call the period of accomplishment.

From the middle of the century the movement to open the state universities to women, to found colleges for men and women on equal terms, and to establish independent colleges for women spread rapidly. From their first organization the state universities of Utah (1850), Iowa (1856), Washington (1862), Kansas (1866), Minnesota (1868), Nebraska (1871) admitted women. Indiana, founded in 1820, opened its doors to women in 1868, and was followed in 1870 by Michigan, at that time the largest and far the most influential of all the state universities. From that time the movement became general. The example of Michigan was followed until at the present time all the colleges and universities of the West, excepting those under Catholic management, are open to women. The only state university in the East, that of Maine, admitted women in 1872. Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana alone among all the state universities of the country remain closed to women. This sudden opening to women of practically all universities supported by public funds is not more extraordinary than the immense endowments which during the same period have been put into independent colleges for women, or into colleges which admit men and women on equal terms. Of these privately endowed colleges, Cornell, originally founded for men, led the way in 1872 in opening its doors to women. The West and South followed rapidly, the East more slowly. Of the 480 colleges which at the end of the century are reported by the Bureau of Education, 336 admit women; or, excluding the Catholic colleges, 80 per cent of all are open to women. Of the sixty leading colleges in the United States there are only ten in which women are not admitted to some department. These ten are all on the Atlantic seaboard and are all old foundations.

This substantial accomplishment during the last forty years of the right of women to a college education has not, however, resulted in fixing a single type of college in which that education shall be obtained. On the contrary, three clearly contrasted types now exist side by side. These are the independent college, the coeducational college, and the affiliated college.

To the independent college for women men are not admitted, though the grade, the organization, and the general aim are supposed to be the same as in the colleges exclusively for men. The first college of this type, Elmira (1855), has been already mentioned. The four largest women’s colleges—Vassar, opened in 1861; Smith, in 1875; Wellesley, in 1875, and Bryn Mawr, in 1885—take rank among the sixty leading colleges of the country in wealth, equipment, teachers and students, and variety of studies offered. Wells College, chartered as a college in 1870, the Woman’s College of Baltimore, opened in 1888, and Mt. Holyoke, reorganized as a college in 1893, have also large endowments and attendance. All the women’s colleges are empowered to confer the same degrees as are given in the men’s colleges.

The development of coeducation, the prevailing type of education in the United States for both men and women, has already been sufficiently described. In coeducational colleges men and women have the same instructors, recite in the same classes, and enjoy the same freedom in choice of studies. To the faculties of these colleges women are occasionally appointed, and, like their male colleagues, teach mixed classes of men and women. Many coeducational colleges are without halls of residence. Where these exist, special buildings are assigned to the women students.

The affiliated colleges, while exclusively for women, are closely connected with strong colleges for men, whose equipment and opportunities they are expected in some degree to share. At present there are five such: Radcliffe College, the originator of this type, connected with Harvard University, and opened in 1879; Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, at Tulane University, opened in 1886; the College for Women of Western Reserve University, 1888; Barnard College, at Columbia University, 1889; the Woman’s College of Brown University, 1892. In all these colleges the standards for entrance and graduation are the same as those exacted from men in the universities with which they are affiliated. To a considerable extent the instructors also are the same.

During the last quarter-century many professional schools have been opened to women—schools of theology, law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, technology, agriculture. The number of women entering these professions is rapidly increasing. Since 1890 the increase of women students in medicine is 64 per cent, in dentistry 205 per cent, in pharmacy 190 per cent, in technology and agriculture 194 per cent.

While this great advance has been accomplished in America, women in England and on the Continent, especially during the last thirty years, have been demanding better education. Though much more slowly and in fewer numbers than in this country, they have everywhere succeeded in securing decided advantages. No country now refuses them a share in liberal study, in the instruction of young children, and in the profession of medicine. As might be expected, English-speaking women, far more than any others, have won and used the opportunities of university training. Since 1860 women have been studying at Cambridge, England, and since 1879 at Oxford. At these ancient seats of learning they have now every privilege except the formal degree. To all other English and Scotch universities, and to the universities of the British colonies, women are admitted, and from them they receive degrees.

In the most northern countries of Europe—in Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark—the high schools and universities are freely open to women. In eastern Europe able women have made efforts to secure advanced study, and these efforts have been most persistent in Russia and since the Crimean war. When denied in their own land, Russian women have flocked to the Swiss and French universities, and have even gone in considerable numbers to Finland and to Italy. Now Russia is slowly responding to its women’s entreaties. During the last ten years the universities of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Greece have been open to women; while in Constantinople the American College for Girls offers the women of the East the systematic training of the New England type of college. In western, central, and southern Europe all university doors are open. In these countries, degrees and honors may everywhere be had by women, except in Germany and Austria. Even here, by special permission of the Minister of Education, or the professor in charge, women may hear lectures. Each year, too, more women are granted degrees by special vote and as exceptional cases.

In brief, it may be said that practically all European universities are now open to women. No American woman of scholarship, properly qualified for the work she undertakes, need fear refusal if she seeks the instruction of the greatest European scholars in her chosen field. Each year American women are taking with distinction the highest university degrees of the Continent. To aid them, many fellowships and graduate scholarships, ranging in value from $300 to $1000, are offered for foreign study by our colleges for women and by private associations of women who seek to promote scholarship. Large numbers of ambitious young women who are preparing themselves for teaching or for the higher fields of scientific research annually compete for this aid. Three years ago an association was formed for maintaining an American woman’s table in the Zoölogical Station at Naples. By paying $500 a year they are thus able to grant to selected students the most favorable conditions for biological investigation. This association has also just offered a prize of $1000, to be granted two years hence, for the best piece of original scientific work done in the mean time by a woman. The American Schools of Classical Studies in Athens and Rome admit women on the same terms as men, and award their fellowships to men and women indifferently. One of these fellowships, amounting to $1000 a year, has just been won by a woman.

The experience, then, of the last thirty years shows a condition of women’s education undreamed of at the beginning of the century. It shows that though still hampered here and there by timorous restrictions, women are in substantial possession of much the same opportunities as are available for men. It shows that they have both the capacity and the desire for college training, that they can make profitable and approved use of it when obtained, and that they are eager for that broader and more original study after college work is over which is at once the most novel and the most glorious feature of university education to-day. Indeed, women have taken more than their due proportion of the prizes, honors, and fellowships which have been accessible to them on the same terms as to men. Their resort to institutions of higher learning has increased far more than that of men. In 1872 the total number of college students in each million of population was 590. Last year it had risen to 1270, much more than doubling in twenty-seven years. During this time the number of men had risen from 540 to 947, or had not quite doubled. The women rose from 50 in 1872 to 323 in 1899, having increased their former proportional number more than six times, and this advance has also been maintained in graduate and professional schools.

The immensity of the change which the last century has wrought in women’s education may best be seen by setting side by side the conditions at its beginning and at its close. In 1800 no colleges for women existed, and only two endowed schools for girls—these belonging to a small German sect. They had no high schools, and the best grammar schools in cities were open to them only under restrictions. The commoner grammar and district schools, and an occasional private school dedicated to “accomplishments,” were their only avenues to learning. There was little hostility to their education, since it was generally assumed by men and by themselves that intellectual matters did not concern them. No profession was open to them, not even that of teaching, and only seven possible trades and occupations.

In 1900 a third of all the college students in the United States are women. Sixty per cent of the pupils in the secondary schools, both public and private, are girls—i.e. more girls are preparing for college than boys. Women having in general more leisure than men, there is reason to expect that there will soon be more women than men in our colleges and graduate schools. The time, too, has passed when girls went to college to prepare themselves solely for teaching or for other bread-winning occupations. In considerable numbers they now seek intellectual resources and the enrichment of their private lives. Thus far between 50 and 60 per cent of women college graduates have at some time taught. In the country at large more than 70 per cent of the teaching is done by women, in the North Atlantic portion over 80 per cent. Even in the secondary schools, public and private, more women than men are teaching, though in all other countries the advanced instruction of boys is exclusively in the hands of men. Never before has a nation intrusted all the school training of the vast majority of its future population, men as well as women, to women alone.

FOOTNOTES:

XV WOMEN’S EDUCATION AT THE WORLD’S FAIR[16]

Few persons have stood in the Court of Honor at Chicago and felt the surpassing splendors gathered there, without a certain dismay over its swiftly approaching disappearance. Never in the world before has beauty been so lavish and so transient. Probably in all departments of the Fair a hundred million dollars have been spent. Now the nation’s holiday is done, the little half-year is over, and the palaces with their widely gathered treasures vanish like a dream. Is all indeed gone? Will nothing remain? Wise observers perceive some permanent results of the merry-making. What these will be in the busy life of men, others may decide: I point out chiefly a few of the beneficial influences of the great Fair on the life of women.

The triumph of women in what may be called their detached existence, that is, in their guidance of themselves and the separated affairs of their sex, has been unexpectedly great. The Government appointed an independent Board of Lady Managers who, through many difficulties, gathered from every quarter of the globe interesting exhibits of feminine industry and skill. These they gracefully disposed in one of the most dignified buildings of the Fair, itself a woman’s design. Here they attractively illustrated every aspect of the life of women, domestic, philanthropic, commercial, literary, artistic, and traced their historic advance. Close at hand, in another building also of their own erection, they appropriately appeared as the guardians and teachers of little children. Their halls were crowded, their dinners praised, their reception invitations coveted. Throughout they showed organizing ability on a huge scale; they developed noteworthy leaders; what is more, they followed them, and they have quarrelled no more, and have pulled wires less, than men in similar situations; their courage, their energy, their tact in the erection of a monument to woman were astonishing; and the efforts of their Central Board were efficiently seconded by similar companies in every state. As in the Sanitary and Christian Commissions and the hospital service of the war, in the multitude of women’s clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the King’s Daughters, the associations for promoting women’s suffrage, so once more here women found an opportunity to prove their ability as a banded sex; and it is clear that they awakened in the nation a deeper respect for their powers.

But the very triumph does away with its further necessity. Having amply proved what they can do when banded together, women may now the more easily cease to treat themselves as a peculiar people. Henceforth they are human beings. Women’s buildings, women’s exhibits, may safely become things of the past. At any future fair no special treatment of women is likely to be called for. After what has been achieved, the self-consciousness of women will be lessened, and their sensitiveness about their own position, capacity, and rights will be naturally outgrown. The anthropologist may perhaps still assemble the work of a single sex, the work of people of a single color, or of those having blue eyes. But ordinary people will find less and less interest in these artificial classifications, and will more and more incline to measure men’s and women’s products by the same scale. Even at Chicago large numbers of women preferred to range their exhibits in the common halls rather than under feminine banners, and their demonstration of the needlessness of any special treatment of their sex must be reckoned as one of the most considerable of the permanent gains for women from the Fair.

If, then, women have demonstrated that they are more than isolated phenomena, that they should indeed be treated as integral members of the human family, in order to estimate rightly the lasting advantages they have derived from the Fair we must seek those advantages not in isolations but in conjunctions. In the common life of man there is a womanly side and a manly side. Both have profited by one splendid event. Manufactures and transportation and mining and agriculture will hereafter be different because of what has occurred at Chicago; but so will domestic science, the training of the young, the swift intellectual interest, the finer patriotism, the apprehension of beauty, the moral balance. It is by growth in these things that the emancipation of women is to come about, and the Fair has fostered them all in an extraordinary degree.

Although the Fair was officially known as a World’s Fair, and it did contain honorable contributions from many foreign countries, it was, in a sense that no other exhibition has been before, a nation’s fair. It was the climacteric expression of America’s existence. It gathered together our past and our present, and indicated not uncertainly our future. Here were made visible our beginnings, our achievements, our hopes, our dreams. The nation became conscious of itself and was strong, beautiful, proud. All sections of the country not only contributed their most characteristic objects of use and beauty, but their inhabitants also came, and learned to know one another, and their land. During the last two years there has hardly been a village in the country which has not had its club or circle studying the history of the United States. No section has been too poor to subscribe money for maintaining national or state pride. In order to see the great result, men have mortgaged their farms, lonely women have taken heavy life insurance, stringent economy will gladly be practised for years. A friend tells me that she saw an old man, as he left the Court of Honor with tears in his eyes, turn to his gray-haired wife and say, “Well, Susan, it paid even if it did take all the burial money.”

Once before, we reached a similar pitch of national consciousness,—in war. Young, unprepared, divided against ourselves, we found ourselves able to mass great armies, endure long strains, organize campaigns, commissariats, hospitals, in altogether independent ways, and on a scale greater than Europe had seen. Then men and women alike learned the value of mutual confidence, the strength of coöperation and organization. Once again now, but this time in the interest of beauty and of peace, we have studied the art of subordinating fragmentary interests to those of a whole. The training we have received as a nation in producing and studying the Fair, must result in a deeper national dignity, which will both free us from irritating sensitiveness over foreign criticism, and give us readiness to learn from other countries whatever lessons they can teach. Our own provinces too will become less provincial. With increased acquaintance, the East has begun to drop its toleration of the West, and to put friendliness and honor in its place. No more will it be believed along the Atlantic coast that the Mississippi Valley cares only for pork, grain and lumber. As such superstitions decay, a more trustful unity becomes possible. The entire nation knows itself a nation, possessed of common ideals. In this heightened national dignity, women will have a large and ennobling share.

But further, from the Fair men, and women with them, have acquired a new sense of the gains that come from minute obedience to law. Hitherto, “go as you please” has been pretty largely the principle of American life. In the training school of the last two years of preparation and the six months of the holding of the Fair, our people, particularly our women, have been solidly taught the hard and needful lesson that whims, waywardness, haste, inaccuracy, pettiness, personal considerations, do not make for strength. Wherever these have entered, they have flawed the beautiful whole, and flecked the honor of us all. Where they have been absent results have appeared which make us all rejoice. Never in so wide an undertaking was the unity of a single design so triumphant. As an unknown multitude coöperated in the building of a mediæval cathedral, so throughout our land multitudes have been daily ready to contribute their unmarked best for the erection of a common glory. We have thus learned to prize second thoughts above first thoughts, to league our lives and purposes with those of others, and to subordinate the assertion of ourselves to that of a universal reason. Hence has sprung a new trust in one another and a new confidence in our future. The friendliness of our people, already rendered natural by our democratic institutions, has received a deeper sanction. How distinctly it was marked on the faces of the visitors at the Fair! I was fortunate enough to spend several hours there on Chicago Day, when nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand people were admitted. The appearance of those plain, intelligent, happy, helpful thousands, all strangers and all kind, was the most encouraging sight one woman had at the Fair. It has been said that the moral education of a child consists in imparting to him the three qualities, obedience, sympathy, dignity. These all have been taught by the Fair, and women, more swiftly perceptive than men, have probably learned their lesson best.

One more profound effect of the Fair upon human character must be mentioned, on character in those features which are of especial importance to women. Our people have here gained a new sense of beauty, and of beauty at its highest and rarest, not the beauty of ornament and decoration, but that of proportion, balance, and ordered suitability of parts. Every girl likes pretty things, but the rational basis of beauty in the harmonious expression of use, and in furnishing to the eye the quiet satisfaction of its normal demands, seldom attracts attention. At Chicago these things became apparent. Each building outwardly announced its inner purpose. Each gained its effect mainly by outline and balance of masses rather than by richness of detail. Each was designed in reference to its site and to its neighbor buildings. Almost every one rested the eye which it still stimulated. Color, form, purpose, proportion, sculpture, vegetation, stretches of water, the brown earth, all coöperated toward the happy effect. What visitor could see it and not have begotten in him the demand for beauty in his own surroundings? It is said that the Centennial Exhibition affected the domestic architecture and the household decoration of the whole eastern seaboard. The Fair will do the same, but it will bring about a beauty of a higher, simpler sort. In people from every section, artistic taste has been developed, or even created; and not only in their houses, but in the architecture of their public buildings and streets shall we see the results of this vision of the White City by the Lake. Huddled houses in incongruous surroundings will become less common. At heart we Americans are idealists, and at a time when the general wealth is rapidly increasing, it is an indescribable gain to have had such a training of the æsthetic sense as days among the great buildings and nights on the lagoons have brought to millions of our people. The teachability of the common American is almost pathetic. One building was always crowded—the Fine Arts Building; yet great pictures were the one thing exhibited with which Americans have hitherto had little or no acquaintance. This beauty, connected essentially with the feminine side of life, will hereafter, through the influence of the Fair, become a more usual possession of us all.

If such are the permanent gains for character which women in common with men, yet even more than they, have derived from the Fair, there remain to be considered certain helps which have been brought to women in some of their most distinctive occupations. Of course they have had here an opportunity to compare the different kinds of sewing-machines, pianos, type-writers, telegraphs, clothes-wringers, stoves, and baby-carriages, and no doubt they will do their future work with these complicated engines more effectively because of such comparative study. But there are three departments which ancestral usage has especially consecrated to women, and to intelligent methods in each of these the Fair has given a mighty impulse. These three departments are the care of the home, the care of the young, and the care of the sick, the poor, and the depraved.

At Philadelphia in 1876 Vienna bread was made known, and the native article, sodden with saleratus, which up to that time had desolated the country, began to disappear. The results in cookery from the Chicago Exhibition will be wider. They touch the kitchen with intelligence at more points. Where tradition has reigned unquestioned, science is beginning to penetrate, and we are no longer allowed to eat without asking why and what. This new “domestic science”—threatening word—was set forth admirably in the Rumford Kitchen, where a capital thirty-cent luncheon was served every day, compounded of just those ingredients which the human frame could be demonstrated to require. The health-food companies, too, arrayed their appetizing wares. Workingmen’s homes showed on how small a sum a family could live, and live well. Arrangements for sterilizing water and milk were there, Atkinson cookers, gas and kerosene stoves. The proper sanitation of the home was taught, and boards of health turned out to the plain gaze of the world their inquisitorial processes. Numberless means of increasing the health, ease, and happiness of the household with the least expenditure of time and money were here studied by crowds of despairing housekeepers. Many, no doubt, were bewildered; but many, too, went away convinced that the most ancient employment of women was rising to the dignity and attractiveness of a learned profession.

When it is remembered that nine tenths of the teachers of elementary schools are women, it can be seen how important for them was the magnificent educational exhibit. Here could be studied all that the age counts best in kindergarten, primary, grammar, high and normal schools, and in all the varieties of training in cookery, sewing, dressmaking, manual training, drawing, painting, carving. Many of the exhibitors showed great skill in making their methods apprehensible to the stranger.

And then there were the modes of bodily training, and the lamentable image of the misformed average girl; and in the children’s building classes could actually be seen engaged in happy exercise, and close at hand appliances for the nursery and the playground. Nor in the enlarged appliances for woman’s domestic life must those be omitted which tell how cheaply and richly the girl may now obtain a college training like her brother, and become as intelligent as he. No woman went away from the educational exhibits of the Fair in the belief that woman’s sphere was necessarily narrow.

There is no need to dilate on the light shed by the Fair upon problems of sickness, poverty, and crime. Everybody knows that nothing so complete had been seen before. The Anthropological Building was a museum of these subjects, and scattered in other parts of the Fair was much to interest the puzzled and sympathetic soul. One could find out what an ideal hospital was like, and how its service and appliances should be ordered. One studied under competent teachers the care of the dependent and delinquent classes. One learned to distinguish surface charity from sound. As men grow busier and women more competent, the guidance of philanthropy passes continually more and more into the gentler hands. Women serve largely on boards of hospitals, prisons, charities, and reforms, and urgently feel the need of ampler knowledge. The Fair did much to show them ways of obtaining it.

Such are the permanent results of the Fair most likely to affect women. They fall into three classes: the proofs women have given of their independent power, their ability to organize and to work toward a distant, difficult, and complex end; the enlargement of their outlook, manifesting itself in a new sense of membership in a nation, a more willing obedience to law, and a higher appreciation of beauty; and, lastly, the direct assistance given to women in their more characteristic employments of housekeeping, teaching, and ministering to the afflicted. That these are all, or even the most important, results which each woman will judge she has obtained, is not pretended. Everybody saw at the Fair something which brought to individual him or her a gain incomparable.

And, after all, the greatest thing was the total, glittering, murmurous, restful, magical, evanescent Fair itself, seated by the blue waters, wearing the five crowns, served by novel boatmen, and with the lap so full of treasure that as piece by piece it was held up, it shone, was wondered at, and was lost again in the pile. This amazing spectacle will flash for years upon the inward eye of our people, and be a joy of their solitude.

FOOTNOTES:

XVI WHY GO TO COLLEGE?

To a largely increasing number of young girls college doors are opening every year. Every year adds to the number of men who feel as a friend of mine, a successful lawyer in a great city, felt when in talking of the future of his four little children he said, “For the two boys it is not so serious, but I lie down at night afraid to die and leave my daughters only a bank account.” Year by year, too, the experiences of life are teaching mothers that happiness does not necessarily come to their daughters when accounts are large and banks are sound, but that on the contrary they take grave risks when they trust everything to accumulated wealth and the chance of a happy marriage. Our American girls themselves are becoming aware that they need the stimulus, the discipline, the knowledge, the interests of the college in addition to the school, if they are to prepare themselves for the most serviceable lives.

But there are still parents who say, “There is no need that my daughter should teach; then why should she go to college?” I will not reply that college training is a life insurance for a girl, a pledge that she possesses the disciplined ability to earn a living for herself and others in case of need; for I prefer to insist on the importance of giving every girl, no matter what her present circumstances, a special training in some one thing by which she can render society service, not of amateur but of expert sort, and service too for which it will be willing to pay a price. The number of families will surely increase who will follow the example of an eminent banker whose daughters have been given each her specialty. One has chosen music, and has gone far with the best masters in this country and in Europe, so far that she now holds a high rank among musicians at home and abroad. Another has taken art; and has not been content to paint pretty gifts for her friends, but in the studios of New York, Munich, and Paris she has won the right to be called an artist, and in her studio at home to paint portraits which have a market value. A third has proved that she can earn her living, if need be, by her exquisite jellies, preserves, and sweetmeats. Yet the house in the mountains, the house by the sea, and the friends in the city are not neglected, nor are these young women found less attractive because of their special accomplishments.

While it is not true that all girls should go to college any more than that all boys should go, it is nevertheless true that they should go in greater numbers than at present. They fail to go because they, their parents, and their teachers, do not see clearly the personal benefits distinct from the commercial value of a college training. I wish here to discuss these benefits, these larger gifts of the college life,—what they may be, and for whom they are waiting.

It is undoubtedly true that many girls are totally unfitted by home and school life for a valuable college course. These joys and successes, these high interests and friendships, are not for the self-conscious and nervous invalid, nor for her who in the exuberance of youth recklessly ignores the laws of a healthy life. The good society of scholars and of libraries and laboratories has no place and no attraction for her who finds no message in Plato, no beauty in mathematical order, and who never longs to know the meaning of the stars over her head or the flowers under her feet. Neither will the finer opportunities of college life appeal to one who, until she is eighteen (is there such a girl in this country?), has felt no passion for the service of others, no desire to know if through history, or philosophy, or any study of the laws of society, she can learn why the world is so sad, so hard, so selfish as she finds it, even when she looks upon it from the most sheltered life. No, the college cannot be, should not try to be, a substitute for the hospital, reformatory, or kindergarten. To do its best work it should be organized for the strong, not for the weak; for the high-minded, self-controlled, generous, and courageous spirits, not for the indifferent, the dull, the idle, or those who are already forming their characters on the amusement theory of life. All these perverted young people may, and often do, get large benefit and invigoration, new ideals, and unselfish purposes from their four years’ companionship with teachers and comrades of a higher physical, mental, and moral stature than their own. I have seen girls change so much in college that I have wondered if their friends at home would know them,—the voice, the carriage, the unconscious manner, all telling a story of new tastes and habits and loves and interests, that had wrought out in very truth a new creature. Yet in spite of this I have sometimes thought that in college more than elsewhere the old law holds, “To him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.” For it is the young life which is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting influences of college days. What, then, for such persons are the rich and abiding rewards of study in college or university?

Preëminently the college is a place of education. That is the ground of its being. We go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful, that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world. No college which does not thoroughly educate can be called good, no matter what else it does. No student who fails to get a little knowledge on many subjects, and much knowledge on some, can be said to have succeeded, whatever other advantages she may have found by the way. It is a beautiful and significant fact that in all times the years of learning have been also the years of romance. Those who love girls and boys pray that our colleges may be homes of sound learning, for knowledge is the condition of every college blessing. “Let no man incapable of mathematics enter here,” Plato is reported to have inscribed over his Academy door. “Let no one to whom hard study is repulsive hope for anything from us,” American colleges might paraphrase. Accordingly in my talk to-day I shall say little of the direct benefits of knowledge which the college affords. These may be assumed. It is on their account that one knocks at the college door. But seeking this first, a good many other things are added. I want to point out some of these collateral advantages of going to college, or rather to draw attention to some of the many forms in which the winning of knowledge presents itself.

The first of these is happiness. Everybody wants “a good time,” especially every girl in her teens. A good time, it is true, does not always in these years mean what it will mean by and by, any more than the girl of eighteen plays with the doll which entranced the child of eight. It takes some time to discover that work is the best sort of play, and some people never discover it at all. But when mothers ask such questions as these: “How can I make my daughter happy?” “How can I give her the best society?” “How can she have a good time?” the answer in most cases is simple. Send her to college—to almost any college. Send her because there is no other place where between eighteen and twenty-two she is so likely to have a genuinely good time. Merely for good times, for romance, for society, college life offers unequalled opportunities. Of course no idle person can possibly be happy, even for a day, nor she who makes a business of trying to amuse herself. For full happiness, though its springs are within, we want health and friends and work and objects of aspiration. “We live by admiration, hope, and love,” says Wordsworth. The college abounds in all three. In the college time new powers are sprouting, and intelligence, merriment, truthfulness, and generosity are more natural than the opposite qualities often become in later years. An exhilarating atmosphere pervades the place. We who are in it all the time feel that we live at the fountain of perpetual youth, and those who take but a four years’ bath in it become more cheerful, strong, and full of promise than they are ever likely to find themselves again; for a college is a kind of compendium of the things that most men long for. It is usually planted in a beautiful spot, the charm of trees and water being added to stately buildings and stimulating works of art. Venerable associations of the past hallow its halls. Leaders in the stirring world of to-day return at each Commencement to share the fresh life of the new class. Books, pictures, music, collections, appliances in every field, learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the best words of the best men for holy days,—all are here. No wonder that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days, the romantic period of youth. No wonder that Dr. Holmes’s poems to his Harvard classmates find an echo in college reunions everywhere; and gray-haired men, who outside the narrowing circle of home have not heard their first names for years, remain Bill and Joe and John and George to college comrades, even if unseen for more than a generation.

Yet a girl should go to college not merely to obtain four happy years, but to make a second gain, which is often overlooked, and is little understood even when perceived; I mean a gain in health. The old notion that low vitality is a matter of course with women; that to be delicate is a mark of superior refinement, especially in well-to-do families; that sickness is a dispensation of Providence,—these notions meet with no acceptance in college. Years ago I saw in the mirror frame of a college freshman’s room this little formula: “Sickness is carelessness, carelessness is selfishness, and selfishness is sin.” And I have often noticed among college girls an air of humiliation and shame when obliged to confess a lack of physical vigor, as if they were convicted of managing life with bad judgment, or of some moral delinquency. With the spreading scientific conviction that health is a matter largely under each person’s control, that even inherited tendencies to disease need not be allowed to run their riotous course unchecked, there comes an earnest purpose to be strong and free. Fascinating fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored; possibilities of doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new and dear friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and work, and the young student cannot afford quivering nerves or small lungs or an aching head any more than bad taste, rough manners, or a weak will. Handicapped by inheritance or bad training, she finds the plan of college life itself her supporter and friend. The steady, long-continued routine of mental work, physical exercise, recreation, and sleep, the simple and wholesome food, in place of irregular and unstudied diet, work out salvation for her. Instead of being left to go out of doors when she feels like it, the regular training of the gymnasium, the boats on lake and river, the tennis court, the golf links, the basket ball, the bicycle, the long walk among the woods in search of botanical or geological specimens,—all these and many more call to the busy student, until she realizes that they have their rightful place in every well-ordered day of every month. So she learns, little by little, that buoyant health is a precious possession to be won and kept.

It is significant that already statistical investigation in this country and in England shows that the standard of health is higher among the women who hold college degrees than among any other equal number of the same age and class. And it is interesting also to observe to what sort of questions our recent girl graduates have been inclined to devote attention. They have been largely the neglected problems of little children and their health, of home sanitation, of food and its choice and preparation, of domestic service, of the cleanliness of schools and public buildings. Colleges for girls are pledged by their very constitution to make persistent war on the water cure, the nervine retreat, the insane asylum, the hospital,—those bitter fruits of the emotional lives of thousands of women. “I can never afford a sick headache again, life is so interesting and there is so much to do,” a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first college year. And while her mother was in a far-off invalid retreat, she undertook the battle against fate with the same intelligence and courage which she put into her calculus problems and her translations of Sophocles. Her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove the measure of her hard-won success. Formerly the majority of physicians had but one question for the mother of the nervous and delicate girl, “Does she go to school?” And only one prescription, “Take her out of school.” Never a suggestion as to suppers of pickles and pound-cake, never a hint about midnight dancing and hurried daytime ways. But now the sensible doctor asks, “What are her interests? What are her tastes? What are her habits?” And he finds new interests for her, and urges the formation of out-of-door tastes and steady occupation for the mind, in order to draw the morbid girl from herself into the invigorating world outside. This the college does largely through its third gift of friendship.

Until a girl goes away from home to school or college, her friends are chiefly chosen for her by circumstances. Her young relatives, her neighbors in the same street, those who happen to go to the same school or church,—these she makes her girlish intimates. She goes to college with the entire conviction, half unknown to herself, that her father’s political party contains all the honest men, her mother’s social circle all the true ladies, her church all the real saints of the community. And the smaller the town, the more absolute is her belief. But in college she finds that the girl who earned her scholarship in the village school sits beside the banker’s daughter; the New England farmer’s child rooms next the heiress of a Hawaiian sugar plantation; the daughters of the opposing candidates in a sharply fought election have grown great friends in college boats and laboratories; and before her diploma is won she realizes how much richer a world she lives in than she ever dreamed of at home. The wealth that lies in differences has dawned upon her vision. It is only when the rich and poor sit down together that either can understand how the Lord is the Maker of them all.

To-day above all things we need the influence of men and women of friendliness, of generous nature, of hospitality to new ideas, in short, of social imagination. But instead, we find each political party bitterly calling the other dishonest, each class suspicious of the intentions of the other, and in social life the pettiest standards of conduct. Is it not well for us that the colleges all over the country still offer to their fortunate students a society of the most democratic sort,—one in which a father’s money, a mother’s social position, can assure no distinction and make no close friends? Here capacity of every kind counts for its full value. Here enthusiasm waits to make heroes of those who can lead. Here charming manners, noble character, amiable temper, scholarly power, find their full opportunity and inspire such friendships as are seldom made afterward. I have forgotten my chemistry, and my classical philology cannot bear examination; but all round the world there are men and women at work, my intimates of college days, who have made the wide earth a friendly place to me. Of every creed, of every party, in far-away places and in near, the thought of them makes me more courageous in duty and more faithful to opportunity, though for many years we may not have had time to write each other a letter. The basis of all valuable and enduring friendships is not accident or juxtaposition, but tastes, interests, habits, work, ambitions. It is for this reason that to college friendship clings a romance entirely its own. One of the friends may spend her days in the laboratory, eagerly chasing the shy facts that hide beyond the microscope’s fine vision, and the other may fill her hours and her heart with the poets and the philosophers; one may steadfastly pursue her way toward the command of a hospital, and the other toward the world of letters and of art; these divergences constitute no barrier, but rather an aid to the fulness of friendship. And the fact that one goes in a simple gown which she has earned and made herself, and the other lives when at home in a merchant’s modern palace—what has that to do with the things the girls care about and the dreams they talk over in the walk by the river or the bicycle ride through country roads? If any young man to-day goes through Harvard lonely, neglected, unfriended, if any girl lives solitary and wretched in her life at Wellesley, it is their own fault. It must be because they are suspicious, unfriendly, or disagreeable themselves. Certainly it is true that in the associations of college life, more than in any other that the country can show, what is extraneous, artificial, and temporary falls away, and the every-day relations of life and work take on a character that is simple, natural, genuine. And so it comes about that the fourth gift of college life is ideals of personal character.

To some people the shaping ideals of what character should be, often held unconsciously, come from the books they read; but to the majority they are given by the persons whom they most admire before they are twenty years old. The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them—ah, they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their classrooms—gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and I were totally unconscious at the time. For many years I have known that my study with them, no matter whether of philosophy or of Greek, of mathematics or history or English, enlarged my notions of life, uplifted my standards of culture, and so inspired me with new possibilities of usefulness and of happiness. Not the facts and theories that I learned so much as the men who taught me, gave this inspiration. The community at large is right in saying that it wants the personal influence of professors on students, but it is wholly wrong in assuming that this precious influence comes from frequent meetings or talks on miscellaneous subjects. There is quite as likely to be a quickening force in the somewhat remote and mysterious power of the teacher who devotes himself to amassing treasures of scholarship, or to patiently working out the best methods of teaching; who standing somewhat apart, still remains an ideal of the Christian scholar, the just, the courteous man or woman. To come under the influence of one such teacher is enough to make college life worth while. A young man who came to Harvard with eighty cents in his pocket, and worked his way through, never a high scholar, and now in a business which looks very commonplace, told me the other day that he would not care to be alive if he had not gone to college. His face flushed as he explained how different his days would have been if he had not known two of his professors. “Do you use your college studies in your business?” I asked. “Oh, no!” he answered. “But I am another man in doing the business; and when the day’s work is done I live another life because of my college experiences. The business and I are both the better for it every day.” How many a young girl has had her whole horizon extended by the changed ideals she gained in college! Yet this is largely because the associations and studies there are likely to give her permanent interests—the fifth and perhaps the greatest gift of college life of which I shall speak.

The old fairy story which charmed us in childhood ended with “And they were married and lived happy ever after.” It conducted to the altar, having brought the happy pair through innumerable difficulties, and left us with the contented sense that all the mistakes and problems would now vanish and life be one long day of unclouded bliss. I have seen devoted and intelligent mothers arrange their young daughters’ education and companionships precisely on this basis. They planned as if these pretty and charming girls were going to live only twenty or twenty-five years at the utmost, and had consequently no need of the wealthy interests that should round out the fullgrown woman’s stature, making her younger in feeling at forty than at twenty, and more lovely and admired at eighty than at either.

Emerson in writing of beauty declares that “the secret of ugliness consists not in irregular outline, but in being uninteresting. We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention exists in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. Beauty without grace is the head without the body. Beauty without expression tires.” Of course such considerations can hardly come with full force to the young girl herself, who feels aged at eighteen, and imagines that the troubles and problems of life and thought are hers already. “Oh, tell me to-night,” cried a college freshman once to her president, “which is the right side and which is the wrong side of this Andover question about eschatology?” The young girl is impatient of open questions, and irritated at her inability to answer them. Neither can she believe that the first headlong zest with which she throws herself into society, athletics, into everything which comes in her way, can ever fail. But her elders know, looking on, that our American girl, the comrade of her parents and of her brothers and their friends, brought up from babyhood in the eager talk of politics and society, of religious belief, of public action, of social responsibility—that this typical girl, with her quick sympathies, her clear head, her warm heart, her outreaching hands, will not permanently be satisfied or self-respecting, though she have the prettiest dresses and hats in town, or the most charming of dinners, dances, and teas. Unless there comes to her, and comes early, the one chief happiness of life,—a marriage of comradeship,—she must face for herself the question, “What shall I do with my life?”

I recall a superb girl of twenty as I overtook her one winter morning hurrying along Commonwealth Avenue. She spoke of a brilliant party at a friend’s the previous evening. “But, oh!” she cried, throwing up her hands in a kind of hopeless impatience, “tell me what to do. My dancing days are over!” I laughed at her, “Have you sprained your ankle?” But I saw I had made a mistake when she added, “It is no laughing matter. I have been out three years. I have not done what they expected of me,” with a flush and a shrug, “and there is a crowd of nice girls coming on this winter; and anyway, I am so tired of going to teas and ball-games and assemblies! I don’t care the least in the world for foreign missions, and,” with a stamp, “I am not going slumming among the Italians. I have too much respect for the Italians. And what shall I do with the rest of my life?” That was a frank statement of what any girl of brains or conscience feels, with more or less bitter distinctness, unless she marries early, or has some pressing work for which she is well trained.

Yet even if that which is the profession of woman par excellence be hers, how can she be perennially so interesting a companion to her husband and children as if she had keen personal tastes, long her own, and growing with her growth? Indeed, in that respect the condition of men is almost the same as that of women. It would be quite the same were it not for the fact that a man’s business or profession is generally in itself a means of growth, of education, of dignity. He leans his life against it. He builds his home in the shadow of it. It binds his days together in a kind of natural piety, and makes him advance in strength and nobility as he “fulfils the common round, the daily task.” And that is the reason why men in the past, if they have been honorable men, have grown old better than women. Men usually retain their ability longer, their mental alertness and hospitality. They add fine quality to fine quality, passing from strength to strength and preserving in old age whatever has been best in youth. It was a sudden recognition of this fact which made a young friend of mine say last winter, “I am not going to parties any more; the men best worth talking with are too old to dance.”

Even with the help of a permanent business or profession, however, the most interesting men I know are those who have an avocation as well as a vocation. I mean a taste or work quite apart from the business of life. This revives, inspires, and cultivates them perpetually. It matters little what it is, if only it is real and personal, is large enough to last, and possesses the power of growth. A young sea-captain from a New England village on a long and lonely voyage falls upon a copy of Shelley. Appeal is made to his fine but untrained mind, and the book of the boy poet becomes the seaman’s university. The wide world of poetry and of the other fine arts is opened, and the Shelleyian specialist becomes a cultivated, original, and charming man. A busy merchant loves flowers, and in all his free hours studies them. Each new spring adds knowledge to his knowledge, and his friends continually bring him their strange discoveries. With growing wealth he cultivates rare and beautiful plants, and shares them with his fortunate acquaintances. Happy the companion invited to a walk or a drive with such observant eyes, such vivid talk! Because of this cheerful interest in flowers, and this ingenious skill in dealing with them, the man himself is interesting. All his powers are alert, and his judgment is valued in public life and in private business. Or is it more exact to say that because he is the kind of man who would insist upon having such interests outside his daily work, he is still fresh and young and capable of growth at an age when many other men are dull and old and certain that the time of decay is at hand?