The College for Women

THE history of the several experiments made in the separate collegiate education of women in America is but a single phase of the general history of the development of women in our time. As in the general, so in the specific, the clue to the philosophy of the movement lies in the recognition of individualism. There is nothing novel in the application of this principle to education. It has slowly been asserting itself in the methods at work among children and men, so that the reduction of the number of pupils to one teacher in primary schools and the development of the elective system in colleges have gone along together. But the absence of tradition and the sense of the demands of the womanly nature have greatly quickened the process by which individualistic treatment has come to be the keynote of progress in colleges for women.

This is clear as regards discipline and social considerations. The first experiments were somewhat monastic. The preference was for a location removed from the busy haunts of men. The aim was, to some extent at least, to organize a form of activity that should be neither in the world nor of it. Strict rules and a good many of them governed the intercourse of the students among themselves and with the outside world. A more than maternal solicitude hovered about them when they were learning their lessons, and accompanied them in their shopping excursions. At this stage the results were not altogether what was expected. Instead of being grateful, the girls were mutinous. They did not appreciate the efforts made in their behalf, and, instead of profiting by the exclusively refining influences under which they were living, some of them manifested curious and disturbing symptoms. It was then discovered that a discipline separate from that of men was not sufficient. There were evils resulting from a large number of women living together. These evils were physical as well as mental, and required constant vigilance if one would guard against them. Members of the community suffered from a certain feeling of tension that became well known in its effects of excitement or depression.

The method of meeting these difficulties came more and more to be that of breaking up the crowd into as small groups as possible, and making each member of the smallest feel her individual responsibility to definite persons at definite times and places. So for a time rules were on the increase in the interest of a strictly family discipline, it may seem an astonishing thing that young women doing justice to Tacitus, logic, and conic sections should be asked to report weekly for attendance on chapel, exercise, and baths : but it is still more astonishing that in refined associations and surroundings they should have needed to. Gradually it became evident that if this anomalous state of things were ever to be done away, it must be by throwing out of consideration as far as possible the crowd, treating it as if it did not exist, and dealing with the single student. The cottage system of later colleges improved upon the material conditions of the older ones, with their cavernous buildings, associating lecture halls and students’ rooms. The habit of solemnly presenting the sub-freshman with a student’s manual, or of compelling her to make her first recitation on the rules and regulations of the institution, came more and more into disrepute, and some of the women’s colleges are now saying in effect to the new student who asks, How am I to learn the rules ? ” “ By breaking them.” This, of course, on the ground that her relation to the government is close, that intercourse between her and it is direct, and that she is constantly under formative influences that will make her intelligent about the principles underlying the rules rather than their wording.

Another aspect of this early culture came under investigation on account of what seemed its questionable results. The withdrawal of the college from the world was not entirely satisfactory. Three forms of evil were alleged : First, some students came out wedded to the routine, full of admiration for the life they had enjoyed for four years, ambitious to do something that could be checked off on a schedule, and too nice for the people about them. Second, some students of evident ability failed to be stimulated by the college life, complained of its monotony, and grew nervous and hysterical in the long terms. Third, some students neither admired nor complained, but showed abnormal excitement whenever the college routine was broken in upon. Mild social distractions were seized upon with a fury indicative, to the shocked observer, of starvation. The difficulty on the part of the faculty in providing a satisfactory social diet under so restricted conditions emphasizes the importance of having women’s colleges at least on the edge of things. The advantages of learned seclusion gave way before those of being near the market-places. It was pointed out that it was better that girls should be homesick for home than for college ; that, they had been sent there to be prepared for life, not heaven ; and that their attitude toward society ought not to be characterized by skittishness. So the task of bringing society within college gates, at desirable intervals and in suitable quantities, being attended with difficulty, the governments of some colleges determined not to attempt it. They tried to place their colleges where the student could readily make part of the general town or city life. They provided no college church, but expected attendance on those of the town or village. Under such circumstances, the student’s life became much what she chose to make it, within certain broad limits laid down by the college discipline. In Northampton, where Smith College is placed, students of the college may take part in bazaars, tableaux, and plays for churches and city charities. They may do regular work in the Home Culture Clubs, or under the inspiration of the King’s Daughters Society ; sing to old women, or cook soup in the homes of disabled washerwomen. They may share the hospitality of citizens in Northampton, in Holyoke, in Springfield, and in Amherst. They may see Edwin Booth play, or they may watch the struggle between Yale and Harvard at football. They may go to prize exhibitions and Junior Promenades at the neighboring colleges; nor are they without society life of their own, with literary, dramatic, and charitable development. Wellesley College exercises a most abounding hospitality. Famous people from all over the world are entertained there, and add stimulus and interest to its culture. All students of Vassar College know what distinct interest was added to the daily routine by the visits of Maria Mitchell’s friends, by recurring tours of inspection of curious Englishmen, by the official visits of governors and their staffs.

From another point of view, it may be said that this early discipline suffered from variety. When five young women shared three bedrooms and one study parlor of small size, or three occupied one large room serving for study and sleeping-room, the danger was, not that life would have too little variety, but that it would have too much. To meet this difficulty, as well as for other reasons, doubtless, study hours were appointed and enforced, besides a short period, night and morning, when each student was assigned to some room where she was to be entirely alone. Year by year it became plainer that an hour, more or less, of enforced solitude was not compensation for enforced society the rest of the day, and in Vassar single rooms are now the rule. Each college built since Vassar has gone further in this matter, the circular of the Woman’s College in Cleveland promising a set of three rooms to two students.

This gradual but not slow development has shown clearly that whether or not men can be successfully educated in the mass, women cannot, no matter how carefully the mass is apprehended as feminine. One lesson has been clearly taught by the common experience growing out of the varied aims of the women’s colleges : success varies with the recognition of the student’s individuality. The rest is a matter of comparative indifference. With this assured, the avowed aim may be to make learned missionaries, cultured ladies, or scholarly women, and the result will not so much vary. Indeed, it will not be at all easy to tell the college-bred woman from any other good woman, by simple inspection. It is safe to predict this for the future, because it has been so in the past, notwithstanding the fact that principles have slowly embodied themselves, or have been stumbled upon, or have been taken refuge in, instead of being matters of definite calculation and foresight. On the social side, then, the college for women may claim that it has not unsexed its students, ruined their health, or made them queer. Here, too, it must admit that its methods have been increasingly individual, even at the cost of a reasonably constant proportion of its government lying awake nights, in fear lest the four hundred should all err in the mass, though persuaded to wisdom only one by one. Doubtless much remains still to be done, but the trend of affairs is clear enough to merit the name of development.

In the intellectual life of the woman’s college individualism from the outset is equally evident. An avowed principle of action it certainly was not. On the contrary, the pioneers in the work were much more concerned to find a safe middle course between their own ideals and the supposed prejudices of the public than to embody a pedagogic reform. As a matter of fact, the practical compromises were, from another point of view, educational reforms. On the ground that Greek was possibly too severe for any but the exceptional woman to study, the exceptional and average woman alike were allowed to substitute a modern language for it. Considering that it is the mission of woman to be beautiful, every student was allowed to devote a certain proportion of her time to the practical study of art. So the student of the representative college for women found herself almost at the outset possessed of opportunities for the cultivation of individual tastes afforded only by the most advanced of the colleges for men. In the belief that girls are almost stupidly conscientious, some police work was intermitted, some of it given up altogether. “ Exactly,” is the comment, “ the standard of scholarship and discipline was lowered both in quantity and quality as compared with that of men, and because of the intrinsic lack of ability in women.” For the moment, let this be admitted. Let women, like the sailors in Sindbad’s immortal fifth voyage, make the most of their cocoanuts. Practically, the colleges for women have already done so, for with these insults they have pocketed good round sums in tuition fees. They are a mercantile success. They stand well with the public, and have longer class rolls than they ever expected. It is an edifying fact, too, that every one of them is doing more serious work and more of it than it hoped for in the beginning. Comparison of the catalogues of early years with those of the present courses will show differences in numbers and in the ground covered amounting to little less than transformation. With every decade the work has become more efficient, and more extensive. This is due partly to the fact that women are no longer taught in the spirit of Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. There is little wild surmise about their discipline at present. Most of those who have to do with them have given up feeling as if they were perpetually on the brink of discovery, and have contented themselves with treating women provisionally, as a good working hypothesis. Indeed, ever since those few months of breathless tension when it was a question whether the experiment would work at all, the woman’s college has been less hampered and embarrassed in its development than might have been looked for. The general public and its immediate patrons have been less exacting as well as less prejudiced than was feared. Newspaper wit has sometimes been provoking, but it has not kept away students nor interfered with the development of the elective system. In the early days and ever since, Dr. Raymond’s wisdom in associating a preparatory course with Vassar has been seriously questioned. Whatever the final judgment on this subject may be, it must be admitted that there was some general advantage in securing a chance to show what sort of preparation could be assured under favorable circumstances. Besides this, the college virtually controlled the bulk of its preparation for a series of years, and so was able to modify its course of study without fear of objection on the score of disturbance in the preparation. Other colleges were able to profit by Vassar’s example. By one means or another they have all now managed to secure what are practically their own terms. Whether it has been the whim of the public to indulge them, or whether they have not been thought worthy of opposition, becomes almost indifferent, in view of the fact that this freedom from interference has enabled them to experiment in peace, and to make their reforms, for the most part, by a stroke of the pen. So the preparation department at Vassar went; so also its time-honored scheme of three studies five days in the week, for half the year; in such quiet the literary and scientific courses at Smith were ushered in ; with so little outcry have some of the salient features of Bryn Mawr been incorporated.

In the woman’s college, from the first, there has been neither orthodox nor heterodox, but each has done what seemed good in its own eyes. Variety of aim and result has been the natural outcome. A woman’s college may be officered by women, or by men and women; or it may have its resident officers women, and depend for instruction in some studies upon non-resident men. This variety is impressive to a superficial observer ; it confuses the careful student at a certain stage of his investigations. He can hardly believe that the phenomenon he examines has any fixed form or any stable character. What is the college spirit ? where is the true collegiate discipline ? he asks. Is it to be found in the group system of Bryn Mawr, in the three courses of Smith, the two of Wellesley, the degree without Greek of Vassar, or the conventional Latin, Greek, and mathematics for half the course, with practically free choice for the rest ? In any, in all, in proportion as they keep themselves healthfully tentative and meet individual needs; not the needs of selfoccupied, self-deceived, self-satisfied human atoms, but the needs of the individual as determined by an enlightened psychology.

The college for women must solve the problem of education at first hand. To that end, it must cut loose from the traditions of men, not because they are men’s, nor indeed because they are traditions, but because the best men have no saving faith in them. It would require a good deal of intellectual boldness, at the present day, to assert that the superlative in education, represented by our leading colleges for men, is even remotely suggestive of anything absolute. Why insist upon sharing the wreck of educational dogma ? Why insist upon ranking as “ advantages ” the under-inspiration of our under-influenced, overmarked, and over-examined young men ? In its almost total exemption from the practical embarrassments of tradition and superstition, the work in a woman’s college offers an ideal field for experiment. Here alone, perhaps, exist the conditions for the most thorough-going cultivation of the teacher, for the speediest extermination of the martinet. There is little to hope from the woman’s college in the direction of restoring a fixed meaning to the Bachelor’s degree. Instead of trying to establish some one of its various forms and stages as permanent, its aim will be more and more to make the discipline perfectly elastic, while of equal efficiency, at any point of application. The leading colleges for women have never been orthodox on this point. Vassar gives its degree without Greek ; Smith offers three degrees, — in arts, in science, and in letters ; Bryn Mawr adopts the group system ; and Wellesley otters two courses. In view of the considerations pressing upon the governments of colleges for men, it will not seem strange that the less embarrassed position of the faculties in women’s colleges has enabled them from the outset to take more liberal views of the length of the college course, the value of strict class division, the importance of routine. But the college for women will have to go further. What has been to some extent matter of chance, often of regret, will have to become matter of principle. The ideal of a liberal education as comprising certain things that everybody must know must be definitely abandoned. In like manner, the conception of certain studies as characteristically ornamental must be relegated to mythology. The present decade has proved, if proof were needed, that the most serious branches are capable of being worked up into a varnish as idea-proof as if they were ornamental. The number of things that every welleducated person ought to know must still undergo indefinite attenuation. Pack the course as close as the division of labor and the coöperation and subordination of departments will permit, but stop there: the student’s mind is a republic of powers, not a receiving vault.

Among what Mr. Venn would call “ the interesting results ” given to the world in Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler’s Educational Review is the generalization that women are prone to minute requirements in teaching, that their discipline tends to punctilio. If this be unqualifiedly true, the education of more women would increase the evils we suffer from. But it must be remembered that the bulk of these teachers are not graduates of women’s colleges, but of normal schools, academies, and seminaries. The desire of the self-educated teacher, or of one from some other of these organizations, to prove herself every bit as good as a college-bred woman often leads, as is well known, to an emphasis of routine supposed to be peculiarly collegiate. From a certain medical college for women comes the testimony of a woman’scollege graduate, and a candidate for honors in the medical school, that the teachers who bind burdens too heavy to be borne, and who impose for the sake of imposition, are the women who do not hold diplomas from a woman’s college. She herself says, with admirable self-respect, that her woman’s-college training enables her to meet their requirements, but her woman’s-college conscience protests all the time that it is a sin. She would prefer to take a larger proportion of her honors in something besides dead strain. The character of the women’s colleges in this respect has been marked by a steady growth. In the early days of Vassar, the close of the semester was the signal for reviews, written examinations, and oral examinations with visitors. The visitors went first, then the oral examinations. The present usage hears hardly an analogical resemblance to the old one. It is dreadful only to the froward.

The woman’s college is in danger from its own success. Its growth has been unprecedented and unexpected; to a certain extent inexplicable. Among those who have been attracted is the social being. She would naturally find her proper place in the fashionable finishing school, it might be thought. But she chooses college, as likewise does her prototype, the business man. They are alike in many points. Both are admirably competent and limited. Because they are competent they succeed in passing examinations for entrance to college, and term examinations afterwards; because they are limited the examinations are necessary; and because they worship their limitations they are a menace to scholarship. Nevertheless they have rights, and rights in the college, and a clear discrimination of these rights is due them. At present the entire relation is ill adjusted. The social being is perfectly certain of her ultimate aims, but is quite at sea as regards those of scholars. She does not appreciate the fact that her seventy-five per cent ambitions are eternally different from intellectual aspiration, — in short, that she is a drag; nor indeed has the college appreciated this until a comparatively recent date. It is becoming daily more evident that some adjustment is necessary to secure their rights to the two contrasted types of student. The distinction between required and elective work afforded the college adequate protection for a considerable time. But now the better preparation and the desire to have what anybody else enjoys combine to make the average student inconveniently experimental. The result reverses St. Paul’s dilemma. The weakness is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. The free growth of the scholar is obstructed, she hardly knows why. The mediocre performance of the society girl does not give satisfaction, but she firmly declares the injustice of finding fault with her. By honor divisions, by group systems, or by a compact course of essentials, the needs of one of these classes would be met, and free scope left for the other. The whole course must not be subject to the friction from which it suffers at present. Then, again, the college for women has not made the most of its almost autocratic power. It is doubtful whether any other educational movement has had such generous and unquestioning support. In spite of all theoretical opposition, and in spite of a certain air of latent criticism, the colleges for women have had their own way.

The time has come when they ought to honor this spontaneous recognition by taking it for granted. It is perhaps hardly just to say that the woman’s college has ever followed public opinion to its own hurt: but in any event it must now lead, definitely and aggressively. Finally, it must clearly perceive and thoroughly accept the realities of its position, foremost among which is its costliness. However rich the return they bring, and however economical in the true sense, therefore, the outlay may seem, it must be admitted that large sums of money have been spent by the women’s colleges. Nor can it be denied that even larger ones will be required in the future. For the success of the experiments that the college is to try, and for which, to a considerable extent, it exists, the best teachers must be had. At present, teaching women is not so attractive to men as teaching men, other things being equal. For the immediate future, therefore, it is essential that other things be unequal, salaries and equipage particularly in their favor.

At this point the reader probably feels that a very satisfactory demonstration has been offered of the straight road that leads to coeducation. Granted that the woman’s college has the lead in its freedom of experiment, it cannot hope to keep that forever, and afterwards what ground is there for its separate existence ? A very simple one, and one capable of expression in a single word, — taste. Without pressing too far the interpretation of the phrase about the still air of delightful studies, or insisting upon the breathing - space provided by four years of exemption from certain of the experiences more imminent in the companionship of men, it is safe to say that there will always be women who will prefer, if they must study away from home, to do so in the society of women rather than of men. There are preferences for all sorts of exceptional and possibly inexplicable things. The woman’s college is neither markedly exceptional nor inexplicable, and if it is true to itself its future is assured. In the past, embarrassed as its workings have been by misunderstanding and misadjustment, its history has been most honorable. It has revolutionized the intellectual training of women without making them invalids or bluestockings. It has made them wiser and happier. It remains to complete the work by more adequately providing for the liberal education of the average woman, for the scholarship of the exceptional one.

Mary A. Jordan.