education of both boys and girls overwhelmingly in the hands of women
teachers. In no other country of the world has this ever been the case,
and its influence upon women’s education has been very great. The five
years of the civil war, which drained all the northern and western
states of men, caused women teachers to be employed in the public and
private schools in large numbers, and in the first reports of the
national bureau of education, organized after the war, we see that there
were already fewer men than women teaching in the public schools of the
United States. This result proved not to be temporary, but permanent,
and from 1865 until the present time not only the elementary teaching of
boys and girls but the secondary education of both has been increasingly
in the hands of women[3]. When most of the state universities of the
west were founded they were in reality scarcely more than secondary
schools supplemented, in most cases, by large preparatory departments.
Girls were already being educated with boys in all the high schools of
the west, and not to admit them to the state universities would have
been to break with tradition. Women were also firmly established as
teachers in the secondary schools and it was patent to all thoughtful
men that they must be given opportunities for higher education, if only
for the sake of the secondary education of the boys of the country.[4]
The development of women’s education in the east has followed a
different course because there were in the east no state universities,
and the private colleges for men had been founded before women were
suffered to become either pupils or teachers in schools. The admission
of women to the existing eastern colleges was, therefore, as much an
innovation as it would have been in Europe. The coeducation of men and
women in colleges, and at the same time the college education of women,
began in Ohio, the earliest settled of the western states. In 1833
Oberlin collegiate institute (not chartered as a college until 1850) was
opened, admitting from the first both men and women. Oberlin was at that
time, and is now, hampered by maintaining a secondary school as large as
its college department, but it was the first institution for collegiate
instruction in the United States where large numbers of men and women
were educated together, and the uniformly favorable testimony of its
faculty had great influence on the side of coeducation. In 1853 Antioch
college, also in Ohio, was opened, and admitted from the beginning men
and women on equal terms. Its first president, Horace Mann, was one of
the most brilliant and energetic educational leaders in the United
States, and his ardent advocacy of coeducation, based on his own
practical experience, had great weight with the public.[5] From this
time on it became a custom, as state universities were opened in the far
west, to admit women. Utah, opened in 1850, Iowa, opened in 1856,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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