undoubtedly serious objection to intimate association at the most
impressionable period of a girl’s life with many young men from all
parts of the country and of every possible social class. From every
point of view it is undesirable to have the problems of love and
marriage presented for decision to a young girl during the four years
when she ought to devote her energies to profiting by the only
systematic intellectual training she is likely to receive during her
life. Then, too, for the present, much of the culture and many of the
priceless associations of college life are to be obtained, whether for
men or women, only by residence in college halls, and no coeducational,
or even affiliated, colleges have as yet organized for their students
such a complete college life as the independent woman’s college. So long
as this preference, and the grounds for it, exist, we must see to it
that separate colleges for women are no less good than colleges for men.
In professional schools, including the graduate school of the faculty of
philosophy, coeducation is even at present almost the only method. There
are in the United States only 4 true graduate schools for men closed to
women, and only 1 independent graduate school maintained for women
offering three years’ consecutive work leading to the degree of Ph. D.
There is every reason to believe that as soon as large numbers of women
wish to enter upon the study of theology, law and medicine, all the
professional schools now existing will become coeducational.
=A modified vs. an unmodified curriculum=—The progress of women’s
education, as we have traced it briefly from its beginning in the
coeducational college of Oberlin in 1833, and the independent woman’s
college of Vassar in 1865, has been a progress in accordance with the
best academic traditions of men’s education. In 1870 we could not have
predicted the course to be taken by the higher education of women; the
separate colleges for women might have developed into something wholly
different from what we had been familiar with so long in the separate
colleges for men. A female course in coeducational colleges in which
music and art were substituted for mathematics and Greek might have met
the needs of the women students. After thirty years of experience,
however, we are prepared to say that whatever changes may be made in
future in the college curriculum will be made for men and women alike.
After all, women themselves must be permitted to be the judges of what
kind of intellectual discipline they find most truly serviceable. They
seem to have made up their minds, and hereafter may be trusted to see to
it that an inferior education shall not be offered to them in women’s
colleges, or elsewhere, under the name of a modified curriculum.
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