Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions
Sometimes the two townships of land have been given _en bloc_, and some
times they have been so given as to permit the location of university
lands in different portions of the State; sometimes they have been kept
as an endowment of the State University; sometimes they have been in
part devoted to the founding of the university. But in every State and
Territory in the above list, a university exists which owes its origin
and its maintenance in part to the government of the United States.
A study of the history of the State Universities shows that in many
States a strange hostility existed toward them. A feeling that by
appropriating lands for their endowment, the general government was
encouraging the growth of an aristocratic class of learned men, seems
not to have been uncommon in the early days. This appears to be one
valid explanation of the reluctance of State Legislatures to make
generous or permanent appropriations for the support of such
universities.
The truth is, however, that the State Universities are the most
democratic of all the institutions of higher learning; this truth is now
generally perceived, and the institutions are growing proportionally
popular. It is due to their necessarily democratic nature that they are
now without exception open to women. Their chief feeders are the public
high schools, with which they must maintain direct and constant
communication. Their chief financial support comes directly and equally
from all property-holding citizens; either by appropriation from the
public treasury, varying in amount with each Legislature, or by a fixed,
special tax, of a certain percentum of all assessed property. Finding
their students in the public high schools, which in the West are almost
universally co-educational, and their support in the public treasury,
into which flow taxes upon the property of women and girls as well as
upon that of men and boys, the wonder is that the State Universities did
not from their origin admit women as students.
The following table will show when each State University was chartered,
opened, and opened to women. The list of States in this table is
presented as above in the chronological order of their admission to the
Union.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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