Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions
The present permitted but unacknowledged presence
of women at Leipzig and other universities on the Continent, was thus
antedated in the West.
Occasionally one of these students, spurred by what she considered the
demands of her self-respect, made formal application for regular
admission to the college; and not a few of our Western colleges became
co-educational by these natural, easy, and noiseless approaches.
The manner in which the desire of one woman for a college education has
transformed a men’s into a co-educational college, is illustrated in the
history of the State University of Indiana. Miss Sarah P. Morrison
wished to enter college, and began agitating the question of opening the
State University to women. Mr. Isaac Jenkinson of Richmond, Ind., tells
the whole pregnant story thus briefly. He writes me:
“I was a member of the board of trustees in 1866, when Miss Morrison’s
appeal was made to the trustees. (Miss Morrison had for several years
been agitating the question among her friends.) I at once offered a
resolution admitting young women on equal terms with young men, but I
had no support whatever in the board at that time; at a following
session the same year, my resolution was adopted by a vote of 4 in
favor, to 3 against it.”
Many colleges in the West had from the beginning a “female course” much
like the “ladies’ course” at Oberlin. This course was, like the
preparatory department, a way of approach for the more ambitious. The
story of one is, with a change of names, the story of many such
colleges. The following from “A Report on the Position of Women in
Industries and Education in the State of Indiana,”[12] illustrates the
function of the “ladies course” in facilitating co-education.
“Butler University at Irvington, Ind., founded in 1855, admitted women
as students from the outset, but at first only into what was denominated
its female course. In its laudable endeavor to adapt its requirements to
an intermediate class of beings, the university, in its ‘female course’
substituted music for mathematics and French for Greek. Few young women
availed themselves of this ‘course’ and it was utterly repudiated by
Demia Butler, a daughter of Ovid Butler, the founder of the university,
and a gentleman of most enlightened views concerning woman’s place in
life. Miss Butler, upon her own petition, indorsed by her father,
entered the university in 1858, and graduated from what was then known
as the ‘male course’ in 1862. From that time the ‘female course’ became
less popular, and in 1864 was formally discontinued.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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