Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions
The colleges, particularly the State universities of the West, are
charged with being defective in their provisions for the development and
culture of the social qualities of their students. Many of them have no
dormitories, and the students upon entering them, women and men alike,
go into boarding-houses or private families, or form co-operative
boarding clubs, according to their own tastes and under conditions of
their own making.
If in these universities students were received for post graduate work
only, no criticism could attach to this custom of leaving every student
to regulate his or her own domestic and social affairs, for such
students are usually mature men and women. But this custom is open to
criticism in institutions, in all of which the majority, and in most of
which all the students, are undergraduates of immature age.
A study of their latest catalogues shows that, excluding the State
universities, most of these institutions which enjoy more than a local
patronage have erected or are contemplating the erection of dormitories
for the accommodation of the young women in attendance upon them.
Although some colleges, as, for example, the Ohio Wesleyan University,
continue to build dormitories large enough to accommodate one or two
hundred young women, there is a tendency favorable to the erection of
less pretentious buildings under the name of hall or cottage, each of
which shall accommodate from twenty to sixty young women. The refinement
both of college life and of subsequent social life would be enhanced by
the multiplication of these homes for moderate numbers of college
women—if each were put under the charge of a woman whose intellectual
culture, stability, and nobleness of character, and experience of life
and the world, made her the evident and acknowledged peer of every
member of the college faculty. But, if these college homes for women
students are placed under the charge of matrons who are expected to
combine motherly kindness and housewifely skill with devout piety, but
in whom no other qualities or attainments are demanded, and if the
matrons are the only women, besides the students, connected with the
institution, the influence of the college home will tend to lower the
ideal of woman’s function in society; to rob the ideal of domestic life
of all intellectual quality; and in general to diminish for young women
the incentives to study.
Every one knows that the strongest stimulus to exertion that young men
experience in college is afforded by their contact with men whose
cultivated talents, whose sound learning, whose successful experience,
and whose rich characters they admire, venerate, and emulate.
The almost universal absence of women from college faculties is a grave
defect in co-educational institutions; and negatively, at least, their
absence has as injurious an influence upon young men as upon young
women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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