Coeducational Colleges and Universities

Coeducational Colleges and Universities

Coeducation refers to the education of males and females at the same institution. The founding of Oberlin College in 1833 is generally recognized as the beginning of coeducational higher education in the United States, although it was not until 1841 that Oberlin granted to women the first college degrees equal to those granted to men. Prior to this time, men and women received their higher education at single-sex institutions, with male-only institutions greatly outnumbering those available to women. Some new small colleges, especially in the Midwest, quickly followed Oberlin’s lead, as did the University of Iowa, which has continuously admitted women, as well as men, since its opening in 1855. However, coeducation was not adopted by already existing institutions until the Civil War when their shortage of students prompted some all-male institutions to admit women for the first time in their histories. Some of these institutions reverted back to male-only policies after the war was over, but there were economic, ideological, and political developments in the following 150 years that fostered both the trend toward coeducation in newly founded colleges and universities and the trend toward giving women access to what had formerly been male-only institutions. Chief among these were the larger enrollments and reduced costs that resulted from educating women in the same institutions as men; the struggles of feminist movements for gender equity; and the legal framework governing higher education in the United States.

Coeducation was not unopposed, however. From the early 1800s onward, controversy raged about what form of higher education, if any, was necessary or suitable for women. The exact content of these debates varied across place and time, but it is possible to identify three major themes that characterized most of the opposition to coeducation. These themes concerned women’s access to higher education, women’s place within coeducational institutions (once they gained access), and women’s treatment within coeducational institutions—especially in contrast to the treatment of men. Opposition to women’s Access ranged from nineteenth-century arguments against allowing women to receive any form of higher education to subsequent attempts to bar them from specific institutions. Efforts to confine women to “appropriate” places within coeducational institutions began at the turn of the twentieth century and continued until the 1970s when concerns shifted to the ways in which women were being treated in those institutions. Although those who expressed these critical concerns have not stopped the trend toward coeducation, they have made it clear that gaining equal access to institutions of higher education and to all of their programs does not ensure that women and men are receiving equally good educations.

Prior to the Civil War, most institutions of higher education were small, poor, and shortlived. Only two state universities—South Carolina and Virginia—received regular state appropriations. Their student bodies consisted of the sons of the planter aristocracy, rather than a cross section of young men from various social classes. In those two states, as in others, students from more humble backgrounds were more likely to attend denominational colleges established by a large variety of religious groups. These colleges proliferated from the 1850s into the 1890s, with many of them being established by missionaries along the ever-moving American frontier and, after the Civil War, in the South among former slave populations.

Because their goal was to provide higher education for all of their church members and converts, religious denominations often tried to provide education for both men and women. In older, more populated, and wealthier parts of the United States, this effort sometimes took the form of establishing separate institutions for men and, usually later, for women, but in the Midwest and West, and among ex-slaves in the South, denominational colleges were more likely to be coeducational and to have multipurpose curricula, including teacher training, that appealed to women as well as men. Coeducation was no guarantee, however, that denominational or even state institutions would be successful. Nevertheless, the growing demand for schoolteachers during and after the Civil War and the growing willingness of school officials to hire women for these jobs created a need for women’s higher education that could not be met only by women’s colleges which, already by 1870, were greatly outnumbered by coeducational institutions of higher education.

It would be a mistake to assume that the missionaries, religious groups, philanthropic donors, and state legislatures responsible for the proliferation of coeducational institutions were guided by ideologies that favored gender integration and equity. It is more likely that most of them held the traditional views of gender typical of their times and regarded coeducation as more of an economic necessity than a matter of justice. Even the strongest advocates for women’s education often failed to embrace the political goals of the firstwave feminists who were active on behalf of women’s rights, including suffrage, from the 1830s to the 1920s. While it is certainly true that these educational leaders championed women’s rights to higher education, it is also true that they often accepted gender segregation and advocated more protective single-sex, rather than coeducational, colleges for women. To obtain support for their efforts to provide women with high-quality educations, these advocates for women’s colleges often used traditional assumptions about gender differences such as the notion that women were naturally more pious, gentle, and virtuous than men. When coupled with a solid education, they argued, women’s essential goodness could have beneficial influence on sons, husbands, and other men and, through them, on social and political life.

Even those who advocated or wanted access to coeducation made use of arguments based on assumptions about the essential nature of women. The presence of women on campus, it was claimed, would have beneficial effects, including a softening influence, on male students. Because of their daily interactions with women in an educational environment, college men would exhibit better manners than those of the rowdy fraternity boys at some of the established male-only institutions. And under the tutelage of their women peers, college men would also increase their appreciation of the arts, music, and other refinements.

This tendency to defend higher education for women on the grounds that it would improve the lives of men continued into the second half of the twentieth century. When Mabel Newcomer published her history of women’s higher education in 1959, she expressed the belief of her contemporaries—as well as that of earlier historical periods —when she wrote that neither the advocates nor the opponents of college education for women seriously questioned that homemaking is woman’s most important role and went on to claim that attending college actually made women better wives, mothers, housekeepers, and community workers than noncollege women.

Newcomer’s congratulatory stance regarding higher education for women came under attack in the 1960s and 1970s when second-wave feminism emerged as a popular and powerful social movement. Feminists argued that women should not be required to put mothering and other family duties ahead of all other roles, and they should not live their lives through their husbands and children. Echoing a demand made by first-wave feminists more than 100 years earlier, the second-wave feminists said that the time had come to admit women to the elite male universities (and to all other male-only institutions). Once that happened, women’s colleges would have no further justification because they were nothing more than a consequence of gender segregation and traditionalism and they had failed in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to embrace, let alone lead, the fight for political and economic equality for women. Single-sex colleges also were charged with creating an artificial world that prevented women from working closely with men on serious endeavors and from competing with men academically. Although they were viewed as far from perfect alternatives, coeducational colleges and universities were considered to be more reflective of the “real world.” They also became, in the decades leading into the twenty-first century, the sites of much feminist activity and many successes in the battle for equal rights and opportunities.

These successes and the earlier successes of those who promoted coeducation in the 1800s and early 1900s were greatly facilitated by the legal framework for higher education that evolved after the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862. That act affirmed the importance of public higher education by making public lands available to states to endow colleges. Even though the legislation did not specifically list the education of women as one of the goals that public colleges should meet, most parents assumed that Land Grant institutions should educate their daughters as well as their sons, and women gradually established their right to attend. After the funding for public higher education was improved under the second Morrill Act of 1890 and was extended to African Americans, these public institutions underwent considerable expansion and went on to become the largest coeducational institutions in the country.

Legal changes concerned specifically with gender and schooling did not appear at the U.S. federal level until the 1970s. Most important to the struggle for gender equity within public institutions has been Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 which provided that no person in the United States could, on the basis of sex, be subjected to discrimination in any education program or activity receiving financial assistance from the federal government. Despite many efforts by educational institutions to interpret “program or activity” as narrowly as possible, and despite some support for these narrow interpretations by the courts, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, passed over the veto of President Ronald Reagan, specified that Title IX applied to all the operations of a college or university, not only those programs or activities that directly received federal funds.

Another important legal milestone on the road to gender equity in higher education was the law passed in 1975 directing that women be admitted to America’s military service academies in 1976 and thereafter. Also put into the service of coeducation was the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. constitution, which the Supreme Court used as the basis for its decision in 1996 that the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) had to admit women. That decision, in effect, made all U.S. public colleges and universities coeducational and brought to an end the right of any public college or university to bar all women (or all men) from institutional access.

By the time of the VMI decision, almost all private colleges and universities that had begun as male-only institutions had already become coeducational, with Columbia University, in 1983, being the last of the Ivy League colleges to admit women to its undergraduate programs. As was true of most other major men’s universities in the United States, Columbia had begun admitting women to graduate work back in the 1890s, a move that was justified largely on the grounds of the prohibitive cost of trying to establish separate graduate programs for women and was legitimated by the even earlier admission of American women to successful graduate work in Swiss and German universities that served as models for graduate education in the United States.