Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West

Introduction

prologue With the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, many states in the Midwest and West chartered land-grant colleges following the Civil War. Because of both progressive ideologies and economic necessity, these institutions admitted women from their early beginnings. Although some historians have downplayed coeducational experiences at land-grant colleges as mere reinforcement of women’s traditional roles through domestic science course work and exclusion from male clubs and activities, this study shows that women students took a much more proactive role regarding their own inclusion on these campuses. Although women students did not feel complete acceptance by their male peers and professors in the land-grant environment , many of them successfully negotiated greater gender inclusion for themselves and their fellow female students. This is not so much the story of the access to higher coeducation as it is the practices of coeducation at land-grant colleges. Regarding the interplay between separation and inclusion for women students, this book examines various areas of contested gendered space, including course work, heteroand homosociality, athletic and military activities, and feminist reforms such as suffrage activism, journalism, and political leadership. Rather than being venues for female exclusion, western land-grant colleges offered opportunities for women students to determine new areas of participation and inclusion for themselves within traditionally male environments. As a result, women land-grant students were able to effect change on many fronts of feminist reform by challenging gender restrictions both on campuses and in the nation at large. Land-grant colleges in the nineteenth-century American West were among the first public institutions in the world to practice coeducation. The admission of female students was a new and revolutionary experiment, Introduction 1 2 | introduction heralded by progressive reformers as a balanced and healthy educational ideal, as opposed to the gender-segregated colleges and universities of the East. Land-grant colleges began educating men and women together at a time when coeducation still endured a heavy debate, especially by critics such as Dr. Edward H. Clarke, whose anti-coeducation treatise Sex in Education; or a Fair Chance for the Girls (1873) argued that women could not endure the strain and stress of higher education with men because increased blood flow to the brain would deprive female reproductive organs of needed circulation.1 The book went through seventeen printings between 1873 and the end of the century. In spite of objections by Clarke and others who believed that women were not intellectually or physically suited for mixed education, the land-grant institutions proceeded to enact coeducation with enthusiasm. Land-grant participants accepted women’s intellectual equality, at least in general, but they nevertheless struggled to work out the actual practices of mixing the sexes. In examining land-grant college environments between 1870 and 1918, one might expect to encounter either incredible progress for women or conservative attempts to limit their activities and participation to a traditional female sphere. The surprise would be in finding neither, and both. While land-grant women encountered a culture of ideological and physical separation, especially through the reinforcement of the traditional feminine expectations, these women also found ways to challenge the separation by rejecting traditional roles or simply adapting them to their own purposes. Out of this interplay between separation and inclusion, women students succeeded in negotiating new spaces of gendered inclusion and equality at land-grant colleges. early beginnings On a windy March day in 1869, twelve hundred people met on the treeless campus of the new Iowa Agricultural College. A few buildings and the small village of Ames, population 650, served as a backdrop to the gathering of students, farmers, politicians, and reporters. Hosts and hostesses of this inaugural gathering of the college had prepared food for the visitors, but the turnout greatly exceeded expected attendance. The mood was electric as locals, visiting reporters, and politicians waited to hear Pres. Adonijah Strong Welch’s inaugural address. Iowans also looked forward to meeting introduction | 3 Welch’s wife, Mary Beaumont Welch, an educated and cultured woman who came to Ames with ideas about the need to provide women with practical and scientific education in the West. President Welch began his speech with a recognition of the great experiment that was about to unfold at Iowa State. He committed the college to “two great and salutary educational reforms.” First, instead of focusing solely on the classical curriculum of traditional European and eastern universities...