Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West

4. Women Students' Sociality: Building Relationships with Men and Women

4 Women Students’ Sociality Building Relationships with Men and Women It does our soul good to see so many women in attendance this term. The boys say it is some inducement to get to chapel now. hesperian student, October 1876 This chapter will examine ways in which four land-grant institutions in the West simultaneously sought to encourage the two opposing forces of separation of the sexes and desirable sociality that would lead to marriage. Most administrators attempted to maintain a strict culture of separation between the sexes, while also allowing and even encouraging proper and appropriate contact between young ladies and gentlemen. Not only did this help to bridle youthful passions, they believed, but it also perpetuated the expectations of women students as wives-in-training. Women students overwhelmingly accepted this separate domestic expectation, along with the social barriers placed between themselves and their male colleagues. Nevertheless, the land-grant environment encouraged a new liberality of social interaction that allowed students to push the boundaries of appropriate sociality and courting rituals in the nineteenth-century American West. One of the inevitable results of coeducation at western land-grants was the increased rate of socialization and marriage among men and women students. For positive or negative, social contact between the sexes was an indisputable outcome of coeducation, and both critics and proponents used this fact to defend their respective causes. Thus, “while the enthusiastic coeducationist was declaiming on the improved morality of the two-sex colleges, his opponent was throwing up his hands at the prospect of dire results.”1 A major argument in favor of coeducation suggested that since 102 women students’ sociality | 103 men and women spent their lives together, then collegiate practice should mirror society’s familial expectations in a healthy and natural way. Advocates stressed the “social interdependence of man and woman” and argued that “since men and women must live together, they should therefore be educated together.”2 This was not merely society’s expectation for men and women. Caroline Dall, in 1861, asserted: “There is, between the sexes, a law of . . . reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when he permits brothers and sisters to nestle about one hearthstone . Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis.”3 For opponents of coeducation, socialization was a danger to the proper separate and moral education of students—especially men,who had a greater responsibility to focus on their studies, achieve professional greatness, and eventually provide for a family.Separate education also guaranteed that women would remain feminine and moral,untainted by the harsh and manly world of men’s higher education.Critics mostly feared that students in a mixed-gender environment became too easily distracted and tempted by associating with the opposite sex: “Opponents of coeducation were overwhelmed with a fear of early and too many marriages,”and the idea that “were girls and boys to study together, flirtations and early marriages would be the inevitable result; the girls would become masculine and unwomanly,and the boys effeminate and unmanly.Co-education would,therefore,lower the standard of morals.”4 Supporters of coeducation claimed the contrary,that when men and women are kept apart,they develop an unnatural longing for what is mysterious and unattainable. Dall believed that where men and women received separate education, the “general abstinence from each other’s society makes the occasion of re-union a period of harmful excitement.”5 And one professor at the coeducational Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, asserted that “love between the sexes cannot be shut in or out by seminary walls” and that by keeping men and women in monastic or conventlike separation,love instead “festered and soured into lust.”6 Social and ideological separation only added to the potential for moral decline and made students “more disorderly,harder to manage,more unreasonable,and every way worse than where the two are united.”Or,as the same Knox teacher so aptly put it,“Horses are known to work quietly in teams, [but] rage and neigh when kept solitary in stalls.”7 Young people were liable to be overcome with passions, especially without 104 | women students’ sociality the tempering of calm, moral, and realistic interaction on a daily basis. Men needed education with women,without any “sentimental halo,”and because “there is no disrespect and scorn of ‘girls...