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3. To Coeducation and Back Again: Gender and Organization at the University of Rochester
- Vanderbilt University Press
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55 3 To Coeducation and Back Again Gender and Organization at the University of Rochester Christine Lundt, Susan L. Poulson, and Leslie Miller-Bernal The history of women at the University of Rochester is noteworthy for the dramatic changes in the ways women have been incorporated. Women’s rights activists, including the famous Susan B. Anthony, and their wealthy allies successfully pressured the university to admit women in 1900. After only a dozen years, however, the university’s president and board of trustees reversed this decision and created a coordinate college for the women students, which lasted until 1955. The decision in 1955 to become coeducational a second time, like the earlier decisions, was not done for reasons of sexual equality, although administrators and trustees often used concerns about gender to justify their policy shifts. Instead, the major concern was what was best for the institution; in the 1950s this translated into policies that the president believed would enhance the university’s reputation in science and research. The placement and organization of the sexes at the University of Rochester reveals a great deal about what shapes an institution of higher education. Internal and external interest groups, concerns about academic prestige, corporate ideals of management, presidential leadership, and prevailing gender norms all influence university policy. The effects of policies are not always intended, however. Coeducation implies a certain level of equality, since all classes and most extracurricular activities are open to women students. Educating women separately from men, through a coordinate arrangement, reduced University of Rochester women students’ access to academic opportunities. At the same time, coordination enabled them to exercise leadership and gave them role models at a time when few women in society had such advantages. In this chapter we discuss reasons that the University of Rochester implemented first coeducation, then coordination, then coeducation again, as well as the implications of these different arrangements for the position of women at the university. CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 55 5/26/04 4:53:25 PM 56 Coeducation before the Late 1960s Early Beginnings: From Single-Sex to Coeducation From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the University of Rochester vacillated between single-sex, coordinate, and coeducation. Rochester was established in 1850 as an all-male institution, like most colleges of its time. The first attempts to integrate women into the university were unsuccessful . In 1851, Azariah Boody, a devout Episcopalian who made his fortune in the railroad industry, and Lewis H. Morgan, a lawyer and one of the founders of modern anthropology, helped establish the Barleywood Female University, Rochester’s first institution of higher education for women. After Barleywood failed in 1853, however, Boody donated the Barleywood land to the University of Rochester.1 In the 1890s, Morgan joined Edward Mott Moore, a wealthy Rochester physician, in a second attempt to open a women’s college. Moore was a well-known founder of Rochester’s public parks and a “lifelong advocate for the higher education of women.”2 Despite their prominence and dedication to their cause, however, Morgan and Moore found insufficient support from the local community and abandoned their efforts. Undaunted by these failures, supporters of coeducation at Rochester continued their efforts and had a breakthrough when a new president, David J. Hill, assumed office in the 1890s. Hill was the former president of Bucknell and had overseen its transition to coeducation.3 Rochester native Susan B. Anthony and her famous cohort, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, asked Hill about the possibility of admitting women to the University of Rochester. He replied that his wife had just given birth to twins and “that if the Creator could risk placing sexes in such near relations, they might with safety walk on the same campus and pursue the same curriculum together.”4 With an administration friendly to the idea of coeducation, local Rochester women campaigned to get women admitted to the university. In 1893, Susan B. Anthony paid for Helen Wilkinson to become the first woman to enter the University of Rochester. President Hill admitted nineteen-year-old Wilkinson as a nonmatriculating full-time student. Wilkinson endured being ignored by the faculty during her first two weeks of classes, as well as being jeered by a good number of the men, especially the football players. She withdrew after two years for reasons of poor health.5 Women’s rights advocates remained determined to bring coeducation to the University of Rochester. In 1898, the board of...