“Let Us Not Look Regretfully on the Past”: Clara Bewick Colby and Midwestern Women’s Early Coeducation at the University of Wisconsin

[Errata]

Correction [12.02.21]:Edits were made by the author post-publication. Click here to see the updated version .

One hundred and fifty years ago, on a June afternoon in circa 1869, six young women held their collegiate commencement before a large crowd filling the assembly chamber of the Wisconsin state capitol, just a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin. ¹They were not the first women to graduate from the University, but they were the first to earn the same bachelor’s degrees as men students from the College of Arts. In her valedictory speech for the women baccalaureates, twenty-three-year-old Clara Dorothy Bewick lavished praise on her classmates for their social and intellectual companionship, on the citizens of Wisconsin for supporting the University, and on her instructors for their dedication to the students’ improvement. UW regents received her special praise for their “recognition of woman’s wants and woman’s capabilities.” In closing, Bewick remarked, “let us not look regretfully on the past. A broader and a nobler life lies before us, let us hasten to make it our own.” ²

While Clara Bewick’s address was appropriately ceremonial, her closing words hinted at a larger story: this group of women graduates had successfully overcome four chaotic years of university reorganization that at first forwarded but then attempted to set back women’s coeducation in Wisconsin in a failed effort to establish a separatist eastern style of women’s collegiate education. By exploring women’s coeducation through the experiences of midwestern college student life in the 1860s, this article examines collegiate coeducation as a signature midwestern experience in the mid-nineteenth century and contributes to a historiography of women’s collegiate coeducation that has too often focused on single-sex women’s colleges, eastern colleges, women faculty or administrators, or the experiences of women students from the Progressive Era forward. It additionally uses gender as a category of analysis to add knowledge about midwestern women college students to the growing body of midwestern history. The biographical approach used here further attends to Linda Eisenmann’s call to establish life histories of collegiate women to amplify work begun by Barbara Miller Solomon in her landmark study In the Company of Educated Women. ³Finally, it briefly considers how opportunities for women’s higher education in the Midwest contributed to the positive trajectory of American feminism, especially through the contributions of coeducated midwestern women leaders like Clara Bewick Colby.

Collegiate Coeducation and the American Midwest

Women’s access to higher education is a distinctive midwestern experience, foundational to the development of collegiate education during the mid-nineteenth century. But why the Midwest? Doris Malkmus answers that question by arguing that collegiate coeducation developed “in the antebellum Midwest as a result of conditions of early settlement, rural gender values, and widespread demand for a practical education for ordinary citizens.” ⁴Scholars point to the fundamental effects of the Land Ordinance of 1785, which set aside one section of land from each surveyed township for a public school to educate frontier children, and to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which governed the territory from which the state of Wisconsin would emerge, that additionally set aside two sections of each township for establishing a university and declared: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” ⁵Upon its statehood, Wisconsin was granted one section in each township for public schools and two entire townships for the use and support of a university. Thus, the University of Wisconsin was established in 1848, although it was not coeducational at its beginning. ⁶

Women’s enlarged gender roles in the mid-nineteenth-century Midwest contributed to the region’s practice of coeducation. Although domestic pursuits were still associated with and valued by women, midwestern gender roles were flexible. Economic security was only ensured with all hands contributing to the various forms of labor required to run a...