well say a girl's being born into a family turns the boys out of doors. It rather strengthens the home attraction. So in the university. I believe there is not a professor or student here who would not, for good and solid reasons, fight for the system." President Warren of Boston University, lately the recipient of, £200,000, wrote: "The only opponents of coëducation I have ever known are persons who know nothing about it practically, and whose difficulties are all speculative and imaginary. Men are more manly and women more womanly when concerted in a wholly human society than when educated in a half-human one."
President White of Cornell wrote: "I regard the 'annex' for women in our colleges as a mere make-shift and step in the progress toward the full admission of women to all college classes, and I think that this is a very general view among men who have given unprejudiced thought to the subject. Having now gone through one more year, making twelve in all since women were admitted, I do not hesitate to say that I believe their presence here is good for us in every respect."
Professor Moses Coit Tyler of Cornell said: "My observation has been that under the joint system the tone of college life has grown more earnest, more courteous and refined, less flippant and cynical. The women are usually among the very best scholars, and lead instead of drag, and their lapses from good health are rather, yes, decidedly, less numerous than those alleged by the men. There is a sort of young man who thinks it not quite the thing, you know, to be in a college where women are; and he goes away, if he can, and I am glad to have him do so. The vacuum he causes is not a large one, and his departure is more than made up by the arrival in his stead of a more robust and manlier sort."
The only objectors to coëducation were from those colleges which had never tried it; President Porter of Yale thought it a suitable method for post-graduate classes, and President Seeley for a course of "lower grade" than Amherst. President Cutler of Adelbert College made an able report, showing that the progress of the age is towards coëducation. Only fifty-three Protestant colleges, founded since 1830, exclude women; while 156 coëducational institutions have been established since that date.
Some of the trustees thought it desirable to imitate Yale,[1] and others felt that they knew what studies are desirable for woman better than she knew herself! When the vote was taken, to their honor be it said, it was twelve to six, or two to one, in favor of coëducation. The girls celebrated this just and manly decision by a banquet.
The inauguration of the women's crusade at this time (1874) in Ohio created immense excitement, not only throughout that State, but it was the topic for the pulpit and the press all over the nation. Those identified with the woman suffrage movement, while deeply interested in the question of temperance, had no sympathy with what they felt to be a desecration of womanhood and of the religious element in woman. They felt that the fitting place for petitions and appeals was in the halls of legislation, to senators and congressmen, rather than rumsellers and drunkards in the dens of vice and the public thoroughfares. It was pitiful to see the faith of women in God's power to effect impossibilities. Like produces like in the universe of matter and
- ↑ But even old Yale has to succumb to the on-sweeping tide of equal chances to women, as will be seen by the following Associated Press item in the New York Sun of October 2, 1885: "New Haven, Conn., Oct. 1.—Miss Alice B. Jordin, of Coldwater, Mich., a graduate of the academic and law departments of the University of Michigan, entered the Yale law school to-day. She is the first woman ever entered in any department of Yale outside of the art school.
