which was offered to men. It is a significant fact that the early objections to it were primarily women's supposed physical inability and the danger to womanly character. The traditional curriculum was as well adapted to the needs of women as to the needs of men in nonprofessional occupations. It was rightly felt that there is a virtue in culture, irrespective of the aims of the individual.
By the Morrill Land Grant of 1862 coeducation was assured, potentially at least, in one institution in every State. The other provisions of the act, compelling the teaching of agriculture and the mechanic arts, also indicated the rise of a new and broader idea in education. The colleges thus founded were not intended primarily for rich men's children, but for the sons and daughters of the great middle class. Coeducation seems to have been a concession to the American sense of fairness. If the farmer's boy should have a school, then the farmer's girl must have a school too; it was obviously cheaper to educate them together, while social tradition, less developed among the farming classes and in the States west of New England, offered no obstacle to this purpose. While, therefore in New England coeducation was still mentioned with horror as an impropriety,[1] in the more crude and democratic West it was having a natural and wholesome growth.
The logical consequences of coeducation in these institutions were evidently not anticipated. The boy who went to the State college took lectures in scientific agriculture or mechanical engineering, with so many hours a day on the farm or in the shop, under a trained instructor; the girl who went to college took whatever was considered strictly ornamental in the course—French, literature, ancient history, rhetoric, with a certain number of hours per day of domestic work. But the hours of sweeping, bed-making, and dish-washing were illuminated by no application of scientific principles from the mind of a trained instructor. In fact, nobody knew very well what she was there for; it seemed only fair that she should "have a chance too," but a chance for what? Why, to marry, of course! But nobody ever said that aloud, and nobody thought of adapting her training to her probable and desirable business in life.
The West had solved the problem of woman's education by offering her the same curriculum under essentially the same conditions of life and discipline as those of men. The disasters to coeducation which had been prophesied had not occurred. Girls
- ↑ Young men and young women have been taught together in the Maine Wesleyan Seminary, Kent's Hill, Maine, one of the best known classical and preparatory schools in New England, since at least 1828, and in the seminary at Cazenovia, N. Y., since 1830.—Editor Popular Science Monthly.
