History Of Co-Education in USA

The roots of collegiate coeducation reach back to the years before the Civil War, when women first pined access to Oberlin and a few other colleges on terms nearly equal to men. This access owed much to the efforts of the early women's rights movement, whose leaders declared that coeducation was an essential precondition of woman's emancipation from her "separate sphere." Disappointed by the education provided at the female secondary schools of their day, early feminists feared that separate education for women would inevitably be inferior to that of men. The only way of ensuring equality, they argued, was to insist that women and men be educated together.

Coeducation appealed to the leaders of the early women's movement not simply on academic grounds but on sexual grounds as well. In their view, the segregation of young men and women led to an undue preoccupation with sex; whereas the joint education of the sexes created a more natural and therefore healthier sexual atmosphere. "If the sexes were educated together," argued Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "we should have the healthy, moral and intellectual stimulus of sex ever quickening and refining all the faculties, without the undue excitement of senses that results from novelty in the present system of isolation." Coeducation, then, promised intellectual emancipation and sexual well-being.


Women's early success at Oberlin persuaded many early women's rights leaders that coeducation would soon be achieved throughout the country. Lucy Stone summed up their views in an address at the 1856 Women's Rights Convention in New York City. "Our demand that Harvard and Yale colleges should admit women, though not yet yielded, only waits for a little more time. And while they wait, numerous petty 'female colleges' have sprung into being, indicative of the justice of our claim that a college education should be granted to women. Not one of these female colleges . . . meets the demands of the age, and so will eventually perish."


Stone could not have been more wrong in her specific prediction. Harvard and Yale did not admit women on equal terms with men for more than a century, and female colleges, far from perishing, proliferated and flourished in the years that followed her speech. Yet in a more general sense Stone was right. Despite the resistance of Harvard and Yale (and of other male preserves, especially in the East and South), by the end of the nineteenth century coeducation had become the predominant form of higher education in this country, and today more than 95 percent of all college women are enrolled in coeducational institutions.

What remains uncertain is how fully coeducation lived up to the hopes of its early advocates. Scholars have written extensively about the history of higher education, but they have directed little attention to the impact of its predominant form on women's lives. Only in the past decade have historians begun to mine the archives of the colleges and universities and to describe women's experience in a number of different institutions. Much remains to be done, but some patterns have begun to emerge.

Though advocates of coeducation achieved some success in the antebellum period, their most important gains came in the wake of the Civil War, a war that left unprecedented numbers of young women faced with the necessity of supporting themselves. By 1872 ninety-seven colleges and universities had decided to admit women. These institutions varied widely in educational quality and purpose, and most were inferior to the eastern male colleges. But a significant and growing number of institutions--including Cornell, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan, Boston University, Wisconsin, and Berkeley--- did more than any educational institution ever had to give women the same education offered to men.