Trailblazers for Women's Education

Last year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani girl who risked her life to get an education. American girls take their rights to an education for granted, and that’s the way it should be, but the path to women’s education, even in this country, was a checkered one.

Our foremothers didn’t have to contend with barbarians, but they did face prejudice.

Many trailblazers fought for women’s education. Maybe because I’m a writer, my favorite advocate is Louisa May Alcott. If you’ve read Alcott’s classics, you know she believed women should have access to the same education as men, which meant co-education. The fictional Plumfield School for Boys enrolled girls as well.

Even during colonial days when a woman’s place was firmly in the home, the daughters of the well-to-do received a good education. Many influential fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, believed their daughters should be well educated. As he explained why his daughter, Martha, should receive a thorough education: “The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead, I calculate at about fourteen to one, and the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and directions without assistance.” Translation: Odds are she'll marry a blockhead and have to depend on herself. It turned out that he was right. Martha's husband went insane, and she was responsible for her family. 

Co-education wasn’t a radical idea, even in the 1800s, and we can thank the settlers for that. As towns founded their small schools, they couldn’t find enough men to teach. They discovered women could teach just as well as men and be paid less. Since the teacher was female, it seemed logical for her to teach both boys and girls. The one who deserves most of the credit for the expansion of American education is the school marm. This is a replica of an 1882 school in Belmont County Ohio, and it was typical for the day.

By 1880, most primary and secondary schools across the country were co-educational, and women colleges opened in the north and south. The first college to admit both sexes was chartered in 1833 in Oberlin, Ohio; and incidentally, was the first to admit all races. Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, was founded in 1836 as the Georgia Female College. It still bears the name of Wesleyan, though it now admits both sexes.

The elite colleges of the Northeast resisted co-education, although many suffragists like Alcott resided there. This information both surprised and irritated me. You'd think as liberal as the Northeast now is, they'd have been leaders in higher education. I was doing this research because I write historical romance, and the protagonist of my western series had to be well educated. In fact, I wanted her to go to Harvard. I certainly couldn't afford to send my child to Harvard, and it looked like I couldn't even send my fictional daughter there. The facts weren't cooperating with me.

Then miraculously, I discovered Harvard conducted an experiment in the early 1880s whereby they admitted a number of women to see if they could hack it, so to speak. The courses were taught by Harvard professors in a separate building called the Annex.

I had the greenlight for my series, The Annex Mail-Order Brides. This is what Harvard looked like during that time.

My heroine and her three friends enrolled, but the friends became disillusioned for various reasons and traveled west to find husbands. They never received degrees, but all carried a Harvard education, and they discovered western men weren't intimated by educated women. Probably because they'd been taught by a school marm.

The real students of the Harvard Annex didn’t accomplish their goals. The administrators decided women students would be too distracting to their men, and the Annex later became Radcliffe College for Women. Harvard didn’t award degrees to women until 1963.

I hope this look at the past reminds us America wouldn't have become the land of opportunity without educational opportunity for all.

Do you think the quality of education is important for equal opportunity?

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