Coed Higher Education

The Beginnings of Coeducation

All colleges in the United States were for men only until 1833 when Oberlin College in Ohio opened its doors to women. (The school was opened to Black Americans at the same time.) Female students at Oberlin were treated differently from male students in terms of college regulations, their course of study, their religiously mandated subservience, and the gendered division of required manual labor. Nonetheless, Oberlin's admission of women and Black students was revolutionary for the time.

A few other colleges, for example, Antioch College, followed Oberlin's example by admitting both men and women, but most institutions in the mid-19th century were single-sex. Women who received higher education in the first half of the 19th century usually attended seminaries, a type of institution that was not more religious than most private colleges of the time but that carefully regulated women's behavior and provided higher secondary school and beginning college work. Some of the famous seminaries, including Mount Holyoke (Massachusetts), later became women's colleges.

Coeducation spread rapidly during and after the Civil War, particularly in frontier areas where practical, cheaper education was needed. In 1870, only about two in five women who were enrolled in institutions of higher education attended coeducational colleges and universities; just 10 years later, about three in five did so. Not many young people of either sex—less than 5%—were enrolled in institutions of higher education, however, as it was not seen as useful for many occupations. Some men-only state universities like Wisconsin, as well as some private colleges, admitted women when their enrollments fell due to war or economic recession. The commitment to women students often wavered, depending on who was president of the college or university or who was governor in the case of state institutions. Institutions also experimented with compromises, such as admitting women students only to a Normal Department for training teachers or establishing a separate female college with its own buildings and instructors. Many of these compromises were short lived, however, as coeducation was the cheaper alternative and the results of educating men and women together were not dire, as critics had predicted.

Forces Favoring and Forces Discouraging Coeducation

The 19th-century doctrine of separate spheres—in which men and women were believed to have different roles ordained by God—encouraged the establishment of distinct educational institutions for men and women. Men's colleges aimed at making their students manly, with rugged sports like football. Middle-class White women were believed to be frail; too much study or study of the wrong subjects might endanger their health and, in particular, their reproductive systems, some leading educators and physicians argued. Women's colleges were more likely than coeducational colleges to develop academic programs presumed to be compatible with women's purported limitations and to encourage women students' refinement through music, art, and the study of modern languages like French.

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