The Evanston College for Ladies and the Woman’s College of Northwestern 1869-74
Despite the 1869 resolution that directed the president, executive committee, and faculty to work out the details of coeducation, little (if anything) was said about women students at Northwestern during the first year of Haven’s administration. The liberal arts college catalog for 1869–70 did list two women students, Rebecca Hoag and Sarah Rebecca Roland, who were undertaking “selected studies,” and faculty minutes indicate that a Miss Yaples was permitted to enroll as a freshman in January 1870.
List of officers, Women’s Educational Association, 1871
Although the University had declared itself open to women students, it was not rushing to recruit them until it could figure out how to supervise them. Faculty could educate women in the classroom but were not prepared to oversee their nonacademic campus life; clearly, the Haven administration was waiting for the establishment of the Evanston College for Ladies to solve the question of incorporating women into Northwestern. The coordinate school model would neatly meet the needs of both institutions.
The Women’s Educational Association
The idea for the Evanston College for Ladies (ECL) predated Haven’s arrival. Prominent Evanston women—the wives of doctors, ministers, businessmen, and Northwestern faculty—had long discussed college-level education for women beyond what the North-Western Female College could offer. In September 1868, Mary F. Haskin convened the first meeting of the Women’s Educational Association (WEA) with the goal of establishing a new academic institution for women that could grant college degrees. Members agreed that the Board of Trustees, the majority of the faculty, and the president of the new college would be women—an innovative arrangement even for a women’s college. They also hoped that Northwestern would agree to give the women students access to its classes.
By spring 1869, the WEA had obtained a charter from the state for the proposed Evanston College for Ladies along with a promise from the Evanston town council of a site for the new college’s building on a plot of land Northwestern had given to the town as a park. The council specified that the land could be used only for a college building costing no less than $25,000 and completed within five years.
The election of Erastus Haven as Northwestern’s president in 1869 was a boon to the WEA. He readily agreed that ECL students would have full access to Northwestern’s classes, library, and museum. In turn, the WEA agreed that its planned building would house the women students and that ECL faculty would supervise them. University men students would be able to enroll in the ECL’s art and music classes. This model would leave separate the administrations of the two institutions while they shared the costs of buildings, facilities, and faculty salaries. The ECL’s oversight of women students would ease the concerns of Northwestern faculty and the parents of potential students.
Planning for the ECL continued through 1871. Haven and the WEA negotiated with William Jones to absorb the North-Western Female College and rent its building until the new college’s building was ready. The Female College saw its 16th and last commencement in June 1871.
Frances Willard was appointed president of the ECL in spring 1871 on the basis of her oratorical skill, teaching experience, study of women’s education abroad, and proven ability to solicit donations. Her talents were immediately put to use raising money for the ECL building as she planned Evanston’s 1871 “Ladies Fourth of July” celebration: a full day of parades, speeches, plays, baseball games, and boat races—and the laying of the cornerstone for the building. (The speechmakers and the baseball players were exclusively men.) Newspapers reported 10,000 people in attendance and the $30,000 pledge goal met.
The ECL opened in the former Female College building in September 1871 with 236 students: 37 “collegiate” students taking courses at -Northwestern, the rest “preparatory” students pursuing arts and music training. But the new school was soon beset by circumstances that changed the future of coeducation in Evanston.
A Plea for Help fundraising circular for the Evanston College for Ladies, 1872, after the Great Chicago Fire
Program for the first and only commencement of the Evanston College for Ladies, June 23–25, 1872
Coeducation in the balance
The great fire that ravaged Chicago on October 9, 1871, nearly took Northwestern’s vision for coeducation with it. Along with homes and businesses that went up in smoke, so too did the fortunes of businessmen who had pledged financial support to the ECL. Suddenly short of funding, the WEA spent the next two years scrambling for the money needed to construct its building by Evanston’s five-year deadline. Still, the ECL did manage to graduate its first class of six in June 1872.
Note from Frances Willard, attached to an Evanston College for Ladies catalog, announcing the merger with Northwestern, 1873
Later that summer, President Haven resigned from Northwestern to become general secretary of the Methodist Board of Education. Northwestern’s new president, Charles Fowler, had ideas, energy, and a firm belief in coeducation but no experience as an educator or administrator. Meanwhile, the cash-strapped WEA was reluctantly reaching the conclusion that an official merger with Northwestern was the only way to keep the ECL alive. On June 24, 1873, after several months of negotiation, the Evanston College for Ladies became the Woman’s College of Northwestern and the WEA was dissolved. As part of the agreement, the WEA required that Northwestern always have at least one woman on the Board of Trustees and that the new of dean of women (the position that would replace the role of president of the ECL) always be appointed a full professor of the University. (Deans of women would be the only women full professors at Northwestern until the 1960s.) Fowler was not as concerned as Haven was about maintaining a sister-school relationship with separate supervision for women students. The schools’ administrative units merged, and Frances Willard became Northwestern’s first dean of women. Within four years of the Northwestern trustees’ resolution to admit women, the face of coeducation had changed completely. And the University would continue to grapple with its new responsibility for housing and supervising women students for years to come.
The year 1874 held two significant events for women students at Northwestern: The new building, now named Woman’s Hall, was finally completed and occupied, so women students no longer had to walk the mile from the North-Western Female College building. And at the University’s commencement on June 25, president Charles Fowler handed a Northwestern diploma to a woman for the first time. As he congratulated Sarah Rebecca Roland, he said, “You are the first of a long line.”