The Evolution of Coeducation 1900–74
Northwestern’s experience with interpreting and instituting coeducation was not unlike that of many universities. Changes were gradual as outside circumstances evolved. Long gone were the days when women were considered incapable of learning, but fears of women using their brains at the expense of their health as wives and mothers were expressed frequently from the mid-19th century onward.
Pages from the women’s handbook Read and Be Right, 1939
From coeds to women students
Coeducation itself came under fire in the early 1900s, when many universities began to worry that women were outnumbering and outperforming men. Proposed solutions included separate classrooms for the same courses, and some institutions reinstated the coordinate-school concept.
Northwestern president Edmund J. James (from 1902 to 1904) worried publicly that too many women students would “effeminize” education. In 1929, the president’s executive committee discussed separate classrooms for men and women students. In many cases, women themselves mandated separate status. In 1906, Northwestern women students formed the Women’s League as a -self-government organization. Women were eligible to hold office as vice president or
secretary on the general student council (formed circa 1915) but continued to maintain a separate self-government organization (renamed the Women’s Self-Government Association and later the Association of Women Students) until 1967. The WSGA also published a separate handbook for women students (Read and Be Right) from 1939 to 1959. Women students, beginning in 1915 and soon backed by the Alumnae of Northwestern (an organization founded in 1916), campaigned for over a decade for a separate women’s building with its own gymnasium but, after many fundraising efforts (interrupted by World War I and the Depression), had to content themselves with the construction of Scott Hall as a general student union in 1940.
1947 class on nutrition in the home economics department lab in Fisk Hall
Student organizations shifted back and forth between single-sex and mixed membership over the years. Beginning in 1929, the formerly separate revues produced by the Men’s Union (MU) and the Women’s Athletic Association (WAA) joined forces as the Waa-Mu Show. The debate team, which had touted its first woman member in 1922, later split into men’s and women’s teams but reconsolidated in the early 1950s, when Roberta Buffett (1954) joined the team. In 1943, the University added a home economics department, enforcing the image of women learning to be good homemakers rather than taking men’s jobs (the department was eliminated in 1973); the engineering classrooms at the Technological Institute were populated almost exclusively by men. Women were allowed to serve on the student government, but it wasn’t until 1970, when Eva Jefferson (1971) was elected, that a woman—and an African American—would be president of the Associated Student Government.
At Northwestern, as was the case at most men’s colleges that decided to admit women, “coeducation” came to mean a campus that included both men and “coeds.” Thus, no matter how impartially it was intended, being labeled “coeds” meant that women students were not truly accepted on the same terms as men.
Over time, as coeducation became the norm, the tradition of treating women students differently from men gradually died out. By the mid-1970s, there was no longer a dean of women, the Women’s Self-Government Association had disbanded, Title IX had opened the door to women’s varsity sports, and more women had begun to fill seats in the labs of the Technological Institute. The era of curfews and parietal hours—the strictly limited times when men and women were allowed to visit each other in campus residences—was over. No longer used to differentiate men from women students in regard to ability or need for protection, the term “coed” could finally resume its original meaning; today such terms as “coed dorms” identify aspects of campus life that include all genders.
The long line continues
Northwestern president Charles Fowler was right when he told Sarah Rebecca Roland in 1874 that she was the first of a long line. The list of firsts for women at Northwestern has only grown since.
Many academic departments and the professional schools can search their records, course catalogs, and commencement programs to find the first woman undergraduate or graduate student. At the Medical School, once women could enroll in 1927, four women were admitted at the same time because cadavers were assigned for dissection to teams of four and the school did not want men and women working together. In 1929, Georgiana Peeney became the first woman to be granted an industrial engineering degree (and only the second woman to graduate) from the School of Engineering.
Engineering classes in the Technological Institute circa 1980
Engineering classes in the Technological Institute: 1950s
Mabel Mason (1916) was the first Northwestern woman to win a prize in the Northern Oratorical League contest, for her talk on “The College Woman and the Twentieth Century Home.” Swimming star Sybil Bauer (1926) broke the men’s world record for the 440-yard backstroke in 1922. On campus, Genevieve Forbes Herrick (1916) was the first woman editor in chief of the Northwestern literary magazine in 1915 (she went on to a career as an investigative reporter), and Jane Orr (1935) became, in 1934, the first woman editor of Northwestern’s yearbook.
And the list of firsts attained by Northwestern alumnae is a story in itself. Two have served as presidents of the National Organization for Women. Northwestern women have achieved the highest honors in science, technology, and medicine. They are renowned writers, performers, directors, teachers, and scholars. They have been elected to government office and headed large corporations. They have taken up the charge to “spread far the fame of our fair name,” as the Northwestern fight song implores—proving that the administrators of 1869 were wise to change with the times. All women needed was the same access as men to the halls of education. At Northwestern, women got that opportunity 150 years ago, and they have been making the most of it ever since.