Women on Campus 1869–1900
Perhaps the thorniest issue surrounding coeducation at Northwestern was how women students would be governed—a concern referred to frequently by Northwestern trustees and faculty and by the parents of potential women students. Even strong proponents of -coeducation—who had no doubt that women could succeed academically—were concerned about the effect the presence of women might have on the men. While the terms of the Evanston College for Ladies merger with Northwestern University required that women always be represented on the Board of Trustees, the women students were now governed by the University’s faculty and -administration.
The self-report scandal
The Entre Nous women’s tennis club, circa 1896
Frances Willard, now Northwestern’s dean of women, knew that women students would be subject to greater scrutiny than men and so tried to maintain a separate structure for the women’s supervision. But Willard felt that her authority was much diminished and that the administration was ignoring her advice about what parents would want for their daughters and ignoring her views about women’s taking responsibility for themselves. She incurred particular resistance to the -self-reports that she required women students to fill out each week. Willard firmly believed that accepting responsibility for their own behavior was a crucial step toward women achieving independence of thought and action. The report asked such questions as whether they had whispered in chapel or walked to the post office without permission. Of course, no such reports were required of men students. Women whose self-reports -consistently indicated they had followed the rules and taken responsibility for their actions were entered into the Roll of Honor and were no longer required to submit the forms.
The Woman’s College Roll of Honor ledger, 1873. This page lists women who were on probation; some have been promoted to Roll of Honor and no longer need to complete self-reports. (Courtesy WCTU Archives)
On November 26, 1873, a lengthy editorial disparaging the self-reports appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune under the headline “Woman’s Rights in Evanston.” The anonymous editorialist wrote:
A flagrant set of injustices is being perpetrated every week in the staid and sober confines of Evanston, which demands public notice and the adoption of immediate measures for its correction. The Northwestern University, located in that village, long ago threw its doors open to women and offered the same privileges to both sexes. It was announced that they would be on terms of equality . . . . In place of this, the young ladies are compelled to go to a confessional once a week, and answer thirteen questions, many of them of the most exasperating character. . . .
As it stands at present, the rule is a petty humiliation and places every young lady in a most mortifying position. If they have any spirit, they will continue to agitate and protest until this clear Woman’s Right is conceded.
The editorial generated a flurry of letters to the editor, both for and against, including one from suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who demanded equality for men and women students, rejecting Willard’s “invidious assumption that boys can be trusted with liberties that girls cannot.” Responses from Northwestern, including from women students themselves, supported -Willard, who also submitted a rebuttal.
Despite support from her students, Willard resigned from Northwestern in 1874, when it became clear that her concern about assuaging parental worries and building strong, self-reliant women did not match Fowler’s idea of one set of rules for all, with no special authority for the dean of women. Still, Willard’s successors continued to contend with parents’ worries about their daughters’ exposure to unsupervised freedoms and resorted to issuing report cards evaluating the women’s behavior. And the question of separate rules for women would persist until the mid-1970s.
Women of color
There were few students of color—men or women—enrolled during the early years of Northwestern. Although founded by Methodists, the University was established as a nondenominational school open to all men, regardless of race or religion. In 1874, after women were admitted, the University catalog stated that Northwestern “recognizes neither sex nor race. It asks the candidate, ‘What do you know?’” But the student population remained largely white and American-born, although students from East and Southeast Asia began arriving in the late 1890s—most after having attended Protestant missionary schools in their native countries. Records from Northwestern’s professional schools (medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and law—all located in Chicago) show that a diverse student body was more common there, though women were few.
In the late 19th century, prevailing American attitudes about race suppressed black attendance at predominantly white universities, including Northwestern. When women were admitted, it had been only four years since the Civil War ended. In the post-Reconstruction era, few black families lived in Evanston. Less than one percent of blacks nationwide attended college, and the majority of those who did attended institutions founded exclusively for them (known today as historically black colleges and universities), which were proliferating in the South at the time. Blacks were also hindered by socioeconomic, racial, and institutional barriers, including attitudes about mixing races, which complicated student housing for blacks. Although no rule prohibited them from living in Northwestern dormitories, it was tacitly understood that black students would find housing with families in Evanston rather than live on campus.
Demographic analysis is hampered by the difficulty of identifying students based on race or ethnicity in Northwestern’s early years. Detailed demographic data was not formally recorded until the late 1970s, and while surnames from catalogs and early yearbook photographs provide circumstantial clues, they are inconclusive. Evidence in University Archives suggests that the first black woman to graduate with a bachelor’s degree was Naomi Willie Pollard in 1905.
From 1872 to 1935, College Cottage, at Orrington and Clark, housed women students on the co-op plan
Women’s housing and student activities
The basis for encouraging parents to send their daughters to a coeducational school was the assurance of a homelike atmosphere with parental-quality supervision. However, the Woman’s College struggled to meet that goal while its new building remained uncompleted. Until Woman’s Hall opened in 1874, women from outside Evanston boarded with carefully selected families or lived in the old North-Western Female College building a mile from campus. Meanwhile, the Women’s Educational Aid Association was formed to help women afford the cost of room and board. The WEAA instituted a co-op plan similar to one devised by Mount Holyoke, offering a reduced rate in exchange for housework. The husbands of several WEAA members purchased a building at the corner of Orrington Avenue and Clark Street, and by October 1872 “College Cottage” was ready for occupancy. In 1874, room and board at Woman’s Hall cost $5 per week; at College Cottage, the cost was $2.25 plus an hour or less of housework. Participation in the co-op plan increased, necessitating additions to the building and the eventual construction in 1901 of Chapin Hall, funded by Daniel K. Pearsons and named for his sister-in-law, Julia Chapin. College Cottage, renamed Pearsons Hall, was used by the WEAA until 1935; the co-op system remained in place in Chapin until 1967. Woman’s Hall also gained an annex in 1892, so that most women students could be accommodated on campus, although some still boarded in approved homes, including women of color, who were not welcome in campus housing.
Woman’s Educational Aid Association pamphlet, 1884
The need for additional housing indicates, of course, that the number of women attending the University was increasing rapidly. In 1893, Northwestern president Henry Rogers reported that in the past 10 years women had averaged 38 percent of the student population. Still, their assimilation into student life continued to reflect uncertainty about the meaning of coeducation. Even if men and women attended the same classes, their extracurricular activities tended to be, or become, separate.
For example, women were admitted to the Adelphic Society, one of Northwestern’s two long-established literary societies, in 1872. In 1874, however, the faculty voted to exclude women from the club. Women immediately formed a new society, the Ossoli (named for women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller Ossoli), although the societies held joint events by the mid-1880s. The Students’ Christian Association, a popular social organization founded in 1880 with a membership of men and women, split in 1890 into the YMCA and the YWCA. The two groups continued active programs of religious education and philanthropy, often working together but as decidedly separate organizations.
Although evidence of black students’ activities from this time is scarce, in 1913 some women students joined Chicago’s Beta chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which had been founded at Howard University in 1908 to provide social and professional opportunities previously lacking for black college women.
Women students were encouraged to exercise for health reasons and participated in athletic activities (including basketball, tennis, and gymnastics), but separately from the men. They alternated with men in using the gymnasium building and lobbied for many years for a separate women’s gym.
Although women had contributed to the production of the yearbook and student newspaper, in 1896 the first issue of the Woman’s Edition of the Northwestern (the newspaper that would become the Daily Northwestern in 1910) occasioned commentary in the Chicago Tribune. After the success of the first issue edited, written, and illustrated by women, a woman’s edition was produced almost annually until 1915, when it was replaced by a more frequent Woman’s Section in the Daily.