Foreword
by Joan M. Johnson
As you will discover in this book, the history of coeducation at Northwestern is complicated, and its successful implementation was far from guaranteed when University trustees voted to admit women students in 1869. Still, this momentous decision should not be surprising, given the advances in women’s opportunities taking place at the time. Northwestern was among the first major wave of colleges to embrace coeducation in the 1860s and 1870s, driven by women’s activism and changes in women’s education.
Social reform flourished across the country in the mid-19th century, spurred in part by Methodists and other Second Great Awakening evangelicals, who sought to create a more perfect society by persuading sinners to repent and live moral lives. Reformers strove to build utopian communities and, of particular interest to local Methodists, called for abolishing slavery and forswearing alcohol. The reform movement first caught fire in the Northeast and blazed across the country.
Women were essential to this wave of reform. Black and white women founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and in Chicago black abolitionist and suffragist Mary Jones sheltered enslaved men and women trying to escape to Canada. Women advocated for reforms ranging from prohibiting prostitution to improving conditions in prisons and asylums, through moral-reform and antislavery groups as well as church auxiliaries and missionary societies. They initiated an organized women’s rights movement, fueled by the world’s first women’s rights conference in
Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
As a result of this activism, states passed laws enabling married women to retain control over wages and inheritances. In Illinois, lawyer Myra Bradwell—whose husband, Northwestern University trustee James B. -Bradwell, strongly advocated for coeducation—helped write the Illinois Married Women’s Property Act of 1861, although because of her sex, the Illinois Supreme Court would later deny her admittance to the bar.
Women’s activism grew during the Civil War as they raised funds, nursed soldiers, and even assumed roles with the US Sanitary Commission. During and after the war, women increasingly earned wages as teachers, nurses, writers, and factory laborers.
Within 20 years of Northwestern’s decision to admit women, Illinois women would lead national movements for women’s rights and progressive social reform—women including Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull House, the first settle-ment house in the country; Ida B. Wells, the suffragist and civil rights and antilynching activist; Catherine McCulloch, an Evanston resident and vice president of the leading national suffrage association; and Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and a key figure in the history of women at Northwestern.
Beginning well before the 1869 decision at Northwestern, US women had been gradually gaining greater access to formal education. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, white women justified their need for schooling as being essential to their roles as inherently moral mothers teaching sons how to be citizens in the new republic. In the decades before the Civil War, academies and seminaries for girls proliferated around the country, especially in the Northeast, offering instruction in French, music, and the ornamental skills as well as in math and science. In Illinois, Rockford Female Seminary was chartered in 1847 and the North-Western Female College (not affiliated with Northwestern University) opened in Evanston in 1855, offering a collegiate course—though not a college degree.
Still, women had few opportunities to obtain a classical education leading to a bachelor’s degree. Many Americans, including influential educators, wondered whether women were intellectually capable—or believed education unnecessary to their roles as wives and mothers. Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?, published in 1859, encapsulates the debate; its author, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, answered in the affirmative. At Oberlin, the nation’s first coeducational college, most women entered through what was called the Ladies Department, which did not require Greek and Latin; despite calling themselves colleges, schools like the North-Western Female College did not actually offer degrees. This changed after the Civil War with the founding of Vassar College in 1865 and Wellesley and Smith Colleges 10 years later; the Women’s Educational Association opened the Evanston College for Ladies in 1871. Oberlin was open to women of all races, although many northern women’s colleges were not, reflecting a variety of policies and practices regarding admitting black, Native American, Latina, and Asian students.
Coeducation was deeply controversial. At many colleges, men trustees, faculty, alumni, and students vehemently resisted the entrance of women. At a time when most Americans embraced adherence to strict, binary gender roles, these men feared that both men and women could become “de-sexed” or, on the other hand, distracted and sexually tempted by the proximity of the opposite sex. In comparison to many northeastern schools, Northwestern was in the vanguard with the relative ease of its decision to admit women. Women tried—and failed—for decades to integrate Harvard, for example, as such men’s colleges founded much earlier than Northwestern, often by Congregationalists or Presbyterians, resisted change.
Since the 1820s, the Methodist Church had called for creating schools and colleges open to men and women; by the 1860s and ’70s, coeducation flourished in regions where Methodists thrived, including Illinois. As towns developed, they built schools so their children would not have to travel far for education. Increased access to high school prepared more students for college. The 1862 Morill Act helped democratize higher education by allotting public land to states for land-grant colleges focused on agricultural and industrial training. States were keen to meet the growing demand for teacher training, and they hesitated to spend money building separate schools for women (although this did not stop southern states from practicing racial segregation). State universities now part of the Big Ten led the movement, many of them admitting women within just a few decades of their founding. Women were admitted to the University of Iowa in 1855, the University of Wisconsin in 1866, Indiana University in 1867, and the Universities of Illinois and Michigan in 1870. Despite this flurry, coeducation remained contentious, and schools around the country faced a backlash—including the University of Chicago, where women had begun to dominate Phi Beta Kappa membership.
Thus, even when the doors were open to them, women were not always welcome. As Northwestern’s history demonstrates, beginning with the vision of local women, it took extensive effort on the part of women students, faculty, alumnae, and staff continuing to demand equal access and opportunity. Similarly, although Northwestern from its beginnings officially accepted students irrespective of race, the earliest women students were white and students of color have long fought for full inclusion and equity. Today, challenges to gender equity remain, as well as equity for gender identity and expression, racial identity, sexual orientation, and economic status. The forward thinking and fierce determination of women and men in leadership and women students, faculty, and alumnae should inspire as well as challenge Northwestern these 150 years later.
