WOMEN in COLLEGE

A story of education equity through the lens of time.

WRTITEN BY Halle Elder

DESIGNED BY Jakob Roberts

Women’s place in education, especially higher education, has been a hard fought battle that is still continuing today. In places all around the world, women are working side by side to secure a place in higher education in order to learn, grow and make their mark on society, but the battle for equality in education is far from over.

Women from all over the world have fought and won, or are still fighting these battles for education, but this article will focus on the select history of women in the United States of America’s battle for equality.

In the U.S.A today, around 58% of all undergraduate students are female, according to The National Center for Education Statistics, meaning that women are actually in the majority of college students, but it has not always been this way. For centuries, women tried to gain a place in higher education, but were often banned from universities, or if accepted, would not be granted degrees. However, the tides began to change for American women in the 19th century. Despite this change, the options were still incredibly limited, mostly consisting of two options; a small number of coed institutions and women’s only colleges.

CoEd Institutions

Although it was an action that often saw large amounts of backlash, some universities decided to allow women to attend on a degree path during the early to mid 19th century. The first school to do this was Oberlin University in Ohio which first became a coed institution in 1837, admitting four female students that year. Oberlin also became the first institution to admit Black students, which resulted in the first Black woman, Mary Jane Patterson, to receive a bachelor’s degree in 1862. However, despite Oberlin’s surface level equality, the battle was still not over in this institution for women to be treated as equal to men in the educational setting. For many years after admitting females into the institution, all female students would be dismissed from classes every monday in order to do the male students’ laundry. Despite these challenges, women in this country continued year after year to fight for equality in their education. As the century went on, more and more universities made the jump to being coed, and along with them, introduced female professors that paved the way for younger students. By the start of the 20th century, over half of the universities in the country were admitting women into their programs.

However, prestigious universities held out much longer and the Ivy League schools did not admit women until well past the 1950’s, over 100 years after Oberlin opened their doors to female students. Male students alongside professors at these universities claimed that their concerns with coeducation were that women were “an unneeded distraction”. There are even claims from this time that undergraduates from Dartmouth hung banners that read, “Better Dead Than Coed”, from their dorm windows when discussions about opening the college to women were occurring.

Women’s College’s

In the early 1800s, the only options for women as far as continued education were “Teacher Schools” that trained women to be primary school teachers. These eventually turned into “Normal Schools” for women and later became women’s colleges. The first Women’s only university was Wesleyan College which opened its doors in 1836. Within another 60 years, 50 more Women’s Only colleges opened in the U.S. While these schools had their benefits for female students, they functioned and were treated as a “less than equal” option when compared to other institutions of higher learning. Historian Helen Horowitz explained that these early women-only colleges were viewed as “dangerous experiments”. The common ideology at this time was that an increased education would push women away from the traditional feminine roles and ideas. This resulted in these schools to be created more like seminaries than traditional colleges at the time. Men’s colleges were modeled as “academic villages” with dorms and classes in separate houses across a campus. However, these women-only colleges were built to keep women contained. Often, everything was in one building, so that the students could be monitored at all times. Improvements from the past had been made, but there was still so much further for women to go to receive the same educational experience as men.

Modern Day

As mentioned earlier, women account for about 58% of undergraduate students in America. This has been the case since the 1980s and has been true since then. However, this success in undergraduate education still does not guarantee equality in education as a whole. Females with a bachelor’s degree still to this day earn significantly less than their equally educated male counterparts. This wage gap has been a source of concerns for many years and there are ongoing efforts to decrease this margin. Women are also often persuaded into certain fields of study and warned against going into the STEM fields because of the difficulty levels associated with these careers. However, people are fighting against this and are forming organizations at universities across the country that are made to support women in STEM and encourage young students to consider these fields. Another concern is that while females make up a large majority of undergraduates, there is a significant drop in those who pursue graduate degrees as well as women who are actively working in academia. Only around 37% of full-time faculty are female and 27% of women account for tenured faculty. Those numbers drop significantly into the single digits for women of color. Women still have a ways to go to truly receive educational equality, but from the growth that has been witnessed from hard fought battles over the last century, I believe it is fair to say that women will not give up the fight to receive the access to education that they deserve.

Note from the author: The information in this article accounts for females and female presenting students in the U.S.. While I acknowledge transgender and non-binary students as well, there is unfortunately a lack of research and data on individuals outside of the male/female binary, especially when looking into education in the past. For these reasons, these individuals were not mentioned in this article, but it is safe to say that their battle for education is ongoing as well.