Perspectives on the History of Higher Education

Volume 24, 2005

Roger L. Geiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351500074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The early twentieth century witnessed the rise of middle-class mass periodicals that, while offering readers congenial material, also conveyed new depictions of manliness, liberal education, and the image of business leaders. "Should Your Boy Go to College?" asked one magazine story; and for over two decades these middle-class magazines answered, in numerous permutations, with a collective "yes!" In the course of interpreting these themes they reshaped the vision of a college education, and created the ideal of a college-educated businessman.Volume 24 of the Perspectives on the History of Higher Education: 2005 provides historical studies touching on contemporary concerns--gender, high-ability students, academic freedom, and, in the case of the Barnes Foundation, the authority of donor intent. Daniel Clark discusses the nuanced changes that occurred to the image of college at the turn of the century. Michael David Cohen offers an important corrective to stereotypes about gender relations in nineteenth-century coeducational colleges. Jane Robbins traces how the young National Research Council embraced the cause of how to identify and encourage superior students as a vehicle for incorporating wartime advances in psychological testing. Susan R. Richardson considers the long Texas tradition of political interference in university affairs. Finally, Edward Epstein and Marybeth Gasman shed historical light on the recent controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation.The volume also contains brief descriptions of twenty recent doctoral dissertations in the history of higher education. This serial publication will be of interest to historians, sociologists, and of course, educational policymakers.

“What Gender Is Lex?” Women, Men, and Power Relations in Colleges of the Nineteenth Century

Michael David Cohen

This study reexamines the extracurricular experiences of young women and men at Midwestern colleges between the 1870s and 1890s. The decades after the Civil War saw the rise of coeducation as the dominant form of higher education in the Midwestern and Far Western United States. Historians have commonly stressed the social segregation and extracurricular inequality by gender that prevailed at some colleges in spite of integration in the classroom. This study, however, draws on students’ experiences at the two colleges in Northfield, Minnesota, to propose an alternative model. In particular, it argues that male and female students at Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges sought each other’s romantic companionship, enjoyed many formal and informal extracurricular activities together, and shared similar opportunities for involvement in electoral politics. It suggests that, while some colleges may have fully adopted the homosocial organization and gender inequality characteristic of the Victorian era, others offered young women opportunities for heterosocial interaction and relative gender equality unattainable in American society at large.

Prof. “What gender is lex?” Freshman. “Masculine.” Prof. “Oh no, it is feminine.” Freshman. “If I had known that I should not have obeyed it.”

—St. Olaf College Manitou Messenger, March 1887¹

In a famous essay, Joan Wallach Scott discusses the several meanings of the word gender. Historically, it began as a grammatical term; linguistic conservatives continue to resist its use in any other fashion. Here gender functions as “a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits.” In this usage, the gender of a word, object, or person carries no meaning beyond its grammatical classification. More recently, however, historians and other scholars have adapted the term to describe cultural understandings of women and men in the past and present. In Scott’s carefully formulated bipartite definition, “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”² Not only does gender carry meaning about men and women: Gender is a major locus through which people create political meaning.

Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 24 (2005): 41-90.

©2005. ISBN: 1-4128-0517-1

Both definitions factored in the above joke printed in the student newspaper of coeducational St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. On the one hand, the freshman mistook the grammatical gender of the Latin word for “law.” But the punch line depended on his (presumably this fictional student identified as masculine, not feminine) understanding of gender as more than grammar. Lex, law, power belonged to the masculine, not the feminine. Illustrating both parts of Scott’s definition, the student constructed power through the language of gender and imagined appropriate power relationships as based in dominant masculine and submissive, or at least not dominant, feminine identities. At the same time, though, he acknowledged the real or potential appearance of feminine authority. If lex were feminine, he would choose to defy that law. For the newspaper’s readers to get the joke, they must, even if they scorned the idea, have been able to conceive of women in power.

* * *

Historians have not traditionally seen nineteenth-century coeducational colleges as strongholds of political or social opportunities for women. Most of the few scholars who have examined gender relations in those schools identify hostile environments for female students. They acknowledge the greater liberality of Midwestern educators, which produced a commitment to gender egalitarianism that combined with economic pressures to encourage the formation of coeducational colleges. Thus in the late nineteenth century, colleges throughout the United States, but especially in the Midwest (and Far West), became coeducational.³ With few exceptions, however, scholars deny that Midwestern liberality produced socially integrated environments. Researchers argue that throughout the country, both male professors and male students resented women’s presence. The former had no choice but to teach all students, but the latter could and did choose to distance themselves from women socially. Though an occasional man and woman became friends, as a rule men offered women only insults. Scholars focusing on the Midwest, who tend to study the period after 1890, observe that in contrast to both Eastern and Far Western schools, male students there welcomed women to campus, but the latter chose to isolate themselves. Either way, women and men created separate extracurricular lives.⁴ Meanwhile, the women’s and coordinate colleges that appeared in Eastern states beginning in the 1860s offered their students entry into such traditionally masculine fields as athletics and campus politics. But these opportunities arose precisely from men’s absence.⁵ When young women and men came together, women’s involvement in men’s activities, let alone empowerment through mixed organizational leadership or political participation, vanished.

The newspapers, yearbooks, and other surviving documents from the two colleges in the small Minnesotan town of Northfield tell a very different story. Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges, both coeducational from their beginnings in 1867 and 1875, respectively, by the 1880s offered women and men remarkably similar opportunities.⁶ Carleton advertised proudly, “ALL DEPARTMENTS OPEN TO STUDENTS OF EITHER SEX.”⁷ St. Olaf, too, except possibly in its divinity school, did not restrict female students’ curricular options.⁸ But historians of higher education note that the student-designed extracurriculum, not the faculty-mandated curriculum, dominated college students’ lives in the nineteenth century. College men and women’s activities outside of class most strongly influenced their overall college experience.⁹ And here, students created a sexually integrated environment. On both informal and formal levels, St. Olaf and Carleton students of the late 1870s through the early 1890s, when most studies of Midwestern college life begin, came together across gender lines to create a single student life. When faculty stepped in to check their mixing, students resisted. Though women’s opportunities did not equal men’s, their participation in the single extracurriculum made them partners, not subordinates or exiles, on Northfield’s campuses. They even shared leadership positions and political roles. These post-Reconstruction colleges, while by no means egalitarian utopias, offered women interaction with men that produced far greater opportunities for power than American society at large.

* * *

Townspeople founded Northfield College in 1866 under the auspices of the Congregational Church; it opened a year later, and in 1871 the name changed to honor benefactor William Carleton. From the beginning, the College welcomed both men and women and, despite the formal church affiliation, Christians of all denominations. These decisions reflected not only the the Midwest’s relative sympathy to women’s higher education and the economic necessity of admitting both women and non-Congregationalists, but that church’s tradition of establishing colleges without demanding control over their policies. Local citizens, rather than Eastern church leaders, chose Carleton’s constituency and purpose. They sought to educate young women and men morally and intellectually, imparting a broadly Christian message. A preparatory department readied younger students for the college course, and an English department offered secondary education to students who did not plan to pursue further study. The collegiate department, in fact, did not open until 1870, after the first students finished their preparatory years. The first graduating class, that of 1874, consisted of one man and one woman, who later married.¹⁰

The curriculum grew more varied as the student body expanded. Beginning in 1877, the College offered three four-year bachelor’s programs, with preparatory programs tailored to each, emphasizing the classics, modern literature, and science. Carleton introduced courses in music in 1872, art in 1889, and stenography in 1891, all of which were open both to students enrolled in the academic courses and to those interested only in learning these skills. The College established a program leading to the master of arts degree in 1885, and trained students for the doctorate of philosophy beginning in 1891.¹¹ Meanwhile, the College’s enrollment grew from eighty-one students attending part or all of the 1867–68 academic year, to 254 a decade later, and 337 in 1892–93. Although both male and female students could and did study in all courses, men tended to gravitate toward the classical and scientific tracks, and women toward the literary; the music and art departments attracted a mostly female enrollment. Men outnumbered women overall, however, until the early 1880s, and in the collegiate department until the late 1880s. Thereafter, women consistently comprised the majority of the student body (see Table 1).¹²

Carleton had barely graduated its first class when it lost its monopoly over higher education in Northfield. In 1874, Norwegian Lutherans founded (and in winter 1875 opened) St. Olaf’s School on the same street corner as one of Carleton’s buildings; it moved to the other side of the Cannon River in 1878. Like Carleton, St. Olaf’s included a preparatory department; here the collegiate department opened in 1886, and the institution became known as St. Olaf College three years later. In addition to the collegiate and preparatory courses of study, an English course educated young people with no plans to enter college. Elementary classes enrolled younger girls and boys. Finally, a divinity school, which seems to have admitted only men, opened the same year as the collegiate department. Excluding the divinity school, for which enrollment numbers have not survived, St. Olaf counted fewer students than Carleton. But it grew. In its first academic year, which consisted of only the winter and spring trimesters of 1875, it enrolled fifty students; a decade later, that number had risen to eighty-two, and in 1887–88 it lept to 135. In 1892–93, the College counted 147 students (see Table 2).

Table 1
Carleton College Enrollments

Unlike Carleton’s, St. Olaf’s more narrowly denominational preparatory and collegiate curricula taught Lutheran theology alongside Latin and algebra.¹³ Non-Norwegians attended at least as early as the 1880s, but the student population was much more nationally and religiously homogenous than Carleton’s. Despite a faculty member’s (or possibly a student’s) telling some students in 1879 that “[o]ur relation to snow-capped Norway must be forgotten,” and that they must “try to inculcate in our minds, that we are Americans and nothing else,” the institution’s ethnic and religious identity endured. In 1890, a student described St. Olaf as a school for the Norwegian race designed to preserve the Lutheran faith.

The Norwegian Lutheran Synod, however, opposed church-sponsored education, and especially coeducation. Bernt Julius Muus broke with the Church leadership when he founded this school for young men and women, and thus had to obtain funding from a private donor. St. Olaf became on its founding the first Norwegian-American Lutheran school or college to admit students of both genders (see Figure 1). Men nonetheless outnumbered women there into the twentieth century. By 1906, the College had awarded only six of its 13...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• title
• copy
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Piggy Goes to Harvard: Mass Magazines, the Middle Class, and the Re-Conceptualization of College for a Corporate Age, 1895–1910
• “What Gender Is Lex?” Women, Men, and Power Relations in Colleges of the Nineteenth Century
• The “Problem of the Gifted Student”: National Research Council Efforts to Identify and Cultivate Undergraduate Talent in a New Era of Mass Education, 1919–1929
• Reds, Race, and Research: Homer P. Rainey and the Grand Texas Tradition of Political Interference, 1939–1944
• A Not-So-Systematic Effort to Study Art: Albert Barnes and Lincoln University
• Selected Recent Dissertations in the History of Higher Education
• Contributors