WOMAN'S UNFITNESS 
 FOR HIGHER COEDUCATION 
 
WOMAN'S UNFITNESS 
 
 FOR HIGHER 
 
 COEDUCATION 
 
 BY 
 
 ELY VAN DE WARKER, M.D., 
 
 Commissioner of Schools, Syracuse, New York 
 
 J 3 , :> :> - 
 
 THE GRAFTON PRESS 
 NEW YORK 
 
Copyright 1903 by The Grafton Press 
 First Impression, December, 1903 
 
 
 
€o 
 
 Mrs. Emma Hart Willard, 
 
 Born at Berlin, Connecticut, in 1787, who, be- 
 lieving that American women were in need of 
 higher and broader education, founded an insti- 
 tution of college rank for women at Waterford, 
 New York, which at the solicitation of the citizens 
 of Troy, New York, was transferred to that city 
 in 1819, and became famous as the Troy Female 
 Seminary and spread abroad a high and liberal 
 culture which has inspired and refined thousands 
 of homes throughout the land, was the first 
 to write upon the education of her sex, 
 was the author of many learned 
 works and died, honored and 
 lamented, in 1870, this 
 book is reverently 
 inscribed by 
 
 The Author. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following pages were written in 
 the interest of the higher education of 
 women. It is the sincere belief of the 
 author that the method of coeducation, as 
 realized in practice, has been brought to 
 its logical conclusion. The commingling 
 of the sexes on an educational basis was 
 at one time a matter of education of the 
 higher kind; but so energetically has the 
 idea been forced into college life, and so 
 deeply have thinking people been stirred 
 by a discussion of its relative merits, or 
 possible dangers, that it is now a problem 
 in sociology. It has got beyond the 
 grasp of the educator, who has heretofore 
 claimed the right as such to decide upon 
 its merits, and has passed into the hands 
 
 [ix] 
 
Preface 
 
 of those who, with a broader and deeper 
 knowledge of human Hfe, must give the 
 verdict of its fitness and utility as a form 
 of education. 
 
 The writer will never forget the pic- 
 ture of a woman who, in 1819^ sought 
 education under that wonderful educator, 
 Emma Willard. This woman lived to the 
 closing decade of the last century, and 
 throughout that long life the culture there 
 gained, and the inspiration to always seek 
 the true and the beautiful, never left her. 
 The high ideals acquired there sustained 
 her throughout a life of self-denial and 
 toil. Is not this the best that education 
 can do to elevate and dignify the work 
 that lies ready for willing hands, with hope 
 blossoming perennially in a sane and 
 healthy mind? A few more years will 
 complete a century since this woman 
 sought and found higher education at the 
 Troy Female Seminary. Has coeduca- 
 tion anything to offer that will equal it in 
 
Preface 
 
 results? Is it not the truth that higher 
 education for women has fallen back a 
 century in utility and fitness, if coeduca- 
 tion is to represent its best form? 
 
 This book is offered as a document to 
 that great and discriminating public to 
 whom must be referred all questions of 
 public policy, and upon whose judgments 
 coeducation must either stand or fall. 
 
 E. V. DE w. 
 
 [xi] 
 
WOMAN'S UNFITNESS FOR 
 HIGHER COEDUCATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Commercial Element in 
 Coeducation 
 
 The commercial character of coeduca- 
 tion, considered as a business enterprise, 
 cannot be brought against the method as 
 such. No pubhc effort, it matters not how 
 beneficent, but what has its business side, 
 that must be wisely handled and fostered 
 that the greatest good may accrue to the 
 philanthropic enterprise. When it is 
 
 [1] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 claimed that the idea of coeducation was 
 gradually evolved from the necessities of 
 the people, that it was a normal develop- 
 ment that grew out of the social complex, 
 more is claimed for the method than the 
 facts justify. 
 
 Oberlin, where the two-sex college orig- 
 inated in 1833, was for forty years re- 
 garded as an eccentricity. The idea did 
 not take root until it was followed in the 
 order of events by the State Universities 
 of Iowa and Wisconsin, endowed by the 
 ancient Government reservation of 1787. 
 The great grant of 1862 had but little 
 effect on higher education, probably due 
 to the disturbance of the Civil War, imtil 
 in the early seventies the so-called col- 
 leges and universities of the West were 
 started under the stimulus of the grant. 
 From 1833 until 1870 there was no de- 
 mand for the coeducational college. In 
 the East, where colleges were endowed, or 
 were aided by private gifts, no demand 
 [2] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 for the college for both sexes existed at 
 all. The conclusion is a fairly reasonable 
 one, that the people of neither section was 
 clamoring for the coeducational college. 
 These colleges were not of normal growth, 
 and were not the slow accretion of public 
 sentiment in their favor. The method 
 was not submitted to a careful test of 
 fitness and expediency, but suddenly, by 
 a general concurrence of feeling, rather 
 than conviction, it sprang into existence 
 throughout the West and the great Amer- 
 ican experiment was declared a success. 
 On the strength of it. Doctor Dewey, in 
 his Boston address, made the assertion that 
 the West was a generation in advance of 
 the East. 
 
 The motive force back of this was 
 simply a grant of 10,000,000 acres of land 
 rather than the needs of the people for 
 coeducation. 
 
 It is not asserted that it is wrong to 
 take advantage of this gift, as it was very 
 
 [3] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 properly made to encourage education, but 
 it was not made to promote the method of 
 education that resulted. The purpose of 
 the act of 1862 is expressed in the follow- 
 ing preamble : " To teach such branches 
 of learning as are related to agriculture 
 and the mechanic arts in such manner as 
 the Legislatures of the States may re- 
 spectively prescribe in order to promote 
 the liberal and practical education of the 
 industrial classes in the several pursuits 
 and professions of life." There was evi- 
 dently no intent to found the present 
 coeducational college with uncontrolled 
 social relations as a coordinate department 
 of the training. Young women had a 
 right to share in the benefits of the grant. 
 The attitude of the promoters of the two- 
 sex plan said then, as they say now, if we 
 give women separate colleges, or coordi- 
 nate institutions, it will cost too much, 
 hence the college for both sexes. There 
 was money enough for both plans, but 
 
 [4] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 not enough to found colleges and satisfy 
 the greed of the political grafter. This 
 sacred trust was bandied about between 
 the upper millstone of political chicanery 
 and the lower of ill-advised and amateur 
 educators, without shame and without re- 
 morse, so far as known. Enough is 
 known to warrant the assertion that if the 
 secret history of that grant could be given 
 in detail, after each State had received its 
 due share, it would form one of the most 
 disgraceful records in the political history 
 of the West. 
 
 Has the West applied the proceeds of 
 the liberal grant wisely? This is what 
 President Jordan says about it in his 
 Popular Science Monthly article : " It is 
 true that untimely zeal of one sort or an- 
 other has filled the West with a host of 
 so-called colleges. It is true that most 
 of these are weak and doing poor work 
 in poor ways. It is true that most of 
 these are coeducational. It is also true 
 [5] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 that a great majority of their students 
 are not of the college grade at all. In 
 such schools low standards rule, both as 
 to scholarship and as to manners. The 
 student, fresh from the country, with no 
 preparatory training, will bring the man- 
 ners of his home. These are not always 
 good manners as manners are judged." 
 President Jordan ought to know what 
 constitutes a good college, with an effi- 
 cient faculty and effective equipment in 
 libraries and laboratories, of which these 
 alleged colleges have none. He ought also 
 to be an excellent judge of what is im- 
 plied by students of college grade, who 
 fail to appear in the student body of these 
 institutions. Commercialism cannot be 
 carried further in educational enterprise. 
 That the people who have been respon- 
 sible for this ill-advised effort to realize 
 upon an investment are not imconscious 
 of their mistake, will appear from the fol- 
 lowing extract from Professor Slosson, of 
 [6] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 the University of Wyoming; " The other 
 charge, that economy was the dominant 
 motive in estabhshing coeducation col- 
 leges, ought to be prohibited under the 
 rules of the Geneva Convention, because 
 it inflicts unnecessary suffering. It is not 
 only false, but it hurts. Our fathers may 
 have been mistaken when they founded 
 coeducational colleges, but they were not 
 stingy." Why could not Professor Slos- 
 son have been consistent as well as gen- 
 erous by conceding something to our 
 fathers in Congress, who made Wyoming 
 University possible in 1862, when, at that 
 date, the paternal relation in Wyoming, 
 if not unknown, had but little to do with 
 coeducation. Business considerations have 
 had more influence in founding the college 
 for both sexes than any other factor* 
 Numerous extracts could be made from 
 the literature of the subject, proving that 
 the segregation plan, while desirable, was 
 too costly to maintain, as it would require 
 [7] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 a duplicate equipment. The objection on 
 this ground was carried so far as to allow 
 young men and women to take the phys- 
 ical exercise together, as was the case 
 at one time in Chicago University, where 
 economy ought not to govern. To the 
 rank coeducationist it has always been too 
 costly to make coeducation wholesome and 
 decent. The commercial spirit has been 
 the ruling one in establishing colleges of 
 this kind in the East. After the Legis- 
 lature passed the enabling act, making 
 Ann Arbor a two-sex college, the faculty 
 objected to the expense caused by extra 
 instructors to meet the demands of women 
 students. The women of Michigan raised 
 $100,000, and women were admitted. The 
 same sum of money was given by women, 
 mostly feminine suffragists, to purchase 
 the admission of women to the Medical 
 School of Johns Hopkins University. 
 Half of this sum subsidized the University 
 of Rochester, the raising of which, says 
 [8] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 Mrs. Harper, nearly cost Miss Susan B. 
 Anthony her hfe. Cornell University, 
 after being liberally treated by a generous 
 benefactor, condescended to admit women. 
 The Hst could be extended further, but 
 enough has been given to show that good 
 business enterprise has underlaid the whole 
 superstructure of coeducation. This is not 
 written in a captious spirit. Money must 
 be had to promote education and its 
 growth. But it is stated in order to prove 
 that coeducation in the offensive form, 
 which is said to be its best expression, did 
 not naturally grow out of the necessities 
 and demands of the people. That the 
 demand for it, and the money which pur- 
 chased for it a place, came from the 
 women who were exploiting the equal 
 suffragist movement. 
 
 The standard of success of a college 
 
 for both sexes is the realization on the 
 
 investment. In other words, the size of 
 
 the class. This measure of success is en- 
 
 [9] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 dorsed by all who have approved the 
 method. President Butler says: "From 
 1890 - 98 the number of men in coeduca- 
 tional colleges increased 70 per cent., while 
 in separate colleges for men the number 
 increased only 34.7 per cent." In the 
 same paragraph he admits that among 
 communities well to do, separate colleges 
 for women are flourishing, " chiefly for 
 social reasons." There are pecuniary 
 reasons why the number of young men 
 has increased in the mixed college over 
 that in the men's colleges. The tuition 
 fees in the former are nearly 100 per cent, 
 less, while the annual living expenses, 
 taken on an average, are 30 per cent. less. 
 (Report Commissioner of Education, 
 Washington, 1900, p. 1926.) Presidents 
 Butler and Jordan, who are presumed to 
 be fair men, take no notice of such an 
 important factor of growth, but endeavor 
 to lead the reader to believe that it is due 
 to the general popular approval of the 
 [10] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 method itself. Instead, the commercial 
 spirit has induced the authorities of these 
 institutions to offer the public a cheap 
 article in the way of education. Ignoring 
 governing conditions, as stated above, the 
 coeducationists, with an air of boasting 
 hardly credible in sober-minded people, 
 call this progress, success, and higher edu- 
 cation, based on large classes and cheap 
 fees, and the matriculation of half -pre- 
 pared boys and girls. 
 
 Against the abandonment of the coedu- 
 cation method in favor of segregation or 
 coordination, we have the trade spirit pre- 
 senting itself in opposition. An ardent 
 advocate of the method alludes to the fate 
 that overtook Adelbert College, in Cleve- 
 land, Ohio. Fourteen years ago this de- 
 partment of the Western Reserve Univer- 
 sity segregated its classes. Of course, the 
 result has been a commercial failure. 
 " Adelbert College now rejoices in the 
 magnificent number of 206 male students. 
 
 [11] 
 
WoMAN'^s Unfitness 
 
 The Women's College has 222 students. 
 Thus all this special and expensive double 
 equipment is maintained, and necessarily 
 at a lower standard for each, for two col- 
 leges of only 200 students apiece, with the 
 sole purpose of preventing the girls from 
 coming in competition with the boys in 
 class-room work." This bold conclusion 
 is given just after the writer had stated 
 that both received the same degrees, and 
 did the same laboratory work. ( New York 
 Sun, August 10, 1902.) If the claim of 
 popular approval was justly predicated on 
 sound reasoning, we might overlook in- 
 discretions such as this, but when it is 
 pointed out that the mixed college is com- 
 ing nearer to a self-supporting stage than 
 the college for a single sex, serious doubts 
 arise whether it is education for trade pur- 
 poses or for culture's sake. A college that 
 hopes to support itself from students' 
 fees, or one that strives to do so, ought to 
 close its doors in the interests of humanity. 
 [12] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 The cost is yearly growing more onerous. 
 The laboratories, the libraries, the increas- 
 ing corps of instructors and professors, 
 make the tuition income of these institu- 
 tions appear as nothing by the side of the 
 aggregate expense. The true college 
 spirit, that signifies serious work, that 
 gives up all for culture and training, has 
 so enlarged educational equipment, that 
 the larger the attendance the greater the 
 individual cost ; while in the mixed college 
 the larger the attendance the greater the 
 profit. A singular feature of the cheap, 
 badly equipped mixed college of the 
 West, is the misuse of the word univer- 
 sity. With resources only large enough 
 to maintain a college of low rank for un- 
 prepared boys and girls, the university 
 name is tacked on without any regard to 
 what the word implies. The authorities 
 of these institutions cannot possibly be 
 ignorant of the scope and aim of a uni- 
 versity, and they also must be conscious 
 [13] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 of the fact that university rank is im- 
 possible to them. There must be a reason 
 why this name is so generally misappro- 
 priated. Here also the trade spirit has 
 left its finger-marks. A supposititious 
 rank would appeal to the uneducated boys 
 and girls from whom the classes are re- 
 cruited. The people at large are ignorant 
 of college or university organizations. It 
 might safely be left to any farmer or 
 mechanic, who has an ambition to have 
 his boys and girls receive an education, if 
 the name university did not have more 
 educational significance than a mere col- 
 lege, and if he would not prefer the for- 
 mer to the latter. If, as a matter of fact, 
 well known to the founders, an alleged 
 university is no better than a college, has 
 not the name been appropriated as a 
 trade-mark in a business enterprise? The 
 actual founders of the so-called colleges 
 and universities of the West, the Congress 
 of 1862, never intended, as the reader al- 
 [14] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ready knows, to found institutions to be 
 known by such names. On the contrary, 
 they were to be trade and agricultural 
 schools, for the benefit of the " industrial 
 classes." Legislatures of the States to 
 which the grant was allotted had no power 
 to act outside the terms of the grant, 
 although they were given power to use 
 their own discretion, but always within 
 the limitations of the law of Congress. 
 Under the conditions it is not an unwar- 
 ranted conclusion that these institutions 
 were created by a misappropriation of 
 public money. Had they done better 
 with it, the offence might be condoned, 
 but with President Jordan's evidence 
 as to the character of these institu- 
 tions, it is painfully evident that irrep- 
 arable wrong has been inflicted upon 
 communities that were greatly in need of 
 good education. When a commercial 
 spirit invades educational matters, it is 
 worse than politics. Of the two evils, it 
 [15] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 is the lesser one to give up to the grafter 
 a percentage on text-books, than to give 
 up an entire system of what ought to be 
 higher education to an abject spirit of 
 trade. It may be objected that a body 
 of men capable of uniting together as 
 trustees and faculty of a college could 
 not be guilty of so prostituting a sacred 
 cause. When it is remembered that ten 
 years ago scores of medical colleges were 
 founded, which were purely private and 
 business enterprises, enabled by acts of 
 Legislatures to confer M. D. degrees, with 
 faculties and boards of trustees always 
 made up of the best men of the locality, 
 and that these colleges were shams, it be- 
 comes less surprising to see the same spirit 
 active in the creation of other institutions. 
 It may have no special significance, but 
 it was in the West that these inefficient 
 trade medical colleges were more numer- 
 ously exploited. 
 
 It is very noticeable that in coeduca- 
 [16] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tional colleges where the social line is 
 strictly drawn, as in Rochester University, 
 Middletown, and Cornell, there is a small 
 attendance of women students. It is in 
 the institutions where the social bars are 
 let down that the large aggregation of 
 young girls is to be found. It is to be 
 hoped that the faculties of these institu- 
 tions have ignorantly assumed the truth 
 of the fiction that these immature and un-» 
 sophisticated people can be safely given 
 the social freedom of mature men and 
 women. It is a charity to assume that the 
 authorities of the mixed college, on such 
 a basis, are not taking advantage of one 
 of the inherent traits of young girls with 
 a view of attracting large classes. One 
 of the most alluring sides of a young 
 woman's traits is her fondness for the 
 society of the other sex. It is but natural 
 that a college on the most liberal co-sex 
 plan would attract the largest attendance 
 of young women, not from any spirit of 
 [17] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 wrong-doing, simply in compliance with 
 a physiological law. If college author- 
 ities are not taking an unfair advantage 
 of women, they are at least satisfied with 
 the results financially. To satisfy the 
 growing distrust of parents and guard- 
 ians, they invent the ridiculous claim that 
 such social freedom is in itself an educa- 
 tion and a wise preparation of the young 
 woman for her after-career. Young men 
 are also attracted to these colleges for the 
 same reason that women are, and, as is 
 proudly pointed out, in rapidly increasing 
 numbers. It cannot be denied that it is 
 good business policy, the result of a liberal 
 trade spirit. There is reason to hope for 
 better things when it is remembered that 
 in the space of ten years the number 
 of trade medical colleges was decreased 75 
 per cent, as the result of public opinion. 
 
 Higher coeducation now means speed, 
 not culture. It is the outcome of the in- 
 tensifying nature of the national life, 
 [18] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 which finds its most characteristic expres- 
 sion in the ruhng commercial spirit. It 
 may be a sad thing to say to those who 
 reverence learning for its own sake, that 
 the most typical form of this spirit 
 is found in higher education. There is 
 hardly a trace of it in primary and second- 
 ary education, unless it be in the more 
 than liberal expenditure of money on the 
 part of municipalities and States to edu- 
 cate the children and youths. This is an 
 education for citizenship, and not for cul- 
 ture. It is in higher education that the 
 dominant business animus rules both the 
 methods and the results. It is made cheap, 
 but price is nothing without speed. It is 
 business with the same meaning that gives 
 to the shipper a better freight rate from 
 Omaha to New York than from Buffalo 
 to New York. It is the long haul as 
 against the short haul in education as in 
 trade. Harvard University already allows 
 its students to specialize in the direction of 
 [19] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 professional work, and thus cut out a 
 year from their hberal training. The 
 senior year, during which so many young 
 men learn to find themselves, counts for 
 nothing if he can save one year out of 
 eight in his total educational work. What 
 Harvard does, many other colleges will do, 
 also. How many students has this pet 
 scheme of President Eliot's drawn away 
 from other institutions? It is very likely 
 that he was not conscious of it, but he was 
 catering to the lowest form of the trade 
 motive, as we know it, in education. 
 
 By viewing the extreme forms of coed- 
 ucation as business enterprises, an expla- 
 nation is furnished of many things that are 
 difficult to understand. These institutions 
 are, almost without exception, denomina- 
 tional in character and control. They 
 stand for education as far as their means 
 will allow, but they must exploit the tenets 
 of the religious bodies that founded them. 
 The central idea seems to be to educate 
 [20] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 young men for the pastorate in these so- 
 cieties. This is well; it is too early in the 
 twentieth century to separate religion and 
 higher education. It is better to combine 
 religion with the humanities, than not to 
 have it at all. But it is religion at a price. 
 Higher education must be animated by a 
 simple purpose ; it cannot be made to serve 
 two masters, and to serve both with profit. 
 Whicji pays the price will depend upon the 
 proselyting energies of the religious 
 founders. If they 'demand more of reli- 
 gion than they do of education, the latter is 
 reduced to a minimum. It recalls to mind 
 the affair of Vanderbilt University, where 
 ihe professor of geology was made to 
 resign on account of a little book which 
 he had written, entitled "The Pre-Ad- 
 amite Man." The trustees imagined that 
 it differed slightly from the Mosaic ac- 
 count of the creation. This is not an ex- 
 treme case. Professor Haeckel teaches at 
 Jena because the clergy at Berlin would 
 [21] 
 
WoMAK^s Unfitness 
 
 interfere with his freedom of investiga- 
 tion and teaching. This is commonly 
 called intolerance on the part of college 
 faculties. It is good business practice not 
 to antagonize any of the sectarian societies 
 that the college may represent. That relig- 
 ion should be an agent to reduce a col- 
 lege from a purely educational status to 
 a business enterprise, is a matter of serious 
 regret, but when it goes further, and 
 allows business considerations to dictate 
 the method and kind of instruction, the 
 freedom and liberality of education in de- 
 nominational colleges are placed in jeop- 
 ardy. 
 
 The independence that ensures the truth 
 and liberality of education is less evident 
 in the mixed college. Women are more 
 passive in religious matters than men. It 
 is doubtful if the action of the trustees 
 at Vanderbilt University would have been 
 tolerated in Eastern colleges for men by 
 the student body. A coeducational college 
 [22] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 could be handled much more easily in 
 prompting the business interest of secta- 
 rianism than a college for men only. Col- 
 leges of this type have a double burden of 
 commercialism, not the least of which is 
 given to increasing the influence of the 
 religious body which it represents. There 
 will be no reform in this direction until 
 the State takes charge of higher educa- 
 tion, just as it has in primary instruction 
 in behalf of all the people. Something 
 may be said of the direct bearing of the 
 trade spirit in lessening the opportunities 
 of women for education in colleges for 
 both sexes. Sound methods of instruction 
 ought to allow women the benefit of pro- 
 fessors of her own sex, if the eternal fit- 
 ness of things is to be respected. Women | 
 stand on a higher plane than men do as \ 
 instructors. In colleges for women they 
 have proven their fitness as instructors. 
 In the coeducation college she is given 
 scant recognition. A tabulation of the sex 
 [23] 
 
Woman's Unfitness 
 
 of professors in colleges and universities 
 is almost barren of women. Taking 
 Table 29 of the Report of the Bureau of 
 Education at Washington for the years 
 1899 - 1900, at random among 46 colleges, 
 5 of which are for men, there are 600 
 men professors and instructors, and 57 
 women in like positions. This is the fair- 
 ness shown to women on the part of men 
 who do not hesitate to claim that their 
 method is the only one that gives to women 
 a privilege equal to men in education. 
 There can be no question that the woman 
 professor can get in closer touch with the 
 young women students, both in sympathy 
 and instruction, than the male professor. 
 If there was a fair division of the chairs 
 in colleges where there is an attendance 
 of 500 to 1,200 women students, the gross 
 social license that has disgraced many col- 
 leges could not have occurred. Women 
 professors are not given a place in these 
 colleges, for the reason that young men 
 [24] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 would find the instruction of women pro- 
 fessors irksome, and would leave for insti- 
 tutions where men professors are em- 
 ployed. It is good trade policy, which the 
 authorities of these institutions would re- 
 gard as hardship to defend. The question 
 is a reasonable one, in view of the facts, 
 does not coeducation cheapen the policy 
 of the college in the matter of instructors ? 
 This cheapening of education is taking 
 an unfair advantage of women, it is dis- 
 posing of them at the least possible cost, 
 and giving them the least possible oppor- 
 tunities, after bestowing upon them an 
 alleged education of the higher kind. It 
 would cost money to give young women 
 professors whom the college could not 
 make useful with men. 
 
 One more matter that concerns the 
 commercial idea in the mixed college, is 
 the gift of scholarships for women in col- 
 leges for both sexes. In Table 30 of the 
 report referred to, and leaving out the 
 [25] 
 
Woman'^s Unfitness 
 
 University of Chicago, the Northwestern 
 University, and the University of lUinois, 
 there are only 106 scholarships, for any 
 of which women have no more rights than 
 men. Women attend college with as many 
 personal hardships as men, and with many 
 less opportunities to earn money. Out of 
 that scant number of scholarships, you can 
 count upon the fingers of one hand those 
 given in aid of women students. She is 
 educated as cheaply, and given as little 
 help as possible during her student life, 
 denied all chance for position in her alma 
 mater, and turned out upon the world as 
 a sort of by-product in the education of 
 men. She contributes 34 per cent, toward 
 the total expense of the institution by her 
 tuition, in return for which she receives 
 an education of doubtful utility and un- 
 certain culture, because it would cost too 
 much money to give her more. 
 
 [26] 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The Literature of Coeducation 
 
 We have only two criteria by which 
 we may estimate the honesty of men, 
 namely, by what they say, and by what 
 they do. Simple as this standard is, by it 
 we may often pierce to the hinterland of 
 act and motive. Apply this measure to 
 the public statement of those who are in 
 favor of the education of the sexes in 
 mixed colleges, we find a mass of so-called 
 literature unique as emanating from men 
 whom by courtesy we must call educated. 
 It is of such a character that it forms a 
 serious indictment of the sincerity of its 
 authors. They seem to have made a fetich 
 of coeducation, and, like a jungle priest, 
 [27] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 fly into a rage when its right is questioned. 
 A man who is sincere in his convictions, 
 who beheves that he is on secure ground, 
 welcomes a discussion of his postulate. 
 Not so the coeducationist. He is intolerant 
 ^/land abusive. He treats a serious social 
 problem with levity, and with what he 
 evidently believes to be wit. He forgets 
 that this is not an age of intolerance, but 
 that of free discussion. He is misplaced 
 in the order of time, and is generations 
 behind the spirit of free thought and in- 
 terrogation that environ him; he repu- 
 diates the first, and resents the latter. He 
 claims supremacy in deciding a great 
 question of sociology. He tries to obliter- 
 ate the laws of human life, and calls it 
 progress. And yet, his aim is to secure 
 the happiness and efficiency of an army 
 of men and women, and he asserts his 
 , ability to do this by a common education 
 I in an atmosphere of the closest social rela- 
 tions. Touching this, his best claim to 
 [28] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 respectability is the fact that he forgets. 
 Humanity cannot be made happier by 
 being ground down into a mjass by the 
 same machinery, neither can men and 
 women be given the same point of view, 
 the same interests, by social relations, how- 
 ever intimate, on the basis of a common 
 education. The coeducationist forgets 
 that men and women are at opposite poles 
 in the ellipse of natural law, that they 
 touch only on the periphery of thought 
 and emotion, and that they are merely 
 gyrating human atoms about the central 
 pivot of sex, differentiated by laws of 
 growth, maturity, and intellection that are 
 growing stronger as our modern civiliza- 
 tion gives individuality and intensity to 
 life. 
 
 It would be amusing, if it were not dis- 
 gusting, to give at length some of the 
 many notable examples of irony and sar- 
 casm, mixed with a peculiar form of wit 
 as misplaced as hilarity at a funeral, flung 
 [29] 
 
Womak'^s Unfitness 
 
 at the opponents of coeducation. A few 
 examples must suffice. A first place in 
 this style of argument must be given to 
 President Butler, of Columbia University. 
 In an article in Collier's Weekly, for June 
 2, 1902, " It would need the pen of 
 Swift," he says, " to portray the absurd- 
 ities of those who resist the movement to 
 open wide to women opportunities for 
 higher education." This quotation gives 
 point to another method of impaling their 
 adversaries on a point of false logic. If 
 you are opposed to coeducation, you are 
 opposed to the higher education of women. 
 The ridiculous charge is at all times 
 brought against those who only ask for 
 sane methods in education, and for an 
 even chance for woman as against man. 
 It is manly and honorable, however, from 
 their standpoint, to falsely charge a wrong 
 motive to any one who opposes you. Pres- 
 ident Butler continues: " They are quite 
 beyond Dooley's reach. One who is blessed 
 [30] 
 
/ 
 
 FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 with a sense of humor, even in modest pro- 
 portions, is unable to treat these argu- 
 ments seriously." The narrow strip of 
 States lying along the Atlantic seaboard 
 " is about as provincial as Honduras." 
 The ordinary relations between men and 
 women he stigmatizes with rare judgment 
 as " artificial and absurd." The only con- 
 ceivable association with the other sex are 
 those of love and marriage, " anything 
 else is bad form, or distinctly suspicious; 
 this seems to me utterly absurd, and that 
 it is fraught with danger, every one 
 knows." It would be better for President 
 Butler to speak for himself, but it would 
 have been still better, before writing this 
 last sentence, to have consulted some good 
 and wise female relative. What he says 
 about society here is false, and one cannot 
 resist the conviction that he knew it to be 
 false, and invented it to point his argu- 
 ment. When he strikes a serious vein, it 
 is to wave the whole matter of " solemn 
 [31] 
 
WoMAK^s Unfitness 
 
 arguments " against coeducation out of 
 court with a high-handed flourish. " But 
 really," he says, " these are all dead issues. 
 The American people have settled the 
 matter." This settlement is peculiar, and 
 forms one of the conclusive arguments 
 resorted to by all the friends of coeduca- 
 tion. " Fifteen millions of children in ele- 
 mentary schools are all being coeducated." 
 Because we may practically say that all 
 children attend primary schools and live 
 at home, therefore the great American 
 people have settled the fitness and utility 
 of herding young men and women to- 
 gether in mixed colleges, where they live 
 in unrestrained social relations, and which 
 our diplomatic president says " is the f am-^ 
 ily, the natural type." There is space for 
 but one other selection from the effort of 
 President Butler. After saying that 
 higher education for women, apart from 
 men, is disappointing, and stating with 
 fine irony that his mind will be weakened 
 [32] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 and his vitality sapped through teaching 
 women, " he takes rank with the advocates 
 of the Baconian authorship of Shake- 
 speare's plays," concluding abruptly in 
 a manner that, following the hilarity of 
 the article, appears ludicrously solemn. 
 " Meanwhile, it is very proper to re- 
 mark in conclusion that the Columbia's 
 plan of the separation of men and women 
 during the undergraduate course, with 
 equal opportunities for them, and a com- 
 mon opportunity in graduate work, meets 
 admirably our social and industrial needs 
 and conditions." This is not coeducation 
 in any sense in which the word is used 
 in this book, nor in any sense made use 
 of by President Butler. In the light 
 of the concluding paragraph, can any 
 one understand why he wrote that arti- 
 cle, and why he infused into it the tone 
 and spirit that it shows? President Butler 
 has been given more space than he was 
 entitled to by the merits of his article, be- 
 [33] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 cause he so completely epitomizes the stock 
 arguments of all who favor the coeduca- 
 tional idea, and his style of presenting the 
 subject is an excellent example of the 
 method. 
 
 Another author who has contributed to 
 the literature of the subject, is President 
 Jordan, of Leland Stanford University. 
 He aims to be learned and philosophical 
 where President Butler was frivolous and 
 jocular, but they stand in one respect 
 upon common ground, as neither has the 
 courage of his convictions. Several refer- 
 ences have already been made to his Pop- 
 ular Science Monthly article, but he is 
 called up here as a witness for the indict- 
 ment brought against the advocates of 
 what they are pleased to call the American 
 idea. After a long statement of plati- 
 tudes which were never disputed, he then 
 draws a picture of a mythical college 
 which is to meet the " varied needs of 
 varied men," which is to be the future 
 [34] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 college for both sexes in common. Where 
 such a college is located he omits to inform 
 us, but it is not the Stanford Junior Uni- 
 versity. On the whole, he talks in a very 
 sane way on the modern college, and it 
 is not until he touches upon the question 
 at issue that he allows the prevailing flip- 
 pant manner to intrude. " Shall women 
 be taught in the same classes as men? " 
 he asks, and answers that it "is a matter 
 of taste or personal preference. It does 
 no harm whatever to either men or women 
 to meet those of the other sex in the same 
 class-room. But if they prefer not to do 
 so, let them do otherwise. No harm is 
 done in either case, nor has the matter 
 more then secondary importance." If co- 
 education can survive a blow like that it 
 has a large amount of reserve vitality, but 
 this appearance of indifference to the 
 burning question that is agitating hun- 
 dreds of colleges, real or putative, appears 
 to result from his low opinion of educated 
 [85] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 women. " She may know a good deal," 
 he says, " but she can do nothing." If 
 women are educated alone, the " tendency 
 is toward beauty and order, while men . 
 have this obscured by the realities; but 
 educated together, the women confer 
 beauty and order upon the men, while the 
 latter give beauty and fitness to the 
 women. There is less of silliness and 
 folly where man is not a novelty." Again 
 he says, " that in coeducational institu- 
 tions of high standards frivolous conduct 
 or scandals of any form are rarely 
 known," and yet on the very next page 
 he tells us of the evils and scandals that re- 
 sult because women are not lodged in dor- 
 mitories, but with fine distinction he states 
 " that this is not to be charged to coeduca- 
 tion." He forgets that there is not a pop- 
 ular college for both sexes in the country 
 that can give dormitory accommodation 
 for but a small part of the women stu- 
 dents. President Jordan's statements have 
 [36] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 been freely quoted elsewhere, to which the 
 reader is referred, but enough has been 
 given to show the tendency toward rash 
 assertion and indifference to facts, and the 
 prevailing tone of flippancy that mars and 
 weakens all that is said by the advocates 
 of coeducation. All things considered, 
 President Jordan has written the best 
 paper upon the subject that has yet ap- 
 peared. 
 
 There appeared in two recent numbers 
 of the Independent an article by Mr. 
 Henry T. Finck, on " Why Coeducation 
 is Losing Ground." His position was 
 fairly stated, his facts were unassailable, 
 w^hile its tone was moderate. It was 
 highly proper that an article of this char- 
 acter should elicit a reply. This was made 
 by Prof. E. E. Slosson, of the University 
 of Wyoming, and appeared in the same 
 number of the Independent. The reply 
 was in the prevailing type. When he 
 failed to give his argument validity by his 
 [37] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 facts, he endeavored to give it vitality by 
 his sarcasm. He began the discussion of 
 such a serious subject in this way, and it 
 is so very characteristic that it deserves to 
 be given in full: " The most immoral act 
 I ever committed, so far as known to the 
 public, was to take a seat on the left of 
 the aisle in an Eastern country church. It 
 was the women's side. The reason I call 
 it my most immoral act was not because 
 of my motive, for I had none, but because 
 nothing I have ever done before or since 
 has caused such horror in the minds of the 
 righteous, such sneers on the part of the 
 ungodly, and such pain to my friends." 
 As an opening for a paper upon a subject 
 of vital importance, this stands unequalled 
 for irrelevancy and unfitness. Its motive 
 is evident, to heap ridicule upon the author 
 who ventures to question the system of 
 coeducation, while at the same time he 
 could pose as a man of infinite wit among 
 the applauding readers of Wyoming Uni- 
 [38] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 versity. He is not satisfied to exhibit wit, 
 but he must also indulge in paradoxes, if 
 we may so mildly designate a denial of 
 physiological truths, as well as the con- 
 clusions of experience. "Segregation of 
 the sexes in coeducation heightens sex con- 
 sciousness and " stimulates the sex idea." 
 Colleges for men are called monastic in- 
 stitutions, and he makes no charges about 
 the morals of the men there, because he 
 " knows too much about them." It is not 
 necessary to treat Professor Slosson se- 
 riously, and, like the others, whom we have 
 so far quoted, it is brought forward only 
 to show the animus displayed by the coed- 
 ucationists. 
 
 The most intolerant and vituperative 
 reply brought out by Mr. Finck's article 
 was from the one who is not an educator, 
 Mrs. Harper, who edits, or writes, a col- 
 umn or two in the Sunday edition of the 
 New York Sun. Her reply is not worth 
 quoting, as it contains no argument 
 [39] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 against Mr. Finck's contention, but is 
 made up of abuse of all who oppose the 
 mixed college, and of that author in par- 
 ticular, who was roundly abused for a 
 couple of books he had written, and which 
 appeared especially to rouse her ire. If 
 there is any truth or justice in the theory 
 of coeducation, it can never be brought 
 out by the methods of argument followed 
 by its adherents. Let them eliminate the 
 tendency to rash assertion of facts of 
 which they oif er no proof, let them once 
 for all come to the modest conclusion that 
 their mere opinion has no value in an 
 argument upon a question of sociology, 
 and exhibit the manners of gentlemen, and 
 there may be hope that the truth will be 
 reached. When you are contending with 
 men who use their style of argument, the 
 only way is to turn against them their 
 own weapons. This want of tolerance 
 savors of medisevalism, and crops out in 
 the most unexpected places. Surely the 
 [40] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 discussion held by the Association of Col- 
 leges of the Middle States, published in 
 the Regents' Report for 1901, must have 
 had something in it worthy of serious con- 
 sideration, and yet Dean Smalley, of 
 Syracuse University, an able and con- 
 scientious educator, says that it had " some 
 nonsense on coeducation." As long as the 
 subject is treated in this way, it will pro- 
 voke hostile discussion. There is not a 
 man who has approached the subject from 
 the opposite point of view who has not 
 been actuated by a spirit of fairness, and 
 the sole desire to seek the truth. This 
 frivolous attitude of its defenders, the 
 jeering, scandalizing comments of the 
 press, have deprived coeducation of all 
 dignity. It appears like education in bur- 
 lesque, a comedy of errors, with the actors 
 dressed in cap and gown. 
 
 It is difficult to keep the advocates of 
 coeducation in colleges for men and 
 women down to the main question. Co- 
 [41] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 education is always traced to the primary 
 school, then to the secondary school, and 
 finally to the college. No writer who has 
 ever opposed the latter form of coeduca- 
 tion had an idea of offering any argument 
 against children being taught together in 
 primary schools. In the secondary schools, 
 in which the student averages the age of 
 fifteen years, hardly any objection can 
 be raised, although in quite a number of 
 cities, especially in the South, they are 
 separated. In the primary school the sex 
 problem, of course, never obtrudes. 
 Among the older students in secondary 
 schools, if the boys and girls were given 
 the same uncontrolled social privileges that 
 they have in mixed colleges, the same ir- 
 regularities would exist. The boys and 
 girls are, however, under home influences 
 and control. This it is that keeps the 
 school wholesome and free from moral 
 contamination, and it is the absence of 
 the home control that forms the storm cen- 
 [42] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tre in large mixed colleges, and that caused 
 the revolution in the relation of the faculty 
 to the women students in Syracuse Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 In the report of the Commissioner of 
 Education for the United States for 
 1901 - 02, there is an extensive chapter 
 devoted to coeducation. It certainly needed 
 editing by the official compiler. In Boston 
 a special committee made a divided report 
 on coeducation. The majority report, 
 signed by J. P. C. Winship and Emily A. 
 Fifield, offers some remarkable instances 
 of logic. We do no injustice to the authors 
 in separating the following extracts from 
 their context. ^ A man tells a rough story 
 in a smoking-car because " there are no 
 women here," therefore, educate boys 
 and men with girls and women, and the 
 refining influence represses and subdues 
 the rough and gross nature in young men. 
 We wonder if that is so. The low estimate 
 that coeducationists place upon our young 
 [43] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 men exists to such an extent that it forms 
 a feature of its so-called literature. How 
 they account for the existence of the 
 American gentleman, young or old, before 
 coeducation was ever dreamed of, is a 
 minor matter not deserving of explana- 
 tion. "If it is right," says this extraor- 
 dinary report, " for brothers and sisters to 
 live in the same house and eat at the same 
 table, then it is right for them to be edu- 
 cated together. Let them be brought up 
 separately, and if they meet only clandes- 
 tinely, great harm is likely to result." 
 Surely the reader will pardon the ques- 
 tion, where did this man and woman get 
 their experience of life ? But the worst is 
 yet to come. " If wedlock is right and 
 proper, then coeducation is right and 
 proper. If men and women are to marry, 
 they should know each other summer and 
 winter before marriage, and the more they 
 know of each other the less likely will 
 divorce result." One other extract, in 
 [44] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 order to show the high-handed style of 
 treating all who oppose the method, by 
 people who have become case-hardened to 
 the coeducational idea. The majority 
 made an enrolment of all teachers for and 
 against attendance in mixed schools. Of 
 the results of this tabulation, they say: 
 " Of the 254 teachers opposed to coeduca- 
 tion, 122 are teachers of girls alone, and 
 109 instructors of boys only. They may 
 be considered eoc jmrte in their views, and 
 should be ruled out." We will say nothing 
 about the peculiar grammar of this quota- 
 tion, and only call attention to the result: 
 as all who voted in opposition did so in obe- 
 dience to their convictions, their vote was 
 recommended for rejection; the result of 
 the voting, therefore, was unanimously in 
 favor. As the minority report is evidently 
 ^'^ eoc parte/^ we rule it out. 
 
 A considerable number of excerpts 
 from the reports of foreign teachers, 
 delegates to the Chicago Educational 
 [45] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 Congress in 1893, are given in the United 
 States report. — Leaving out all ref- 
 erences to common and secondary schools, 
 one of these reports, being from a lady, 
 Mile. Marie Dugard, is well worth quot- 
 ing in part. " From the moral stand- 
 point, the consequences are still more 
 dangerous. It is a law that if two individ- 
 uals live together, the one who has the 
 strongest personality becomes the model of 
 the other. Finally, it is impossible that 
 between young men and young women, 
 associated every day in the familiarity of 
 classes, there should not be formed some 
 romances, which the American education, 
 it is true, renders inoffensive so far as 
 regard manners, but which will neverthe- 
 less have disadvantages. These objections 
 seem judicious, and in the light of them 
 it seems that coeducation ought to be 
 abandoned."^ Prof . Emil Hausknecht, of 
 Berlin, says in the same report: "As a 
 makeshift, coeducation is better than noth- 
 [46] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ing — as a principle, it entirely ignores 
 the needs of the separate sexes." In his 
 book entitled " American Traits," Prof. 
 Hugo Munsterberg, in a summary which 
 is especially fair and reserved, writes of 
 the effemination of college training. 
 " The whole situation here militates 
 against the home and against the mascu- ^ 
 line of higher education, and seems to me, 
 therefore, antagonistic to the health of 
 the nation. . . . Coeducation means only 
 equality; but the so-called higher educa- 
 tion for girls means, under the conditions 
 of American life to-day, decidedly not the 
 equality, but the superiority of women. 
 . . . The woman who studies medicine or 
 natural science, music or painting, perhaps 
 even law or divinity, can we affront her ^^ 
 with the suggestion, which would be an 
 insult to the man, that all her work is so 
 superficial that she will not care for its 
 continuation as soon as she undertakes the 
 duties of a married woman? Or ought 
 [47] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 we to imply that she is so conceited as to 
 believe that she is able to do what no man 
 would dare hope for himself; that is, to 
 combine the professional duties of the man 
 with the not less complex duties of the 
 woman? She knows that the intensity of 
 her special interest must suffer, and that 
 her work must become a superficial side 
 interest." 
 
 In the further examination of the report 
 of the Bureau of Education at Washing- 
 ton, which, by the way, is a coeducational 
 document, rather unfair measures are re- 
 sorted to to prop up the cause. The boast 
 is frequently made that the American idea 
 is spreading to foreign universities and 
 colleges ; concerning this, the report states : 
 " At Oxford, women are admitted to the 
 lectures of about 120 professors, readers, 
 and lecturers in the university. They are 
 also admitted to the examinations for 
 B. A., but are not eligible to the university 
 degrees. Substantially the same arrange- 
 [48] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ments have been made at Cambridge. 
 Women are admitted on the same terms 
 as men to Durham University, and are 
 ehgible to all the degrees excepting those 
 in divinity. Victoria University grants 
 degrees on the same terms as men. In the 
 University of Wales, women have the 
 same privileges as men. The University 
 College, established in England since 1868, 
 is open to men and women. By the Uni- 
 versities Act of 1889, the Scotch univer- 
 sities were authorized to open their doors 
 to women. Edinburg admits them to the 
 classes with men. Glasgow has affiliated 
 Queen Margaret College for women, and, 
 more recently (1895), opened all lectures 
 in the faculty of arts to women. The 
 University of Dundee, affiliated to St. 
 Andrew's, is coeducational. Women are 
 admitted to all the privileges of the 
 Royal University of Ireland. Trinity 
 College, Dublin, does not admit women, 
 but special examinations for women out- 
 [49] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 side the course for students of the college 
 were established about twenty-five years 
 ago, and are still continued." The con- 
 tention of this extract is manifest, that is^ 
 that coeducation, as we understand the 
 term in the United States, is finding a 
 foothold in conservative England, and is 
 intentionally misleading. Coeducation, 
 with its untrammelled social relation of 
 i/i- the sexes, as exists in Northwestern and 
 Chicago University, and as it formerly 
 existed at Syracuse, could not live an hour 
 in England. As a matter of fact, coedu- 
 cation on the Oberlin plan has made no 
 progress in England, or the Colonies. 
 In England, University College has a 
 woman's department. King's College also 
 has a woman's department. Lady Mar- 
 garet, Somerville, and St. Hilda, at 
 Oxford, are for women. In Wales, there 
 are Alexandria Hall, at Aberystwyth, and 
 Aberdere Hall, at Cardiff, as distinct 
 from the parent institution as are Rad- 
 [50] 
 
FOE Higher Coeducation 
 
 clifFe, at Harvard, and Barnard, at 
 Columbia. Glasgow has affiliated Queen 
 Margaret College for women, and is not 
 coeducational. In Germany, the college 
 as it is known here does not exist, its func- 
 tion being confined to the gymnasia, to 
 which women are not admitted. German 
 universities confine their degree work to 
 the learned profession, law, medicine, 
 divinity, and to a course of philosophy. 
 The Technische Hochschules are coordi- 
 nate in rank with the universities, and give 
 practical professional training, except in 
 the learned professions. Women are ad- 
 mitted to examinations for degrees in 
 many of the universities, but are not al- 
 lowed to matriculate, and are simply 
 hearers by courtesy. They thus form no 
 part of the student body. In France, the 
 prevailing conditions are but little better 
 in favor of women, their university no 
 better. In 1898 there were 871 women en- 
 rolled as attending French universities, in 
 [51] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 a total of 28,782. In medicine there were 
 469, science 80, letters 262, and in phar- 
 macy 55. For the same year (1898) there 
 were only 16 doctorates in medicine and 3 
 diplomas in pharmacy bestowed. In spite 
 of all this, in nearly every article that is 
 written the statement is made that coed- 
 ucation is making rapid progress abroad, 
 and the public which they address be- 
 lieves it. 
 
 An interesting feature of the more re- 
 cent literature of coeducation, is the plan 
 of segregate, or coordinate, education. 
 These are advocated as a remedy for the 
 evils that the system has gradually led up 
 to. Both are as strenuously battled against 
 as is the plan to abolish the method en- 
 tirely. President C. F. Thwing, in his 
 book, " The College Woman," extracts 
 from which are given place in the report 
 of the Bureau, " Coordination," he says, 
 " represents a college for men as part of 
 a university, and a college for women as 
 [52] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 part of a university, each able to exist 
 without the other, both united in loyalty 
 to the same ideals. Coordinate education 
 is not coeducation, for the men and women 
 do not recite in the same class. It pro- 
 motes a very sane health. It does not 
 tempt to love giving or love receiving any 
 more than humanity itself. It is a method 
 more easy to administer than coeducation. 
 The students are not brought into relations 
 so intimate that even the wisest parents 
 can ask questions of anxiety." It is an 
 anomaly in education that the sex relation 
 referred to by President Thwing is just 
 what the hard-shell coeducationist does 
 want. The humanizing, cultivating influ- 
 ence of the " cultured " young girl of 
 eighteen on the education of men cannot 
 be given up. She is an essential feature 
 of the method. In this " cultured " so- 
 ciety too great intimacy cannot exist, and, 
 if marriage takes place, and the more the 
 better, as President Jordan says, what can 
 [53] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 be so good as a cultured young man, 
 whom we may term the by-product of the 
 method? 
 
 Brown University has begun the method 
 of coordinate education, and is counted by 
 Doctor Harris, in his Bureau report, as a 
 coeducational college, which called forth 
 a protest from President Faunce. The 
 work at Brown does away with one ob- 
 jection raised against the coordinate sys- 
 tem, namely, its expense. " While this 
 establishment," the president says, " makes 
 no drain whatever upon the University's 
 financial resources, it adds greatly to its 
 popularity and favor with the commu- 
 nity." Coordination, when established as 
 a part of a college for men, elicits no pro- 
 test on the part of coeducation advocates, 
 but when it is proposed to introduce it into 
 institutions for both sexes, where the " cul- 
 ture " theory has hitherto flourished, it 
 rouses a storm of indignant protest. 
 
 The same may be said of the proposed 
 [54] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 segregation plan for Chicago University, 
 an idea which has taken root also in North- 
 western University, according to recent 
 despatches of the Associated Press. These 
 changes in the two great institutions of 
 the Middle West may be regarded as san- 
 itary measures to improve education and 
 clear the moral atmosphere, as clearly 
 needed in college life as in an effort to 
 abate the smoke nuisance in Chicago. 
 Against this, newspaper attacks are made, 
 of a character only equalled by the slum 
 politics. The reader already knows some- 
 thing of the aim of coordination in educa-» 
 tion. Is there anything about it to solicit 
 the following intemperate attack from 
 Mrs. Harper, in the easy columns of the 
 New York Sun? " Is the sex line to be 
 drawn at Chicago University? After ten 
 years of enjoyment of its splendid privi- 
 leges, are women to be set aside in an 
 ' annex,' and subjected to all the limita- 
 tions which are endured by the women of 
 [55] 
 
Woman's Unfitness 
 
 other colleges where coordinate education 
 prevails? These are the things which the 
 people of this country have a right to 
 protest. Has Doctor Harper hypnotized 
 Mr. Rockefeller, that he consents to this? 
 . . . One of the greatest experiments ever 
 made has heen in progress at Chicago 
 University, and it has been watched by the 
 educators of the world. President Harper 
 proposes to declare this practically a fail- 
 ure. Such action will be a calamity from 
 which it will require a generation to re- 
 cover. There should be a quick and unan- 
 imous protest from every newspaper and 
 every man and every woman of influence." 
 ( New York Sun, July 6, 1902. ) The con- 
 cluding sentence of this quotation demon- 
 strates that Mrs. Harper lacks sanity on 
 this subject. All people must think as she 
 does. All newspapers do not advocate 
 coeducation, and most men and women of 
 influence send their daughters to colleges 
 for women. Again she says: "It is 
 [56] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducatio 
 
 N 
 
 sought to do this unjust thing, not by pre- 
 senting openly the objection to the present 
 system, and permitting a full and free 
 discussion, but by the party machine 
 method of coercing voters, juggling bal- 
 lots, taking advantage of absentees, to 
 secure majorities, and other devious ways 
 of the politician." This would be very 
 wrong if it were true, but it is not true. 
 Again, she winds up with the crescendo: 
 " Against this most retrogressive action let 
 there be emphatic protest by the press, by 
 individuals, and by organizations of men 
 and women throughout the country." 
 (New York Sun, September 28, 1902.) 
 If there can be anything finer than this 
 in the way of a quiet, philosophical dis- 
 cussion of a great problem in education, 
 research has failed to discover it. 
 
 The most aggressive advocates are the 
 
 women suffragists. This movement has 
 
 been the fostering agent of the corelation 
 
 of the sexes in college education. This, at 
 
 [57] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 least, is true of the method in the East. 
 In the West and Middle West, peculiar 
 social conditions favored the growth of 
 the idea. In the East, the plan of cam- 
 paign on the part of the suffragists has 
 been a stupid abuse of men; on a parity, 
 their method of advancing the cause of 
 coeducation has been an equal abuse of 
 any one who opposed it. The motive of 
 the women suif ragists, admitting that they 
 have any, must be a mixed one. On the 
 one hand, they hope to gain an additional 
 political asset with which to discount the 
 future, and, on the other hand, to make 
 a marked impression by the alleged ex- 
 cessive brightness and receptive quaUties 
 of women over men in their studies. The 
 latter is no doubt true, as relates to 
 young woman from eighteen to twenty- 
 two years of age, but this disappears as 
 maturity places men and women on a com- 
 mon level. Industrial feminism has re- 
 ceived but little attention from the suf- 
 [58] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 fragists, who have concentrated on the 
 woman student, and only on the student 
 as she takes part in a mixed college, the 
 interest that ought to have been extended 
 to women in the many relations of impor- 
 tance which she bears to the great modern 
 movement of industrial feminism. Here 
 she is gaining her greatest victories in the 
 wide domain of the industries, and gains 
 them with modest assurance, in which co- 
 education and woman's suffrage take no 
 part. This, the future will show to be true 
 coeducation ; in the ever widening univer- 
 sity of practical life, where skill of hand 
 and the trained mind will make woman 
 man's coworker, share and share alike, co- 
 education must open the door to woman. 
 It must make easy and ensure success for 
 her in what is difficult for the sister who 
 is not coeducated. But coeducation has 
 not yet stood this test. There is an entire 
 absence of evidence to prove that, in the 
 active competition of life, young women, 
 [59] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 the product of mixed colleges, have any 
 ^ advantage over other women. The coedu- 
 cationists make no claim in this direction; 
 there are too many facts against it viewed 
 from this standpoint. The only claims the 
 women suffragists make, are that women 
 are entitled to the same kind and degree 
 of education that men are receiving, with- 
 J out reference to occupation, and that edu- 
 
 cation of the coeducational kind will better 
 fit her for the duties of a wife and mother. 
 Concerning this latter contention, there are 
 no facts obtainable from the vast army of 
 wives and mothers. That, however, is of 
 no consequence ; it is stated with the force 
 of a self-evident proposition, in which all 
 are to place their belief. If there is any- 
 thing in the license permitted in the un- 
 controlled relations of the sexes to fit a 
 woman for wifehood, the history of these 
 young women has failed to reveal it, or, if 
 to bring to the side of the cradle an intelli- 
 gence trained on this model offers any 
 [60] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 advantages over instinctive motherhood, it 
 also has yet to be proven. 
 
 The relation of women to the industries 
 is not indebted to college education ; on the 
 contrary, the great common school system 
 of the country, which, during the past fifty 
 years, has been given broader scope and a 
 more practical direction, is what has 
 opened the door to industrial feminism in 
 America, as contrasted with the social 
 feminism of Germany, with Madame 
 Husson as its exponent. In England, 
 where it is a gospel of discontent, or in 
 Sweden, where Ibsen is its prophet. This 
 is called the " emancipation of women," 
 and this is the ground held by the women 
 suffragists. There is no word as to the 
 betterment of woman labor conditions. 
 On the contrary, she is simply regarded 
 individually as a political unit, from whom 
 her natural prerogatives have been with- 
 held. " And all women will know in time," 
 says an illogical advocate of " equal 
 [61] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 rights," " what many of them realize now, 
 that their Government has not fulfilled its 
 whole duty in simply permitting them to 
 make a living." When did Government, 
 State or national, ever assume any right 
 to " permit " women to make a living? 
 Absurdities like this must not be allowed 
 to interrupt the even flow of the remark- 
 able argument; "but that justice de- 
 mands," she continues, " that it should give 
 them, in addition, a voice in the councils 
 and a part in its administrations. The 
 State itself will eventually have sufficient 
 confidence in the judgment, ability, and 
 patriotism of its women to acknowledge 
 fully their value and their necessity in 
 public affairs." (New York Sun, July 5, 
 1903.) This social feminism, the gospel 
 of decadence, that is disturbing Europe 
 and filling it with a literature of revolt 
 and discontent, is not that woman may find 
 wider fields for her industrial efforts, but 
 for her to throw off the shackles of social 
 [62] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 restraints, and secure in their place her 
 emancipation from marriage and all that 
 it implies. If coeducation is not to secure 
 for women a broader field of usefulness, 
 then, under the decadent teaching of the 
 women suffragists, she will be expected to 
 join in the cry of revolt against the crime 
 of marriage and maternity without her 
 consent. 
 
 The future for women, the healthy, con- 
 tented future, all depends on the material 
 side, that inevitably tends to release 
 woman from her dependence on man. 
 This must not only be relative, but it must 
 be absolute and general, in order to give 
 her a freedom of choice as to what her 
 relations with man may be. If she be 
 self-supporting and contented with her 
 lot, she marries from choice, with no neces- 
 sity to wait for a possible marriage which 
 may never come. She will be under no 
 necessity to become a place-hunter from 
 a political majority, which, unless women 
 [63] 
 
Woman'^s Unfitness 
 
 possess a moral fibre to which men are 
 strangers, will make of her a social im- 
 possibility. What is there in coeducation 
 to impart to woman her ability to keep her 
 future in her own hands? That is to 
 broaden, not her capacity to vote and to 
 seek office, but to secure for her a fair 
 share of the right and ability to work. 
 That is to increase her effectiveness by 
 the side of man that alone will secure to 
 her an equal share of compensation. 
 
 To the great and final test of coeduca- 
 tion in mixed colleges, that of fitness for 
 work, the literature of the subject gives 
 no clue. Unsupported assertions are 
 made, but no proof given. It would nat- 
 urally occur to one that, if the advocates 
 of the method believe it to be necessary 
 to say what they do, and in a way which 
 they evidently regard as striking and con- 
 vincing, they would also see the need of 
 offering some evidence that would bring 
 conviction to thinking people. 
 [64] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 It would be a simple matter to keep in 
 touch with their women graduates, and 
 tabulate their occupations and earning 
 capacities. The majority of women grad- 
 uates of mixed colleges who have to seek a 
 vocation enter the teaching profession. A 
 contributor to the New York Sun of Jan- 
 uary 11,1903, Mrs. Harper, is wholly just 
 in her complaint of the small salaries paid 
 to women teachers. But the explanation 
 is not that they are discriminated against, 
 it is simply the old law of supply and 
 demand. The statistics given in the Re- 
 port of the Federal Bureau of Education 
 show that the average excess of women 
 teachers over men is 72 per cent, for the 
 whole country. The average pay for men 
 is $47, and $39 for women, monthly. 
 An average never expresses a mathemat- 
 ical fact, it is only an approximation, and, 
 as such, gives no idea of the actual salaries 
 paid. In the cities of what in the report 
 is called the North Atlantic Division, it is 
 [65] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 doubtful if there are one per cent, of men 
 on the eligible lists seeking positions in the 
 grammar schools. On the eligible list of 
 the city of Syracuse, there are more than 
 enough seeking positions to supply the city 
 for ten years, and no men applying for 
 appointment as room teachers. Women 
 graduates from the local coeducational 
 college have crowded the lists for high 
 school positions to an equal extent. These 
 young women refuse positions in schools 
 of the senior grade. It is only partly a 
 matter of pay, as the majority claim that 
 their college education has fitted them for 
 something higher than to teach children. 
 If their higher education is responsible 
 for the belief that they are too well edu- 
 cated to teach children, their college has 
 badly fitted them for their calling. In- 
 deed, so risky is the experiment of ap- 
 pointing a recent graduate to a high school 
 position, that Doctor Blodgett, the very 
 efiicient Superintendent of Schools of 
 [66] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 Syracuse, has repeatedly protested against 
 such appointments. Competition is rap- 
 idly placing the teacher of college rank on 
 the same basis as the graduates of the nor- 
 mal schools and teachers' training classes. 
 In all the literature that has emanated 
 from the coeducationists, there has been 
 nothing said about the college coeducated 
 girl at home. She must, for a certain 
 period of her life, resume her place in the 
 home environment, with the exception of 
 those who teach, or the small number who 
 enter the professions. What atmosphere 
 does she bring with her, what return does 
 she make for the family resources often 
 strained to fit her for something useful? 
 Elenor Hoyt, in Collier's Weekly for 
 June 21, 1903, writes evidently in the 
 fulness of knowledge of this interesting 
 phase of the coeducated college woman. 
 " The college girl from the small town 
 finds it impossible ' to settle down and 
 stagnate.' Something is wrong with an 
 [67] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 education that does not provide a woman 
 with resources to defy stagnation. The 
 daughter cannot reheve her mother of 
 long-carried domestic and social responsi- 
 bilities, because these petty intrusions upon 
 her time interfere with her self -culture. 
 The college girl must carry the gospel of 
 plaster casts and foreign photographs to 
 the great unwashed, even if that work 
 takes strength and energy, and, conse- 
 quently, good cheer." There are fortu- 
 nately many exceptions to this dark 
 picture, otherwise coeducation as a home 
 wrecker would exceed in force a Western 
 cyclone; but, in theory, that is just what 
 the system might be expected to do for a 
 shallow, conceited girl. It is, as President 
 Jordan wisely says, that some girls are not 
 fit to be coeducated at a college. 
 
 [68] 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 The Physiology of Coeducation 
 
 One of the strongest arguments that the 
 advocates of coeducation offer in favor 
 of their system, is the improved healthj 
 physically and mentally, of the women 
 students. This claim is made so assid- 
 uously as to lead one to believe that a 
 similar condition does not exist among 
 women at large, but that it is a distinguish- 
 ing trait of the college woman. If the 
 reader will bear in mind what has been 
 said concerning the social life in colleges 
 for both sexes, it will need no argument to 
 establish the fact that there is nothing, 
 either in the curriculum or in the social 
 habits of the students, to maintain good 
 [69] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 health in those who are well, or to enable 
 those who are constitutionally deUcate to 
 cope successfully with the four years of 
 student life. She is admitted on the same 
 physical standard that men are, and she 
 continues on that basis throughout her 
 course. The central idea of coeducation 
 is the obHteration of the sex hne. The 
 moment woman is held as something dif- 
 ferent from man in needs and capacity 
 for education, or that she offers any phys- 
 ical limitations to its attainment, coedu- 
 cation as a system in higher education will 
 break down, and its most bigoted advo- 
 cate can no longer claim any place or 
 necessity for it. Any contention that 
 women students show a continued im- 
 provement in health and physique during 
 their college course has no better basis in 
 fact, or in reason, than many other claims 
 upheld by the advocates of the system. 
 
 What they make a point of is true of 
 all young women who have a fair start 
 [70] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 in the way of functional health, as they, 
 mature in four years of advancing woman- 
 hood, without regard to their station or 
 occupation in life. 
 
 This clears the way for an impartial 
 inquiry into the subject of coeducation and 
 women's health. In the interest of fair- 
 ness, it may be said that many who have 
 opposed it have made their specifications 
 of the ill-effects of coeducation upon the 
 health of women students too broad. It 
 is not so much a matter of the greater 
 liability of a physical breakdown during 
 the pursuit of student life, in excess of 
 other occupations of women, as it is of 
 whether there are efficient functional 
 reasons why women may not conform to 
 the standard of men in the manner and 
 method of study. And, further, if such 
 conformity is enforced in colleges for both 
 sexes, is her future health as well assured 
 as it would have been had she been edu- 
 cated along lines where due regard was 
 [71] 
 
WOMAN^S U:NriTNESS 
 
 given both to education and to woman- 
 hood? 
 
 Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in her book 
 on " The Question of Rest for Women," 
 is obhged to reluctantly confess that forty- 
 five per cent, of women suffer from men- 
 strual pain. The experience of every 
 physician who has opportunities for 
 observation confirms this. Experience also 
 shows that twenty per cent, of other 
 women suffer from mental depression, las- 
 situde, loss of appetite, and a general 
 sense of physical ill. Here sixty-five per 
 cent, of women offer a material reason 
 why some modification should be made in 
 her manner of study. Dr. Putnam Jacobi, 
 in her experimental study of this function, 
 shows that there is a marked increase of 
 arterial blood-pressure just before, with an 
 abrupt fall after its completion. There 
 is also, during this function, an enormous 
 increase of nerve waste, as shown by the 
 increase in the excretion of urea in some 
 [72] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 cases, and in other eases, while the sys- 
 temic demands for its excretion exist 
 equally in both cases, there is a marked 
 failure of elimination. Here an actual 
 poison is retained in the system, concen- 
 trating in action on the gray matter of the 
 brain frontal lobes. These women could 
 labor with much less damage to their nerve 
 centres over the wash-tub, than they could 
 solve their problems in geometry, or con- 
 strue their Latin prose. In view of these 
 profound alterations in circulation and 
 nutrition, to demand of women the same 
 hours and continuity of work that men 
 give to college work, is a physiological in- 
 sult. To quote further from Dr. Putnam 
 Jacobi, who is a staunch defender of the 
 ability of her sex to do all manner of work 
 at all times: " For theoretical reasons, ex- 
 posed in detail, and from the results of 
 observation, we are authorized in asserting 
 that women do work better, and with much 
 greater safety to health, when their work 
 [73] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 is frequently intermitted, but that these 
 intermittences should be at short intervals 
 and lasting a short time, not at long in- 
 tervals and lasting longer." She makes 
 what we may term a solemn conclusion 
 in the last paragraph of her brilliant book : 
 " It remains true, however, that in our 
 existing social conditions, forty-six per 
 cent, of women suffer more or less at 
 menstruation, and, for a large number of 
 these, when engaged in industrial pur- 
 suits, or others, under the command of an 
 employer, humanity dictates that rest 
 from work during the period of pain be 
 afforded whenever practicable." If to 
 those who suffer from actual physical 
 pain is added twenty per cent, of others 
 who suffer from the psychic disturbance 
 of menstruation, we have a vast number 
 of young women in our two-sex colleges 
 who are treated with brutal inhumanity 
 and indifference, for have we not the evi- 
 dence of numerous defenders of coeduca- 
 [74] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tion that no difference is observed in the 
 work of college girls during this period, 
 and no complaints are made. -That no 
 complaints are made is probably true, for 
 any one who has studied girls knows very 
 well that, when continually working in the 
 presence of the other sex, they will suffer 
 actual torture rather than betray the cause 
 of their weakness. 
 
 But Dr. Putnam Jacobi goes deeper 
 into the cause of women's temperamental 
 need for rest than the superficial one of 
 menstruation. She concludes : " Finally, 
 that they (intervals of rest) are required 
 at all times, and have no special reference 
 to the period of the menstrual flow." This, 
 as our author states, is because women do 
 work better and with less possible injury 
 to health, when these short, but frequent, 
 intervals of rest are observed. 
 
 Now, no author the equal to Dr. Put- 
 nam Jacobi in general professional learn- 
 ing, or in special knowledge of her sex, 
 [75] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 connected with any college for both sexes, 
 has given this physiological side of coed- 
 ucation any other attention than a general 
 denial. In a flat contradiction, which, in 
 most cases, is a summary of their igno-t 
 ranee upon the subject, they appear to have 
 disposed of the whole question to their 
 own satisfaction. Coeducation is being 
 tried before the bar of a public that is 
 gradually becoming enlightened, and this 
 question will have to be answered by argu- 
 ments more valid than sneers and mean- 
 ingless denials. 
 
 Brilliant as is the work of Dr. Putnam 
 Jacobi upon this important phase of coed- 
 ucation, we have a more recent contribu- 
 tion, based upon a wider range of data 
 and bearing directly upon the subject of 
 education. In the transactions of the 
 American Gynecological Society for the 
 year 1900, Dr. George J. Engelmann, the 
 then president of the society, contributed 
 a paper on " The American Girl of 
 [76] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 To-day. The Influence of Modern Edu- 
 cation on Functional Development." It 
 may be said here that if coeducationists 
 ignore this work of Doctor Engelmann, 
 they will do so to their lasting regret. 
 Space forbids doing more here than giv- 
 ing a few extracts from this paper. In 
 Table III., one hundred college women 
 are tabulated, of whom ninety per cent, 
 were sufferers before entering, and ninety- 
 five per cent, during college life. The 
 ratios are high, as the author included 
 moderate sufferers. He says: " We have 
 seen an aggravation of suffering with ad- 
 vancing grade, as much as ten per cent.; 
 and yet more in normal than in high, 
 more in college than in high or prepara- 
 tory school. The college alumnse, by 
 their records, show sixty-six per cent, dur-* 
 ing the earlier years of pubertal develop- 
 ment, andir. isl:ate that organic trouble 
 increasM during college from twenty-four 
 to Jlfhrtl^-fsix per cent. A certain confirma- 
 [ 77 ] 
 
 % 
 # 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 tion of these figures is, moreover, found 
 in the experience of young women as to 
 the increased difiiculty of work, mental 
 or physical, during the menstrual period, 
 and by the number who are excused from 
 their regular duties at those times. We 
 find this expression precisely where we 
 should naturally expect it, where study is 
 harder, and looked upon more seriously." 
 In speaking of the pre-menstrual and 
 post-menstrual waves of nervous excita- 
 tion and blood-pressure, he says: " Intel- 
 lectual vigor follows the same lines, and 
 mental energy and acumen are, as a rule, 
 diminished during the first days, at least, 
 as is afiirmed by perhaps sixty-five per 
 cent, of the many questioned, who state, 
 that mental exertion, study, at that time, 
 is more difficult and wearing, and requires 
 greater effort. This mental depression is 
 evident in the listlessness, indiff*erence, and 
 inability to master tasks easy at other 
 times, noted by every observant educator 
 [78] 
 
poR Higher Coeducation 
 
 as indicating the presence of the flow and 
 the period of its first advent, and the 
 brightest mind, the most sensitive, high- 
 strung, nervous organization is, as a rule, 
 the most responsive and most Hable to 
 impairment during the menstrual period." 
 Our author continues, with another and 
 most important resume: " Functional dis- 
 turbances are least in the first years of 
 pubertal development in the high school, 
 increasing with each year, increasing in the 
 normal school and college, increasing with 
 intensity and seriousness of work; in one 
 institution we see an aggravation of from 
 sixty- four to seventy per cent, in the fresh- 
 man class, and to eighty per cent, in the 
 higher classes. This is not the effect of 
 brain-work alone, but of all the conditions, 
 mental and physical, of school life, the 
 resultant of concomitant circumstances, as 
 is shown by the widely different conditions 
 in various institutions, but the dependence 
 upon school life is distinctly characterized 
 [79] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 by increase of suffering, more frequent 
 recurrence from eighteen to twenty-five 
 and even as often as once in fourteen 
 days, toward the latter part of the school 
 year, with return to the normal in vacation, 
 usually recurring with the resumption of 
 fall work, but certainly with the tire which 
 comes toward the close of the session 
 in spring. This deterioration in health, 
 general and functional, in the college girl, 
 is not the natural accompaniment of in- 
 creasing years, as is proven by a comparison 
 of her condition with that of the working 
 girl. It is distinctly a sequence to college 
 life, directly and indirectly, not due alto- 
 gether to mental strain, but to the com- 
 bined influences of life and methods of 
 training. This comparison is instructive, 
 though unjust to the working girl, and 
 I refer to it because it has been made to 
 show that the influences of school and col- 
 lege life are no more deleterious to the 
 peculiar organization of women than those 
 [80] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 to be encountered in other occupations in 
 the active pursuits of hfe. It is unjust, 
 because the sole aim and object of the 
 one is the development of all the powers 
 and faculties, guided by instructors whose 
 duty it is to perfect this development, and 
 correct faults physical as well as mental. 
 The other is engaged in the struggle for 
 existence, and in the keen competition of 
 the day must expect wounds, however the 
 humanitarian may seek to guard her." 
 
 Taken from the report of the committee 
 of Association of College Alumnge for 
 1855 on the Health of Women Col- 
 lege Graduates, Doctor Engelmann shows 
 sixty-six per cent, with menstrual ir- 
 regularities, as compared with fifty- 
 three per cent, during the earlier years 
 of pubertal development, and states that 
 organic trouble increased during col- 
 lege life from twenty-four to thirty-six 
 per cent. In conclusion. Doctor Engel- 
 mann says: " To the educator I would 
 [81] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 say that heed must be given the instability 
 and susceptibility of the girl during the 
 functional waves which permeate her en- 
 tire being; that emotional stimulation 
 must be avoided, and decided concessions 
 must be made to the depression, physical 
 and psychical, the lessened inhibition, and 
 physiological control during the fluctua- 
 tions of menstruation." Our author calls 
 attention to the sex trait already alluded 
 to, and which explains why so many col- 
 lege instructors for both sexes insist that 
 women students make no complaints and 
 show no impairment in work, due to func- 
 tional causes. The author says: "The 
 number and intelligence of those examined 
 are such that we must accept the data, and 
 accept, too, the fact that unfavorable con- 
 ditions, that suffering irregularity, and 
 impediment to work, are never thoroughly 
 revealed; they are always likely to be 
 below the true mark by reason of the in- 
 herent imwillingness of women to admit 
 [82] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 imperfections of this nature." This in- 
 stinctive reticence concerning the func- 
 tional life must be greatly intensified in 
 mixed colleges, in which, if a woman stu- 
 dent were periodically absent from class 
 work, she would, in her exaggerated state 
 of self -consciousness, believe that the eyes 
 of every man student there were upon her, 
 with a full understanding of the reason. 
 Many college women, who have consulted 
 me professionally concerning their health, 
 have stated this fact as a positive reason 
 why they cannot lighten their work, and 
 that all whom they knew, who were func- 
 tional sufferers, felt the same about it. If 
 we could get the secret history of these 
 women, it would reveal a degree of phys- 
 ical courage to work under difficulties, 
 and a heroism in suppressing emotions, 
 that would call forth our tenderest sym- 
 pathy and highest admiration. One other 
 matter in the functional disturbance of 
 women during educational life requires 
 [83] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 a brief notice, especially as it is touched 
 upon but lightly in any discussion of this 
 subject. The evidence upon functional 
 pain and excess is ample, but, a^ showing 
 the profound nervous inhibition, and the 
 important fact that the pelvic organs al- 
 ways become the storm centre, the total 
 arrest of function is important. This ar- 
 rest is purely emotional, and is so common 
 in educational institutions, that it has re- 
 ceived a distinctive name, the French call- 
 ing it " Amenorrhea des pensionat.'' In- 
 stances of it have occurred in the same 
 student at the opening of every college 
 year. Its average duration is three 
 months. It resists all the usual treatment 
 of such a condition, and terminates spon- 
 taneously. Meanwhile, the student is not 
 capable of her best work, is languid and 
 pale, with indigestion and insomnia. 
 
 Coeducation has nothing to do with its 
 causation, but, as contravening the stock 
 argument of the coeducationists that 
 [84] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 women have no functional traits that 
 would conflict with the routine of study 
 followed by men, it is conclusive evidence 
 to the contrary. The last word that can 
 define this difl^erence has been spoken by 
 Dr. Putnam Jacobi; she says: " Our ob- 
 servations should show that in all these 
 respects the intermenstrual, and especially 
 the premenstrual, periods, represent a 
 pregnancy in miniature." Could sex dif- 
 ferentiation, that has any possible bearing 
 upon the question of women observing the 
 routine of study prescribed for men, have 
 a more reaching effect than this? 
 
 To quote Dr. Edward H. Clark, in his 
 " Sex in Education," and I do so with all 
 the more pleasure from the fact that his 
 little book was the first to focus public 
 attention upon the fact that, while educa- 
 tion had the same meaning and end for 
 women as for men, it had wide physio- 
 logical differences in its method. His 
 book appeared in 1874, when coeducation 
 [ 85 1 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 was first beginning to assume its aggres- 
 sive form, and anything in opposition was 
 sure to be roundly abused. 
 
 Few books ever were more virulently as- 
 sailed. He roused a campaign of abuse, 
 the sure indication of a weak cause, and 
 among the multitude of replies not one 
 refuted a single fact stated by Doctor 
 Clark. " They may study," he says, " the 
 same books, and attain equal results, but 
 should not follow the same methods. 
 Mary can master Virgil and Euclid as 
 well as George ; but both will be dwarfed, 
 — defrauded of their rightful attain- 
 ments, — if both are confined to the 
 same methods. It is said that Elena Cor- 
 naro, the accomplished professor of six 
 languages, whose statue adorns and honors 
 Padua, was educated like a boy. This 
 means that she was initiated into, and mas- 
 tered, the studies that were considered to 
 be the peculiar dower of men. It does 
 not mean that her life was a man's life, 
 [86] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 her way of study a man's way of study, 
 or that, in acquiring six languages, she 
 ignored her own organization. Women 
 who choose to do so can master the hu- 
 manities and the mathematics, encounter 
 the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure 
 the hardness of physics, and the conflicts 
 of politics; but they must do it all in 
 woman's way, not in man's way. In all 
 their work they must respect their organi- 
 zation and remain women, not strive to be 
 men, or they will ignominiously fail. For 
 both sexes, there is no exception to the law 
 that their greatest power and largest at- 
 tainment lie in the perfect development 
 of their organization. Wherein they are 
 men, they should be educated as men; 
 wherein they are women, they should be 
 educated as women. The physiological 
 motto is, educate a man for manhood, a 
 woman for womanhood, both for human- 
 ity. In this lies the hope of the race." It 
 must not be the conclusion of the reader 
 [87] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 from the foregoing that these hmitations 
 are confined to the college girl. The girl 
 in the counting-room and store, or factory, 
 labors under the same functional disadvan- 
 tages. With the latter, however, it is less 
 trying to keep a fair average of physical 
 work than it is for the college girl to keep 
 on an effectual level with men in purely 
 intellectual work. The working girl has 
 the advantage of a sturdier physique, 
 while the woman student is a product of 
 the schools all through her life, and has 
 developed the intellectual at the expense 
 of the physical side of her organization. 
 She has in that degree increased the zone 
 that is responsive to physical suffering, 
 and without the hardened fibre of nerve 
 and muscle that enables her to endure. 
 Women enter college only half prepared 
 — she is perfect in her prescribed studies, 
 but her physical training has been entirely 
 neglected. In nearly all secondary schools, 
 no attention is paid to physical education 
 [88] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 of girls. The boys fare better, not because 
 they receive any more attention along 
 these lines, but in the high schools the boy 
 is at an age when athletics appeal to him, 
 and voluntary sporting clubs keep him in 
 good training. Simply to show how this 
 essential to education is neglected in sec- 
 ondary schools, it is only necessary to 
 mention the instance of Syracuse, New 
 York, in which city a high school was 
 erected at a cost of $400,000, without a 
 gymnasium, or a place in the building in 
 which one could be installed. The college 
 girl does her first gymnasium work after 
 she enters college. Coming into her life 
 at a period when nutrition is centring 
 upon function, which is only on the 
 threshold of maturity, it is difficult to 
 divert this nutrition in the direction of 
 muscular development. The gymnasium 
 work of the young men is carried on for 
 a different object than that of young 
 women. Outside athletics is what he is 
 [89] 
 
WoMAK^s Unfitness 
 
 working for, and compared to which the 
 work of the young woman is hke a pen- 
 itential sacrifice. It is a common expe- 
 rience among physicians of a university 
 town to write letters, calling the attention 
 of physical directors to some young 
 woman who is being pushed too far in her 
 training. It is the old cry of the girl who 
 will struggle on and not complain. On 
 the sexual side of her life, a young woman 
 is a moral coward, with a huge preponder- 
 ance of physical courage. There is a sad 
 lack of discretion in those who direct the 
 physical work of college girls. No atten- 
 tion is paid to functional periods, and she 
 cannot " cut her gym " without getting 
 marked. The writer could name several 
 delicate girls who left college on account 
 of their inability to meet the demands of 
 gymnasium work. 
 
 The coeducationist has one stereotyped 
 reply to this. " The woman's health is 
 perfect. She is never absent from recita- 
 [90] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tions or from her physical training. She 
 never complains, and she compares more 
 than favorably with that of the men. 
 Therefore she is well, and can't suffer 
 more than a man, because if she did, how 
 could she do her work? " " This talk 
 about girls suffering pain and lassitude 
 and mental tire at certain times is senti- 
 mentalism and nonsense. A few may do 
 so, we don't know about it, we teach 
 them and we know. Coeducation has 
 come to stay." The reader may search 
 through the literature of the subject, and 
 if he can find any other answers than those 
 summarized above, he has discovered a 
 logical and sympathetic professor in a col- 
 lege for both sexes, an individual who has 
 had hitherto a mythical existence. There 
 has never been the slightest reference to the 
 fact that sixty per cent, of young women 
 are functional sufferers, that at such times 
 they need rest, not long periods, but short 
 and often repeated periods of rest, as Dr. 
 [91] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 Putnam Jacobi shows. The inference is 
 forced upon one that they either are want- 
 ing in candor, or are ignorant. If they 
 object to this indictment of unfairness or 
 ignorance, then why do they not meet the 
 facts as thoroughly estabhshed by scien- 
 tific and competent observers upon the 
 subject, in the interest of truth and the 
 physical and mental well-being of the 
 women who are entrusted to their care? 
 Instead of that, they one and all assert 
 what is false, and studiously ignore the 
 teachings of science. 
 
 Colleges for both sexes either make no 
 reports upon the health of students, or, 
 when reports are made, they are so com- 
 piled that they have no scientific value. 
 In Volume II., page 1888, of the Re- 
 port for 1899 - 1900 of the Commissioner 
 of Education at Washington, we are 
 enabled to trace the histories of some 
 of these women. We first take the statis- 
 tics given in the great group of colleges 
 [92] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 condensed in the Northern Central Divi- 
 sion, comprising twelve States. This 
 division is taken for the reason that it 
 has the largest college population, and 
 that in this group coeducation has the 
 strongest foothold. There are 10,620 
 women students, of whom only fourteen 
 per cent, complete their college course by 
 taking the various bachelor degrees. The 
 question is obvious: is this enormous loss 
 of eighty-six per cent, due in any way 
 to impaired health, or physical break- 
 down, or did eighty-six per cent, of the 
 women find after its trial that coeducation 
 was a failure? It is probable that the 
 two factors are mixed, and it would be 
 important to know which factor governed. 
 Contrasting with this the group comprised 
 in the Northern Atlantic Division, which 
 President Murray, in Collier's Weekly, 
 with a wit which was keenly appreciated 
 by coeducationists, called a narrow strip 
 of seaboard as provincial as Honduras. 
 [93] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 The women students number only 2,675, 
 of whom eighteen per cent, complete their 
 college course. In the absence of carefully 
 collected statistics, it would be impossible 
 to say what proportion of this number of 
 failures is due to impaired health. Prob- 
 ably it is only a comparatively small num- 
 ber. It is not so much a matter of phys- 
 ical breakdown during the pursuit of 
 student life as it is a failure of coeducation 
 itself to meet the expectations of the 
 women in its educational test. 
 
 That young women can follow men in 
 the same studies, with the same unremit- 
 ting study periods, with her radical func- 
 tional differences, appears upon the face 
 of it an unreasonable proposition. Yet it 
 is one that is made without any qualifica- 
 tion by the advocates of bisexual educa- 
 tion. A sad feature of this side of the 
 question is that the breakdown may not 
 occur during college, but come to her like 
 a heritage of her violated physiological 
 [94] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 life when the final strain is made upon her 
 vitality by motherhood. It is the edu- 
 cated young mothers that show the sad 
 havoc made by maternity; the class that 
 has developed the cerebral faculties at the 
 expense of the brawn and muscle needed 
 at this supreme hour of a woman's life. It 
 is among this class that we find the failure 
 of physiological function that results in 
 sterility, in anaemia, in neurasthenia, and 
 hysteria. Among them we find the carp- 
 ing wife, the woman who bears the burden 
 of an unsatisfied life, of unappeased 
 longings that make life so hard to bear 
 and make her, to those who love her, so 
 difficult to understand. Coeducation ought 
 to aid and to conserve the race, the race 
 of young women upon whom the nation 
 relies to preserve and keep vital the colo- 
 nial ideal. Faults of education, of train- 
 ing, are causing a profligate waste of this 
 precious element in the national life. We 
 are able to preserve the virility of the men 
 [95] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 who will carry onward the colonial tradi- 
 tion, but we fail to keep intact the func- 
 tional stability of the woman who must 
 contribute of her womanhood, if we are 
 to preserve that regnant race which is 
 known among all the earth as the Amer- 
 ican. 
 
 We are justified in demanding of those 
 who ,are in charge of the education and 
 training of this class of young women 
 that they permit no spirit of commercial- 
 ism to stand in the way of reform. A 
 system of education that fails to build 
 a strong and healthy body, that is heed- 
 less of the inexorable laws of sex, will, 
 at some future time, find itself on trial 
 at the bar of public opinion, and will be 
 measured, not by its standard of educa- 
 tion, but by the damage it has caused 
 to the vitality of American women. It 
 may be heard from every side that the 
 American of the colonial strain is dy- 
 ing out. This is positively true, and is 
 [96] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducatiok 
 
 due to a diminishing birth rate, which, 
 if it continues at its present ratio, will 
 result in extinction in the course of a 
 century. It is almost impossible to be- 
 lieve that an honorable man will make as- 
 sertions that amount to falsehood simply 
 to make a point in an argument. Pres- 
 ident Nicholas Murray, in his paper al- 
 ready quoted, says: " Statistics prove 
 that women students and women grad- 
 uates are healthier than their married 
 sisters." This is simply what the writer 
 states, that marriage and motherhood are 
 the crucial tests of the American woman's 
 vitality, and in which she is found want- 
 ing. With fine consistency and a logic 
 peculiar to himself, he continues: "The 
 statistics show that there are fewer child- 
 less marriages among them, and that they 
 have a larger proportion of children." 
 The statistics are all the other way, that 
 there are more childless marriages and a 
 smaller number of children to each mar- 
 [97] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 riage than is found among the American 
 woman otherwise trained and educated. 
 Well may President Murray remark near 
 the conclusion of his article, " A prejudice 
 well held is worth two convictions." Co- 
 education has not been the only factor in 
 a restricted birth-rate, as it is of too recent 
 growth, but, going back to 1870, in elab- 
 orate articles on the decrease of the birth- 
 rate among American families, by Dr. 
 Nathan Allen, of Lowell, he affords se- 
 rious matter for thought on the part of 
 coeducationists who have a tendency to 
 quote false statistics. It will be a sad day 
 for America when the story of those who 
 created the Empire of the People is pre- 
 served in the voiceless words of the printed 
 page, instead of being vitalized by the 
 current of living tradition. 
 
 [98] 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Does Coeducation Educate ? 
 
 Coeducation assumes it to be true that 
 men and women, in the final education, 
 which fits them for their various duties 
 in hfe, require the same education both 
 in methods and kind. If this is correct, 
 then the training of the sexes in mixed 
 colleges is based upon justly assumed 
 premises ; if it is not, then coeducation 
 is a retrogression instead of an advance, 
 and is effectual only in doing incalcu- 
 lable harm to those who submit to the 
 method. In higher education the old 
 idea of the humanities for culture is giv- 
 ing place to education for the sake of the 
 utilities. Universities of the first rank 
 LofC' [99] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 are cutting down their four years' curric- 
 ulum, filling their last year with elective 
 work so that those who enter the profes- 
 sional schools can complete their college 
 and professional work in seven years in- 
 stead of eight. Here educators practically 
 admit that preparatory college work must 
 depart from old standards and take spe- 
 cial directions with a view of the best 
 training for the different lines of profes- 
 sional study. The lawyer, the doctor, and 
 the man who is preparing for a teaching 
 career, each specialize differently in his 
 junior college year, both with a view of 
 saving time and for better fitness for 
 future work. There is no doubt but that 
 this concession on the part of colleges is 
 a direct advance as it conforms to the 
 utilitarian and commercial period in which 
 we live. 
 
 This is a direct challenge to the system 
 of education as carried out in mixed col- 
 leges. Change their curriculum as they 
 [100] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 may, they cannot alter the fact that the 
 theory of coeducation is lagging hope- 
 lessly behind so far as it can furnish any 
 course of electives which will prepare men 
 and women v/ith special fitness for their 
 widely different careers. The sex problem 
 intervenes, as it always has done, and as 
 it always will do. Industrial feminism 
 has so broadened that her education must 
 conform to her new industrial relations. In 
 technical education this has been given 
 practical form, but not in the college cur- 
 riculum, or in professional schools. There 
 men and women are educated on identical 
 lines without any reference to the wide 
 divergence that in after-life defines their 
 careers even in the same profession. This 
 is not due to those who outlined the cur- 
 ricula of the mixed colleges, but it was 
 a concession to meet the demands of 
 woman, who has, from too hasty general- 
 ization, given herself up to the false 
 theory that if she were to be educated 
 [101] 
 
WoMAN'^s Unfitness 
 
 along the identical lines that time-honored 
 traditions and experience have proved 
 were the best for man, she would be able 
 to do a man's work in the same way that 
 man does it. She has assmned that edu- 
 cation is able to suppress the sexual dif- 
 ferences that exist, not alone physically, 
 but that which is equally marked in the 
 mentality of men and women. These 
 differences, when applied to women, have 
 been called sexual limitations, but sex 
 assigns no limit to the intellectual proc- 
 esses of men and women. These differ- 
 ences are not limitations, but divergences, 
 in mental products. She simply cannot 
 take man's point of view, and the more 
 mature she is and the more thoroughly 
 educated and specialized, the more widely 
 she diverges from man. When industrial 
 feminism has reached a higher level, when 
 women have created their own standards, 
 and ceased to compare themselves indus- 
 trially with men, they will work as eff ec- 
 [102] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tually and be given the same recognition. 
 This is not saying that there are two 
 standards of work, one for men and the 
 other for women. There is but one stand- 
 ard for work, that of efficiency, and those 
 for whom the work is rendered will apply 
 it rigidly to men and women alike. Until 
 woman has recognized her own standard 
 and measured her efficiency thereby, she 
 will never do her best work, and show 
 effectually along what lines she is capable 
 of competition with man. In order to 
 create her standard of efficiency, she must 
 begin to plan a system of education that 
 will be most effective in creating a special 
 fitness for her work. She will never do 
 this until she has reconsidered her line of 
 argument by which she formulated the 
 crude theory that an education identical 
 with that acquired by man was the one 
 thing needed. I believe if woman were to 
 do this, and abandon the male standard by 
 which she has fettered her best efforts, 
 [103] 
 
•^.. 
 
 WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 she would not only receive the same indus- 
 trial recognition, but she would excel him 
 along any lines of work inside of her phys- 
 ical limitations. 
 
 And first, coeducation in colleges or- 
 ganized upon the basis of a single sex, and 
 that sex man, must be abandoned. Woman 
 has given it many years of trial, and 
 she ought to have been convinced ere this 
 that it was a flat failure. She has not 
 bettered her position in the professions. 
 She is subordinated by man when she 
 ought to be, by her mental abilities, his 
 coequal. She has labored by his side as 
 diligently and as effectually as he has. 
 Nevertheless he has carried off the prize, 
 while the best that can be said of him 
 is that he was her intellectual equal. Will 
 the woman who so determinedly advocates 
 her right to coeducation stop and reflect 
 upon the fact that the education in which 
 she has had a share was the product of 
 ages of experience, and designed solely 
 [104] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 for man; to develop his fitness for his 
 elected life-work, and not to develop her 
 fitness for hers. Coeducation, therefore, 
 unless radically modified for woman's par- 
 ticipation in it, is a rank injustice to 
 woman, and does violence to those fine 
 intellectual qualities that she may justly 
 claim as an endowment. 
 
 Men who advocate coeducation have 
 seen and admitted sexual differences in 
 mental endowment that demand unlike 
 educational treatment. President Jordan, 
 in his Popular Science Monthly article, 
 says: " Women take up higher education 
 because they enjoy it; men because their 
 careers depend on it. Only men, broadly 
 speaking, are capable of objective studies. 
 Only men can learn to face fact without 
 flinching, unswayed by feeling or prefer- 
 ence. The reality with women is the way 
 the fact affects them. Original investiga- 
 tion, creative art, the resolute facing of 
 the world as it is, belong to man's world, 
 [105] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 not at all to that of the average woman. 
 That women in college do as good work 
 as men is beyond question. In the mii- 
 versity they do not, for this difference 
 exists, the rare exception only proving the 
 rule, that women excel in technique, men 
 in actual achievement. If instruction 
 through investigation is the real work of 
 the university, then in the real university 
 the work of the most gifted woman may 
 be only play." Elsewhere he says: 
 " Shall we give our girls the same educa- 
 tion as our boys? Yes and no. If we 
 mean by the same, an equal degree of 
 breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness 
 for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let 
 it be the same. If we mean this: shall 
 we reach this end by exactly the same 
 course of study, then the answer must be 
 no. For the same course of study will 
 not yield the same results with different 
 persons." President Butler, of Columbia, 
 in an article in Colliers Weekly, super- 
 [106] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ficially says: "No two men require just 
 the same training, much less all men. The 
 same is true of women, they being human. 
 It appears, then, that the system of edu- 
 cation must be elastic enough to take care 
 of infinitely varied individualities. We 
 are just leaving this and acting accord- 
 ingly."^ 
 
 Making due allowance for President 
 Butler's prejudices, he does not mean 
 what he says. There are not an infinite 
 number of inhabitants on earth, much less 
 individualities. 
 
 Professor Slosson, in an article in the 
 Independent, already referred to, says: 
 " No two persons should be taught the 
 same things, or in the same way, and the 
 direction of educational progress in the 
 future will be, I hope, toward greater dif- 
 ferentiation of studies, methods, and aims. 
 If this occurs, there will be, I believe, a 
 more complete separation of the sexes than 
 now prevails in educational schools." 
 [107] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 Whether women will realize the error, 
 and act as energetically in its correction 
 as they were strenuous in their demands 
 for coeducation, time will reveal. They 
 have everything against them now — fac- 
 ulties brought up under the tradition of 
 older education, curricula carefully ma- 
 tured for the benefit of man, to which 
 they are obliged to warp their mental 
 fabric, and, more difficult to overcome 
 than all else, the commercialism that ren- 
 ders their very valuable contributions to 
 the college funds too desirable to be given 
 lightly up. 
 
 Let us change from the mistakes made 
 by women to the mistakes made by men, 
 who created the machinery by which 
 women are made to adjust their mental 
 status to that of men. There is no evi- 
 dence forthcoming from the advocates of 
 the American idea that coeducation as 
 practised is a hybrid produced by the un- 
 holy union between two hostile theories. 
 [108] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 Already in colleges for men, in the front 
 rank of influence and progress, the old 
 classical cult is on its final trial as to its 
 utility and educational value. What mod- 
 ifications have taken place, or those which 
 are yet to be, are in the interest of man. 
 The bisexual idea takes no part in the 
 new curriculum. This is advance; it is 
 evolution to a higher level in educational 
 methods. Can the mixed colleges join in 
 this advance, and, if they do, can they 
 model their changed methods after that 
 of the single sex institutions, where the 
 evolution is limited in its benefits to men 
 alone? If they adopt the latter, woman 
 must be left out in the plan of betterment, 
 and be made to take her chances in the 
 future as she has done in the past. If, 
 however, woman is to receive due consider- 
 ation in whatever improvement in methods 
 they deem^ fit to adopt, it must be given 
 her at the expense of the more perfect 
 system adopted by the single sex college. 
 [109] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 In any event, coeducation cannot be kept 
 in the front rank of improvement. It is 
 hopelessly handicapped by striving to 
 make a single organization perform two 
 functions. The conviction cannot be 
 evaded that it stands in the way of prog- 
 ress. This may be a subject upon which 
 the advocates of coeducation may en- 
 deavor to establish a contrary conclusion 
 now, but the time is not remote when the 
 truth of our contention will be self-evi- 
 dent. With women in clubs and as- 
 sociations, united in State and national 
 organizations, all demanding the so-called 
 privileges and immunities, real or imag- 
 inary, of men, the authorities of the 
 mixed colleges will have a difficult task 
 to convince women that a man's education, 
 either in college or the professional and 
 technical schools, is not the better way to 
 fit her to equal her coworker man in the 
 value of his labor. The strenuous de- 
 mands of women have carried the author- 
 [110] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ities of colleges, honestly striving to do 
 their best, off their feet. Professors in 
 coeducational institutions have confessed 
 that the extent of the evil was recognized, 
 but so great was the pressure brought to 
 bear by women that no correction ap- 
 peared possible. There is no evasion of 
 the fact that coeducation is popular with 
 women ; still there is not a college in which 
 it exists, that, if it were left to the vote 
 of the men, it would not be promptly sup- 
 pressed. It cannot be denied that men, 
 who earn their degrees in coeducational 
 colleges, on going out, find that they have 
 to take a lower rank than the men who 
 graduate at Yale, Harvard, or Union. 
 While this does not lessen the value of the 
 education they have acquired at their alma 
 mater, it does impair the social value of 
 what they have worked and paid their 
 money for. 
 
 In every way, socially, educationally, 
 and economically, coeducation gives less 
 [111] 
 
Woman'^s Unfitness 
 
 out of college life than the students of the 
 single-sex colleges get out of theirs. That 
 a change may be reached, there must be 
 a campaign of education among women 
 outside of college lines, — the hard, bitter 
 education of experience in her battle of 
 life where competition knows no mercy. 
 As long as woman's plaint is heard of 
 scanty recognition and inadequate com- 
 pensation, just so long she may know that 
 the old errors in her educational training 
 prevail. The trustees who have seen in 
 coeducation a matter of revenue only, will 
 make haste to restore the order of single- 
 sex colleges when they find that men are 
 deserting their institutions. Millions can 
 be lavished upon them without avail, as 
 was proved by the Chicago University, 
 which had surrendered so thoroughly to 
 the sex theory that young men left the 
 institution to preserve their dignity. ) It 
 was one of the marvels of college admin- 
 [112] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 istration to witness the quick change of 
 conviction among the authorities. 
 
 It is among two-sex institutions that 
 have grafted the university idea upon the 
 original type of college that the most 
 glaring injustice is measured out to the 
 women students. The medical school, the 
 law school, and the post-graduate courses 
 in the mechanical arts and applied sciences 
 are all modelled upon the needs of the one 
 sex in the practical relations of life. Let 
 us examine her opportunities in medical 
 education by the side of men. It is here 
 that the greatest injustice is done to her. 
 In elementary medicine and the coordinate 
 branches, under the modern method of 
 text-book recitations, her chances are 
 equal, but it is on the practical side that 
 she is made to suffer the penalties of the 
 sex. She must be a brave woman, to he- 
 roically overcome what is most repellent 
 to her woman's instinct, or she will find 
 herself thrown upon the world to earn her 
 [113] 
 
4 
 
 WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 own living only half -educated in her 
 chosen calling, and she must do this in 
 the battle with a competition that is merci- 
 less. Can it be supposed that a young 
 woman can suppress the heredity of ages 
 of sexual environment and tradition, and 
 look unmoved upon the grossest exhibition 
 of the male form, knowing that she is 
 under the scrutiny of the unsympathetic 
 glances of the men of her class, and pre- 
 serve through such an ordeal a calmly re-» 
 ceptive mind? It is not a matter of 
 modesty, it is one of sex, which has 
 been ignored all through her career as 
 a subject of coeducation. What woman 
 feels and resents is not an attack on her 
 modesty, but on her right of sexual ret- 
 icence. A man may be as modest as a 
 woman, but he does not mentally retreat 
 before the exhibition of the sexual ideaL 
 A man is only half -sex, his coarser fibre, 
 his lower tone of emotional life, make sex 
 with him something casual, to be encoun- 
 [114] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tered and then forgotten. Woman is all 
 sex, her faculty of potential motherhood, 
 the periodical insistence of her sexual life, 
 like a stigmata, forces the logic of her 
 being into her conscious existence. It be- 
 comes with her a physical and a mental 
 attribute. She cannot forget. It is this 
 ever present consciousness that makes her 
 repel the outward token, and throw 
 around it a reticence that is to her sacred. 
 Its invasion rouses her to resistance, not 
 against her sex, but against whatsoever 
 would lay bare her consciousness of phys- 
 ical womanhood. In this lies her weak- 
 ness in the hard competition with men, but 
 it is also her armor. 
 
 In no other relation are these traits so 
 nearly strained to the breaking-point as 
 in coeducational medicine, and in none are 
 they more brutally ignored. Do medical 
 women need the same education in the 
 practical side of education and training 
 as do medical men? It can be positively 
 [115] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 answered no. A woman enters upon her 
 practical career a specialist. A specialty 
 with a man physician is a matter of choice, 
 with a woman it is one of necessity. A 
 woman treats the ailments of her sex, ad- 
 mittedly one of the most difficult branches 
 of medicine. Let a single instance of the 
 manner in which the woman student is 
 helped to specialize in her important 
 branch suffice, especially as one of the 
 best and most thorough of the country 
 schools of medicine will be put in evidence, 
 the medical department of Syracuse Uni- 
 versity. Gynecology is taught only dur- 
 ing the last or senior year. The announce- 
 ment reads as follows: " Didactic lectures, 
 two sessions a week for four months. Clin- 
 ical lectures, one session a week for four 
 months." Thus all the woman student can 
 learn of what will constitute her life-work 
 is acquired on the theoretical side in thirty- 
 two lectures, and on the practical side in 
 sixteen clinics. Within the knowledge of 
 [116] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 the author no other two-sex medical school 
 oiFers anything better. If women were 
 given the same opportunities for poi^- 
 graduate hospital appointments as the 
 male graduate, the situation would be par- 
 tially relieved, but they are not, as but few 
 hospitals throughout the country are open 
 to the appointment of women internes. 
 
 " In medicine," says Mr. Finck, " fe- 
 male practitioners are now, and always 
 will be, chiefly specialists in women's 
 diseases, which cannot be taught in mixed 
 classes. The Chicago Medical College 
 came to grief just a year ago, after thirty- 
 two years of existence, because it was 
 organized on the theory that women should 
 have exactly the same training in medi- 
 cine and surgery as men." (The Inde- 
 pendent. ) Mr. Finck only needed to add, 
 the same training in the same way as men, 
 to make his position complete. 
 
 The medical school will offer the de- 
 fence that it is not its function to educate 
 [117] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 specialists, a point well taken if they had 
 not invited into their student body a class 
 that must from the necessity of their hm- 
 itations become specialists from the first 
 day they offer their services to the public. 
 Is this a fair and equitable division of 
 medical education for men who may be- 
 come gynecologists if they please, and for 
 women who become gynecologists because 
 they must? Why women submit to this 
 when there are well-equipped medical 
 schools for women, where they are special- 
 ized during their student life, and well 
 fitted to enter upon their life-work, is one 
 of the anomalies fostered by the coeduca^ 
 tional idea. They have been taught to 
 believe that they cannot compete with 
 men unless they are trained along his lines, 
 or unless so educated that they have lost 
 something that gives to man his preem- 
 inence in professional life. Woman will 
 miss her true place in medicine until she 
 realizes that it is her sex and the cosex 
 [118] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 of those who seek her skill and sympathy 
 that define her place as a medical woman, 
 and that to be made equal to the demands 
 that will inevitably be made upon her from 
 the very beginning of her career, she must 
 be educated, not as men are, but as women 
 ought to be. 
 
 Although women are not as assiduously 
 seeking entrance into the legal profession 
 as they are into medicine, yet even here 
 her work will differ from that of men in 
 the same calling of life, and her usefulness 
 and success will depend upon how well 
 she has been differentiated in education 
 and training to give her special fitness for 
 her legal career. In all the practical sides 
 of hfe for which women fit themselves by 
 special education, it is not in the funda- 
 mentals in which lies the difference in 
 training, but in the more limited and tech- 
 nical side which she will require by reason 
 of her sex. 
 
 There is one profession in which sex 
 [119] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 offers no obstacle to a successful career, 
 but on the contrary is adorned and made 
 all the more effectual by those traits 
 which hamper her in other callings. It is 
 the profession of teaching, in which she 
 more than keeps her place in the front, 
 and is not in competition with man except 
 in the matter of compensation. Even here 
 she specializes to a degree that is not de- 
 manded of her male fellow student. He 
 speciahzes only in what he has elected to 
 teach; the woman, taught by the inflexible 
 methods implied by coeducation, special- 
 izes in the same manner and degree, while 
 the fact is overlooked by those responsible 
 for her education that her career as a 
 teacher will but rarely follow along the 
 same lines. She is thus obliged to further 
 specialize as to what methods will be 
 needed. This the colleges for both sexes 
 do not teach in their pedagogical course. 
 That knowledge she must acquire after 
 she has entered upon her work at the ex- 
 [120] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 pense sometimes of her reputation and her 
 professional pride. Any school board, or 
 superintendent, could testify to the doubt 
 as to fitness that attends the appointment 
 of a young college woman to high school 
 or academy work. In Syracuse, Superin- 
 tendent Blodgett positively stated that he 
 would recommend no college graduate 
 who had not acquired her probational ex- 
 perience elsewhere. It may be asked, is 
 not this true of any young teacher? It 
 is not to an equal degree among the 
 graduates of State normal schools. She 
 specializes there in methods with sole ref- 
 erence as to what she is to teach. Practice 
 and the science of her profession are ac- 
 quired side by side, and, while coeducation 
 is the rule, men and women are taught the 
 same pedagogical art for the simple reason 
 that they are prepared to teach the same 
 things to pupils of the same educational 
 grade. If the double-sex colleges were to 
 open departments for the training of 
 [121] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 grammar and high-school teachers, the 
 woman would have an equal chance with 
 her male coworker. But the coeducational 
 colleges cannot do this; their work must 
 meet the demands of men, and there are 
 but few college men who do not hope to 
 do better than to become gramimar or high- 
 school teachers. That coeducation fails to 
 prepare woman in the best manner for a 
 profession in which she has reached the 
 highest distinction, and that those who 
 direct these institutions are conscious of 
 their deficiencies, is proven by the fact 
 that in the coeducational college of teach- 
 ers and professors less than two per cent, 
 are women. If women were given rec- 
 ognition upon the teaching staff of col- 
 leges for both sexes, there is but little 
 doubt that many of the social complica- 
 tions that mar the harmony of these in- 
 stitutions would not occur, or would be 
 minimized, as women by both natural tact 
 and sympathy are better fitted than men 
 [122] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 to deal with the psychic moments of the 
 young and emotional of their sex. The 
 spirit of commercialism which rules in 
 these colleges would not tolerate placing 
 women on a parity with men in the teach- 
 ing force, as the male element in the stu- 
 dent body would resent it as an encroach- 
 ment on their rights, as women in many 
 of these institutions are tolerated, rather 
 than respected. 
 
 In view of the restricted opportunities 
 of woman to enter the higher ranks of 
 professional teachers, she is allowed, and 
 even encouraged, to fritter away precious 
 time in doing elaborate postgraduate 
 work with a view to earning advanced de- 
 grees that can be of no possible use to 
 her except that she may be prepared to 
 take a professor's chair, which we have 
 already shown, by the small ratios of 
 women professors in mixed colleges, is 
 from necessity nearly closed against her. 
 In the science courses of these colleges she 
 [ 123 ] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 is induced to specialize, with a view to pro- 
 fessional work in architecture, geology, 
 chemistry, and electricity, which, if she is 
 not to teach these subjects, is wasted time, 
 as her physical limitations would seriously 
 hamper her if she followed them practi- 
 cally in after-life in competition with 
 men. Modern industrial feminism has 
 opened many occupations which were for- 
 merly restricted to men, and in which she 
 is an active and successful competitor, but 
 it will be observed that this invasion of 
 man's industrial field begins when woman 
 is physically the coequal of man, and ends 
 abruptly at the line where this equality 
 ceases and man's physical superiority be- 
 gins. In the higher education of women 
 this line must be known and strictly ob- 
 served if women are to be given an equal 
 chance in active life in which the inex- 
 orable law of commercialism rules. In 
 the mixed college, in which women are 
 educated on the standard and after the 
 [124] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 method of men, can this line be followed, 
 or is any attempt made to follow it? It 
 must be known to every competent edu- 
 cator that her active life must diverge 
 from that of man, and that beyond this 
 industrial line there can be nothing in 
 common between them. 
 
 Education from the grammar school to 
 the college has but one object in view, 
 namely, to make good citizens and to fit 
 the subject for the career in life best 
 adapted to success and happiness. The 
 thousands of young women in coeduca- 
 tional colleges are not seeking education 
 for the purpose of becoming teachers, doc- 
 tors, lawyers, or professors, but they are 
 looking forward to marriage, maternity, 
 and social success. They cannot be edu^ 
 cated too highly, refined too finely, made 
 too womanly for the destiny, the joys of 
 which have bloomed perennially in the 
 hearts of women. The Am erican woman_ 
 is the mos t^ marvellous human product of 
 
 ^ [125] 
 
i 
 
 X^ > V w ^\ 5v» s V % ^>^v.o^^'^ ; 
 
 Woman's Unfitness 
 
 any age, or^ and. Educate, refine, and 
 cultivate her and she lends herself to this 
 with an innate facility; there is no grace 
 lacking to distinguish her from the daugh - 
 ter of a hundred earls. Cast at the most 
 plastic period of her life, without restraint, 
 and in the midst of a social environment 
 that must blunt her finer social instincts, 
 without the advice of the older and cul- 
 tured of her sex, coeducation can give her 
 nothing in return for the cost of this. 
 
 In view of the facts presented, coedu- 
 cation cannot be regarded as an advance 
 in educational methods, or as giving an 
 adequate return for the time spent or the 
 possible dangers that attend the system. 
 If not an advance, then it is a retroaction, 
 and a misdirection of educational efforts. 
 Its methods are wrong, and the social 
 environment which the system creates is 
 hostile to sound education and good man- 
 ners. 
 
 The young woman graduate has no re- 
 [ 126 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 sources except teaching or matrimony, as 
 but few of them enter the professions. 
 As already shown (Chapter II.) she is 
 above teaching children in the primary 
 schools, and until her egoism is toned 
 down by contact with the asperities of real 
 life she is above matrimony as well. She 
 is not fitted for commercial work, because 
 she has never been taught practical busi- 
 ness methods. She joins the great army 
 of unemployed, prevented, by what Presi- 
 dent Jordan calls the " true college spirit," 
 from seeking a new education in a wage- 
 earning occupation. The literature of the 
 coeducation movement may be searched 
 in vain for any demand for an elective 
 business training such as would bring the 
 young woman graduate into actual com- 
 petition with the young man graduate who 
 enters business. A few colleges have 
 bookkeeping courses, more with a view to 
 teaching than for practical use. Nowhere 
 are the typewriter and stenography given 
 [127] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 any place, without a knowledge of which 
 most business offices are closed to the 
 applicant. 
 
 A doubt is cast upon the educational 
 value of mixed colleges with a curricula 
 common to both sexes by the fact that 
 those who have seriously studied the sub- 
 ject are not in agreement concerning the 
 education of women. The president of 
 Bryn Mawr says that women ought to be 
 educated after the manner of men. Pres- 
 idents Murray, Harper, Quimby, Jordan, 
 and Eliot say that she requires a different 
 course of study. Among experts who have 
 had excellent opportunities of observing 
 woman in the rough and in the educated 
 product, there is no accord in opinion as 
 to the value of coeducation. This diver- 
 gence on the part of educators must be 
 logically explainable. Is it not that they 
 are disappointed in the results? The 
 women who have been so trained have not 
 shown the scholarship, the fitness for the 
 [128] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 after earning life, that they had hoped 
 for. That when the theoretical phase of 
 coeducation was passed, and they were 
 confronted by the results, there was ineffi- 
 ciency, lack of purpose, and unfitness for 
 practical life for women trained on a 
 theory, that was not found among women 
 who were not coeducated, or had received 
 no college education. 
 
 [129] 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The Social Side of Life in Mixed 
 Colleges 
 
 The relations existing among the young 
 men and women in colleges for both sexes 
 have centred the attention of the public 
 upon the problem of coeducation. It has 
 afforded the public more subjects of com- 
 plaint and criticism, and given the college 
 authorities more opportunities to defend, 
 than all other phases of the question com- 
 bined. From an educational point of 
 view it has not the importance of some 
 of the topics discussed here, but it is one 
 that appeals to all those who have daugh- 
 ters undergoing the trials of coeducation, 
 and to that larger public that takes either 
 [130] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 a genuine or a morbid interest in whatever 
 excites a constantly renewed attention. 
 The escapades of the students afford a 
 never- failing interest to the readers of 
 newspapers, while the more glaring 
 breaches of social convention are sent 
 broadcast over the country by the news 
 agencies. The attitude of the press toward 
 this side of education is either one of com- 
 ical narration or of scorching comment, 
 so that the important and serious prob- 
 lem of higher education for women has, 
 through the questionable social attitude 
 forced upon them by coeducation, lost its 
 dignity and become a matter of doubt and 
 apprehension on the part of all right- 
 thinking people. 
 
 It is proper, before going further, to 
 allow the advocates of the mixed college 
 methods to state what they are doing, or 
 expect to do, for young men and women 
 in a social way, because it is in this direc- 
 tion that they claim to reach the better 
 [131] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 and more practical results. These are 
 among the latest utterances upon the sub- 
 ject, and will be given without comment, 
 in order that the reader may draw his own 
 conclusions from contrasting these state- 
 ments of mere opinion on the part of coed- 
 ucators with the facts as they actually 
 occur. 
 
 President Butler says : "A wise college 
 president wrote a few years ago that this 
 intertraining and equal training take the 
 simper out of the young woman and the 
 roughness out of the young man. He was 
 right. The woman who grows up sur- 
 rounded by women and taught only by 
 women, and the man who grows up sur- 
 rounded by men and taught only by men, 
 are a long time maturing. Both are ab- 
 normal. The artificiality and the ab- 
 surdity of the ordinary relations between 
 men and women are chiefly due to social 
 traditions, which gave rise to the system 
 of separate education. Comradeship and 
 [132] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducatio 
 
 N 
 
 friendship are eliminated, and the only 
 conceivable associations with the other sex 
 are love and marriage." 
 
 President Jordan says: " Another con- 
 dition very common and very undesirable 
 is that in which young women live at home 
 and traverse a city twice each day on rail- 
 way or street cars to meet their recitations 
 in some college. The greatest instrument 
 of culture in a college is the college atmos- 
 phere, the personal influence exerted by 
 its professors and students. The college 
 atmosphere develops feebly in the rush of 
 a great city. The spur student en, or rail- 
 way-track students, as the Germans call 
 them, the students who live far from the 
 university, get very little of this atmos- 
 phere. The young woman who attends 
 the university under these conditions con- 
 tributes nothing to the university atmos- 
 phere, and therefore receives very little 
 from it. If young women enter the col- 
 leges, they should demand that suitable 
 [133] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 places be made for them. Failing to find 
 this, they should look for it somewhere 
 else." Previous to this quotation, he says: 
 " When young women have no residence 
 devoted to their use, and are forced to 
 rent parlors and garrets in private houses 
 of an unsympathetic village, associations 
 which develop vulgarity cannot be used 
 for the promotion of culture either for 
 men or for women. That the influence 
 of cultured women on the whole is op- 
 posed to vulgarity is a powerful argument 
 for education." 
 
 Prof. E. E. Slosson, of the University 
 of Wyoming, says in a very recent article 
 in the Independent: " The sole remedy — 
 or preventative, for I know of no remedy 
 — for sexual hyperesthesia, is normal 
 casual contact between men and women, 
 especially when young, in their daily 
 tasks and pleasures. As in electricity, the 
 more complete the insulation, the higher 
 the potential rises on each side until in- 
 [134] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 stead of comparatively harmless sparkling 
 we get a thunderbolt. No amount of for- 
 mal meeting in society will accomplish this 
 purpose. All balls are masked balls. To 
 separate the sexes at the ages of, say 
 thirty-five to forty, or nine to twelve, 
 would do little harm, but to separate them 
 completely, or, what is still worse, incom- 
 pletely, between the ages of fifteen to 
 twenty, is often injurious. I willingly 
 admit that coeducation will not work well 
 in some classes of society and with certain 
 people. In fact, I think it requires a 
 high standard of morals and intelligence 
 to be even tolerable. There are girls 
 who are not even fit to be sent to a coedu- 
 cational college; who get harm and do 
 harm. When such are detected, the pres- 
 ident usually invites them to his private 
 office, and gives them the same advice that 
 Hamlet gave to Ophelia. But it should 
 be said in fairness that such cases are more 
 [135] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 often the result of perverted training than 
 of any congenital defect." 
 
 President Barnard, as quoted in Report 
 of Commissioner of Education at Wash- 
 ington, 1900-01, says: "But it is still 
 objected that though the association of 
 young women with young men in college 
 may be beneficial to the ruder sex, it is 
 likely to be otherwise to the gentlefr^TBig""""-^, 
 delicacy and reserve which constitute in 
 so high a degree the charm of the female -^ 
 character are liable, it is said, to be worn 
 off in the unceremonious intercourse of 
 academic life, and the girl who enters 
 college a modest, shrinking maiden is 
 likely to come out a romping hoiden or a 
 self -asserting dogmatist. Those who make 
 this objection argue rather from assumed 
 premises than from any facts of obser- 
 vation." 
 
 Having given the assertions of the ad- 
 vocates of coeducation concerning the 
 social life in mixed colleges, let us give 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 in contrast a few incidents that lead one 
 to believe that the irrepressible problem of 
 sex will, when left to the operation of its 
 pristine laws, effect its own solution. 
 These incidents are taken from the daily 
 press, some local and others coming 
 through the associated press. If not true, 
 it would have been well for the reputa- 
 tions of the institutions concerned to have 
 demanded immediate retraction. As the 
 statements were never denied or retracted, 
 it is perfectly proper to assume that they 
 are true. There is ample material of this 
 character to make a volume, but space 
 can only be given to such as will demon- 
 strate the condition of social life created 
 in colleges in which the sexes hold unre- 
 strained relations. 
 
 The following is from the New York 
 Times of October 18, 1902. A young 
 woman during the night desired to remove 
 some freshman colors placed on the roof 
 of a building. " The fire-escape over 
 [137] 
 
WOMAN^S UNFITNESS 
 
 which the ascent was made is in front of 
 Willard Hall, and leads from the fourth 
 floor to the roof. It leans from the build- 
 ing as it leads to the roof, making the feat 
 a daring one. After the young woman 
 descended, she admitted that she was 
 frightened as she climbed the iron ladder, 
 and when she leaned over the side of the 
 building to place the sophomore banner; 
 the fact that the skylight had been ordered 
 closed by the authorities in charge of the 
 hall left the fire-escape as the only means 
 of reaching the roof. The freshman- 
 sophomore fight is now on in earnest." 
 Further details are given, but it would 
 not add to the significance of the daring 
 act to repeat them here. This took place 
 at Northwestern University, which has a 
 large population of women compared to 
 men (290 men, 280 women, in 1900). 
 That which concerns us here is not that 
 this woman made such a daring and un- 
 womanly effort, for women have an in- 
 [138] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 stinctive fear of climbing and high places, 
 but why did she wish to do it, what force 
 was at work in her mental equipment 
 strong enough to impel her to act counter 
 to the innate fears that belong to the un- 
 cultured woman? It may be due to that 
 quality in coeducation which, as President 
 Murray Butler so delicately says, " takes 
 the simper out of the young woman and 
 the roughness out of the young man," a 
 statement which is repeated ad nauseam 
 in all coeducation arguments. It would 
 be more to the truth to say that this 
 " roughness " of the young men, which 
 coeducation had failed to eliminate, had 
 infected the young women and impelled 
 them, by taking out their " simper," to 
 emulate the young men. Many other in- 
 cidents of this character could be related, 
 and are as ^well if not better known to 
 coeducationists than to others. And yet 
 Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with great com- 
 placency, states : " In not a single instance 
 [139] 
 
Woman's Unfitness 
 
 is an argument against coeducation given 
 which offers sufficient ground for the pro- 
 posed retrogressive movement." (New 
 York Sun, July 6, 1902.) In this same 
 university the evils of the unrestrained re- 
 lation of the sexes is awakening a reac- 
 tionary spirit. In the English classes the 
 " coeds " declare that love-making has be- 
 come " too prevalent a practice and has 
 been carried altogether too far. They 
 joined in the declaration that while men 
 were awkward and women timid when the 
 sexes were separated, there are concealed in 
 the sheep's clothing of coeducational virtue 
 many ravaging wolves. Coeducation in the 
 class-room ends in cowalking on the cam- 
 pus. ) The girls contended that, pleasant 
 as they were, extended strolls along the 
 lake front were not conducive to good 
 lessons.^ (Associated News, Syracuse 
 Herald, January 25, 1903.) It was at 
 this university, as already related in an- 
 other chapter, that, following the an- 
 [140] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 nouncement of the scholarship awards, the 
 betrothal of two young men to two senior 
 coeds was made known. ( New York Sun, 
 September 28, 1902.) It is very evident 
 that there was no control of the relations 
 of the sexes on the part of the faculty, 
 and that a dangerous degree of license 
 prevailed, against which the women re- 
 coiled in self-defence. Additional facts 
 illustrating the social life prevailing in 
 mixed colleges are furnished by the Syra- 
 cuse University. The author has no ex- 
 cuse to offer in referring to a local insti- 
 tution, because the university is one of the 
 best, if not the best, coeducational college 
 in the United States. Its student body is 
 composed of a superior class of young 
 women and men. The head of the uni- 
 versity. Chancellor Day, is firm and con- 
 scientious in his government, and the uni^ 
 versity has greatly prospered under his 
 wise management. The faculty is a body 
 of men, earnest and faithful in their work, 
 [ 141 ] 
 
V 
 
 WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 ^ and who, while they beheve sincerely in 
 the methods of coeducation, would not 
 hesitate to either segregate or eliminate 
 women from the student body if they were 
 convinced that coeducation was wrong. It 
 certainly follows that if social matters as- 
 sume a state of threatening tension in such 
 a carefully conducted university as Syra- 
 cuse, the conditions existing in the so- 
 called colleges of the West, for instance, 
 must create the need for greater force 
 in repression. The following incident il- 
 lustrates the generally prevailing method 
 of controlling social affairs among stu- 
 dents in mixed colleges, and was the one 
 followed at Syracuse until a crisis occiu*red 
 in the social life at the college in the winter 
 of 1903. 
 
 " The way the students of Syracuse 
 University take it upon themselves to reg- 
 ulate the evils of coeducation in the uni- 
 versity was brought to light yesterday in 
 a rather interesting manner. The uni- 
 [142] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 versity authorities provide no rules for 
 the government of the students except 
 that they are expected to abide by the 
 laws of the city as citizens, and generally 
 that is all that is needed. Occasionally 
 an offence occurs, and then the upper 
 class men are expected to take the matter 
 in hand. Such a case has been running 
 along for some time since the opening 
 of college, and last night the crisis was 
 reached. The offenders, there were two 
 of them, had been spending most of 
 their spare time 'going fussing,' either 
 to one of the sorority houses or to one 
 of the boarding-houses. Saturday night 
 the upper class men, belonging to the 
 same fraternity as the offenders, packed 
 the young men's trunks, hired a cart- 
 man, and sent them down early in the 
 evening, one to the chapter-house and 
 the other to the boarding-house. The 
 trunks were labelled with the owners' cards 
 and the statement that the owners would 
 [143] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 be around to claim a room, and take the 
 first regular meals Monday morning. 
 The young men were not able to get their 
 trunks back without stirring up a deal of 
 comment from the other students who had 
 heard of the affair." (Syracuse Herald, 
 October 21, 1902.) 
 
 " A meeting of the representatives of 
 the fraternities and of the neutral organi- 
 zations of Syracuse University will be 
 called soon by Chancellor Day and Dean 
 Frank Smalley to formulate plans for 
 regulating the social life of the univer- 
 sity. The authorities have made no start- 
 ling disclosures and have discovered no 
 new evils, but they have decided that it is 
 time to restrict the amount of * fussing ' 
 done by the young men, and the number 
 of ' fudge parties ' given by the young 
 women. Fussing is the term used to de- 
 scribe calling on young women. During 
 the last year or two evils have grown up 
 which the authorities think need correct- 
 [144] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ing. Chief among them is the amount 
 of calling done by the young men upon 
 the young women and the number of 
 fudge parties and dances held, several of 
 them every week. The fraternities, and 
 especially the sororities, are considered 
 the chief offenders along the lines of 
 parties and dances, although a large 
 number of small parties are held during 
 the year by the various boarding-houses 
 which are frequented largely by the 
 neutrals. The idea of holding a dance 
 at the chapter-houses once or twice a 
 month has taken hold of some of the fra- 
 ternities so that the dance has become a 
 regular feature of fraternity life at those 
 places. Another source of evil is the num- 
 ber of freshman parties held by the fra- 
 ternities: every one of the fifteen frater- 
 nities plan to hold a party during the 
 college year in honor of the freshmen; 
 then each fraternity usually entertains 
 during the year in honor of other class 
 [ 145 ] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 delegations. Dances are frequently given 
 by the other organizations. The univer- 
 sity band is holding a series of * band 
 hops ' at Empire Hall this winter, which 
 are held whenever there is a week that 
 there is no other function scheduled. In 
 addition to this, two other societies, the 
 Double Seven, composed of sophomores, 
 and the Moux Head, composed of juniors, 
 have been organized especially for social 
 purposes. 
 
 " The university authorities have always 
 been in favor of pleasant social relations 
 between the men and women students in 
 the university, but they believe that the 
 "^ social whirl has been kept up without suffi- 
 cient periods of rest, and one case is re- 
 ported of a student who had declared 
 repeatedly that he had no time for society, 
 who had his life made miserable for him 
 until he went * fussing ' with the others. 
 The authorities say that what does the 
 harm is the taking of the students away 
 [ 146 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 from their work two or three times a 
 week, keeping them up half the night, 
 with the result that failures are recorded 
 against them the following days in the 
 class-rooms. Letters have come from the 
 parents of young women asking that the 
 girls be restricted from attending so many 
 affairs. The university cannot well do 
 this, as it has no control over those who 
 do not live in the dormitory, Winchell 
 Hall. There the door is closed at ten 
 o'clock, and no one can get in later except 
 those who have had permission to be out. 
 This privilege is granted largely that the 
 girls may attend the theatres, but even 
 then no one can get in after twelve under 
 any consideration. The plan. Dean Smal- 
 ley says, is to call a meeting of the 
 representatives of the various student or- 
 ganizations, and discuss the matter in an 
 open congress. The dean said that he did 
 not believe in the laying down of any 
 strict rules on the matter, but that it 
 [147] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 should be discussed in an open conference, 
 and that the evil should be adjusted by the 
 students themselves, so soon as they see 
 what the trouble is." (Syracuse Heralds 
 December 13, 1902.) The above extract 
 represents a state of affairs that the wise 
 and witty President Butler, in his Collier's 
 Weekly article, says " are all dead issues," 
 but Syracuse University found them very 
 much alive, as we shall learn when we find 
 how the theory of the " open conference " 
 worked out in practice. The idea that 
 mixed colleges have no authority over 
 their students because they are not resi- 
 dent in dormitories is one of the most 
 pernicious errors of the system. None of 
 the poorer colleges have dormitories, and 
 the students are scattered through the 
 towns in boarding-houses, with no guides 
 to good manners or good morals. Pres- 
 ident Jordan, in his Popular Science arti- 
 cle, says of it: " Students living at home 
 or in boarding-houses of an unsympathetic 
 [148] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 village, or travelling daily on railway or 
 street cars, can contribute nothing to the 
 college atmosphere, the personal influence 
 exerted by its professors and students. 
 The young woman who attends the uni- 
 versity under these conditions contributes 
 nothing to the university atmosphere, and 
 therefore receives very little from it. She 
 may attend her recitations and pass her ex- 
 aminations, but she is in all essential re- 
 spects in absentia^ and, so far as the best in- 
 fluences of the university are concerned, 
 she is neither coeducated nor educated. If 
 young women enter colleges, they should 
 demand that suitable places be made for 
 them. Failing to find this, they should 
 look for it somewhere else. Associations, 
 which develop vulgarity cannot be used 
 for the promotion of culture, either for 
 men or for women." The facts, however, 
 show that President Jordan is wrong 
 about the " college atmosphere " devel- 
 oped by the dormitory system. Whether 
 [149] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 he would include the chapter-houses as 
 offering " associations which develop vul- 
 garity," it is difficult to say, but as 
 they are certainly not "^^ in absentia''^ we 
 conclude not. From the evidence already 
 given, it appears that the effort to create 
 environments best calculated to develop 
 the college atmosphere, and which the most 
 conservative coeducationists believe will 
 afford a remedy for the admitted evils 
 of the system, are the means of introduc- 
 ing additional complications in the social 
 control of students in mixed colleges. 
 Before the introduction of chapter-houses 
 and the erection of Winchell Hall at 
 
 /Syracuse University, and while the women 
 students were scattered in boarding- 
 houses, but little was heard of social ex- 
 
 V cesses or improper liberties between the 
 isexes. Here there was as complete separa- 
 tion between the sexes as was possible. 
 The meetings occurred only in the class- 
 room or in the streets. With concentra- 
 [150] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tion, trouble began. The young men were 
 more difficult to control. Class rows at 
 supper parties in suburban taverns or city 
 hotels were the cause of great damage to 
 private property. The moral tone of the 
 young men was lowered, and nothing but 
 threats of wholesale suspensions or expul- 
 sions unless the damages were paid for 
 by the offending classes kept the students 
 under control. No sense of wrong in these 
 disorders appeared to appeal to the young 
 men. On the contrary, they indulged in 
 disrespectful and hostile criticism of the 
 college authorities, until they felt the iron 
 hand of Chancellor Day. Now the in- 
 fluence of the " cultured young women," 
 from which President Jordan expects so 
 much, was anything but wholesome, as a 
 share of the hostile comment on the author- 
 ities came from them. Women have ever 
 been the incentive of deeds of prowess and 
 strength among men. From the belted 
 knight at the tourney to the crude and 
 [151] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 misdirected valor of a young man in a 
 
 mixed college, the plaudits of fair hands 
 
 will always be the crowning glory. It is 
 
 the mistake of coeducationists to assume 
 
 that the massing of young men and 
 
 women together for purposes of education 
 
 could in any way modify the sexual com- 
 
 — ^ plexity. It is their proud boast that the 
 
 , presence of young women has a refining 
 
 "r^-^nd elevating influence upon young men 
 
 when mixed in education. The constant 
 
 contention is made of the influence of 
 
 " cultured " young women upon young 
 
 men. They are not cultured; they are 
 
 being cultured. Character is unformed. 
 
 They are plastic, unrefined, and have not 
 
 yet attained the stage of influence. On the 
 
 contrary, it has been shown that when the 
 
 young women were massed, instead of 
 
 scattered in isolated boarding-houses, the 
 
 men became rougher and their horse -play 
 
 more aggressive, which even the women 
 
 strive to emulate, as we shall see when what 
 
 [ 152 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coepucation 
 
 may be called the assault on Winchell 
 Hall is described. 
 
 The efforts of the faculty to suppress 
 the pernicious social activity of the fra- 
 ternities and clubs by calling into council 
 and cooperation the representatives of the 
 student bodies culminated in an outbreak 
 of social license which caused the citizens 
 of Syracuse to hold their breath. The 
 following is the newspaper account of the 
 incident, which resulted from a condition 
 of affairs that had been in existence for 
 some time, and was steadily growing 
 worse. 
 
 " Two college women, one a junior and 
 the other a freshman, were expelled from 
 the university yesterday noon by Chan- 
 cellor James R. Day for attending a dance 
 at Long Branch last Friday night. By 
 so doing they disobeyed a regulation of 
 Winchell Hall, the women's dormitory, at 
 which they were living. This is the first 
 action of the kind which has ever been 
 [153] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 taken by Syracuse University. There 
 was broadcast consternation among the 
 students of the university when it was 
 learned that two of their number had been 
 expelled for doing something they had 
 come to regard as only a harmless amuse- 
 ment. The chancellor's action ye.sterday 
 is another move in his policy in guiding 
 the young women of the university in the 
 way he thinks they should go. At Win- 
 chell Hall, which is university property, 
 stricter rules have been laid down than ever 
 before, and the students living there are 
 expected to adhere to them. Tuesday, 
 Thursday, and Saturday nights are call- 
 ing hours, and all young women must be 
 home from practice and college dancing 
 affairs before midnight. Long Branch 
 has been tabooed." Long Branch, it may 
 be explained, is a resort on Onondaga 
 Lake, with dance-halls, bowling-alleys, 
 and bar. It is outside the police jurisdic- 
 tion of the city, and during the winter 
 [154] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 months is a rough resort, never frequented 
 by the better class of the community. 
 " Last Friday night Mrs. J. A. R. Scott, 
 chaperon of the Hall, called the young 
 women in question into her apartment and 
 asked them if they intended going to the 
 lake to dance that evening. They told 
 her that such was their intention, and they 
 were requested not to go. The college 
 men, with whom the young women had 
 made the engagement for the party, called 
 for them, and were made acquainted with 
 the rule of the Hall. There was a mis- 
 understanding here, it is said, and the 
 party went out not intending to go to the 
 lake. Then the plan was changed again, 
 and it was decided to go to Long Branch 
 only to bowl. The students knew that 
 other college women would be at Long 
 Branch that night, members of leading 
 fraternities on University Hill. It was 
 finally decided to go to the lake to bowl 
 only, and the die was cast. When the 
 [ 155 ] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 girls and their escorts reached Long 
 Branch and started to bowl, the music 
 from the upper floor was wafted down to 
 them, and they could hear the light steps 
 of the dancers as they glided over the 
 smooth floor. Thinking there could be no 
 harm in a single waltz or a rousing two- 
 step, bowling lost its charm for them, and 
 the party went to the dance-hall and spent 
 a portion of the evening. They arrived 
 home before midnight, however, according 
 to the story. The next morning Mrs. Scott 
 was informed that the young women in 
 question had gone to the lake the night 
 before. The matter was reported. Chan- 
 cellor Day acted yesterday. It is under- 
 stood that there is another young woman 
 of the university living at Winchell Hall 
 who may leave the university for a reason 
 similar to that which has brought about 
 the expulsion of the others. The chan- 
 cellor said last evening that the case is 
 [156] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 not yet decided." {Post- Standard, Feb- 
 ruary 4, 1903.) 
 
 As an evidence of how deeply this 
 social license had contaminated the stu- 
 dents, both men and women, the spirit of 
 insubordination evoked by the disciplinary 
 orders of the chancellor is sufficient. 
 " The students feel that the authorities 
 have been too severe in expelling these 
 two women and in allowing the fifty or 
 seventy-five others who went across the 
 lake to go free. The only difference was, 
 they say, that these two were from Win- 
 chell Hall, where the rules forbid the 
 women being out after twelve o'clock, and 
 the others were from chapter-houses and 
 boarding-houses." (Syracuse Evening 
 Herald, February 4, 1903.) As already 
 stated, this condition in the social life of 
 the university grew out of the theory that 
 the fraternities and inmates of sorority- 
 houses would meet in a proper spirit the 
 wishes of the faculty in limiting the num- 
 [157] 
 
WoMAN''s Unfitness 
 
 ber of social affairs and for earlier hours, 
 but they proved the chief offenders in 
 defying college authority. All healthy 
 and proper college spirit seemed to have 
 disappeared in a " college atmosphere " 
 different from that which President Jor- 
 dan believed would be created by coed- 
 ucation, while the college authorities at 
 Syracuse were taught some unpleasant 
 truths about the mutual reaction of young 
 men and young women when left to 
 govern themselves. 
 
 The efforts of the faculty to limit the 
 meetings of the students by ordering a 
 stop to the band dances was met by the 
 students with a spirit not becoming in 
 those who enter college for the serious 
 purpose of study and moral discipline. 
 From bad they went to worse in organ- 
 izing the dances across the lake. When 
 the order was issued placing the women 
 in boarding and sorority houses under the 
 same restrictions as the Winchell Hall 
 [158] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 women, the students affected by the order 
 were disposed to stand upon their rights, 
 quoting the university catalogue, which 
 reads: " The university does not provide 
 board or rooms for its students. They 
 select their rooms with the advice of the 
 faculty, and become amenable, like other 
 citizens, to the laws and ordinances of 
 the city." This defines the attitude of 
 the faculty toward the students, with 
 the result, so far as relates to the women, 
 as just described. The order of Chan- 
 cellor Day wisely reversed the policy 
 of the institution in this regard. In 
 a chapel address he clinched his circular 
 order, and put an end to any rebellion on 
 the part of the women. " It is said that 
 the administration may have authority 
 over Winchell Hall, but not over the dif- 
 ferent fraternity and boarding houses. 
 Let me tell you that the university has 
 absolute authority over everything con- 
 nected with this institution. The univer- 
 [159] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 sity trustees could, by a motion, if they 
 so desired, remove the franchise of every 
 fraternity on this hill. Fraternities, if 
 properly run, are a great service, but there 
 is another side. They sometimes conceal 
 members and protect culprits. The 
 authority of this institution reaches over 
 all. Whenever the university speaks the 
 fraternities and other clubs will have to 
 observe the rules laid down. In closing 
 his address the chancellor declared that 
 the women of the university must be 
 placed within greater restrictions than the 
 men, not because they were more evilly in- 
 clined, but in order to avoid any appear- 
 ances of a questionable character." ( Syra- 
 cuse Journal, February 11, 1903.) 
 
 Thus falls to the ground one of the 
 most ardently asserted benefits of co- 
 education on the social equality theory, 
 namely, the refining and restraining influ- 
 ences exerted by the free and imrestricted 
 social relation of the students. Any un- 
 [160] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 biassed student of weak human nature 
 could predict such a result unfailing. The 
 conclusion is a logical one, that, according 
 to the authorities of the best coeducational 
 college in the country, young women can- 
 not be educated the same way as young 
 men in a moral and social sense. 
 
 We have seen the bad and degenerating 
 effect of young men upon women in col- 
 leges for both sexes; let us see if the 
 women have the elevating, refining, and 
 wholesome influence upon young men that 
 the advocates of the system claim they 
 have. We shall be obliged to again refer 
 to the newspapers. 
 
 The occasion was the sophomore dinner 
 at one of the hotels, which the freshmen 
 endeavored to interrupt. Early in the 
 evening the president of the freshman 
 class called on a young woman in a near-by 
 sorority-house. Several sophomores pres- 
 ent proposed that he do a few stunts for 
 the amusement of the young woman. A 
 [161] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 one-sided fight resulted, from which the 
 freshman tried to escape through the 
 kitchen. Here he was met by the upper 
 class-men and his retreat cut off. Addi- 
 tional freshmen coming to the rescue, a 
 destructive free fight resulted. The young 
 women of the house ran screaming into 
 the street, their cries attracting a crowd 
 of passers-by and residents of the hill. At 
 the hotel the rioting was renewed by the 
 freshmen, which a force of police kept 
 within bounds. At the banquet fifty 
 " couples " were present. ( Syracuse Jour- 
 nah February 2, 1903.) 
 
 At Syracuse it is the usual thing for 
 the freshmen to prevent the sophomore 
 banquet, but a peculiar element of hostility 
 was added by the attempt of some class- 
 men to make the president do " stunts " 
 for the amusement of young women 
 sophomores, while he was a guest in their 
 house. As good manners, refinement, 
 gentlemanly reserve, and respect and cour- 
 [ 162 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 tesy toward women is claimed to be a 
 direct outcome of the presence of women 
 in coeducation, it is proper to leave the 
 reader to come to his own conclusion in 
 this case. 
 
 A freshman flag displayed from the 
 roof of Winchell Hall caused a deter- 
 mined assault on the building to remove 
 it. Access could be gained to the roof 
 only by the fire-escape. Several men 
 climbed the ladder. " Within the dormi- 
 tory all was excitement. From the upper 
 v/indows of the building there opened a 
 continuous stream of water, old shoes, 
 dismantled books, and every conceivable 
 missile at the men on the iron ladder. The 
 leader kept on climbing; once, however, 
 he faltered. A full-grown dictionary, 
 hurled from a window two stories above, 
 struck him between the shoulders. The 
 force of the shock knocked his feet from 
 the ladder. He clung fast until he had 
 recovered his breath, and then continued 
 [163] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 up the ladder. He was immediately fol- 
 lowed by several of his companions, and 
 the banner was soon in their possession." 
 (Syracuse Journal, February 21, 1903.) 
 It may appear that the influence of the 
 women on the sophomores was somewhat 
 remote, but their quickness to adopt the 
 methods of the men in maintaining their 
 class spirit was evident, and painfully so, 
 from the standpoint of the coeducation- 
 ists, who make such extravagant claims 
 for the refining influence of women. A 
 few more incidents and we shall conclude 
 the evidence upon this disagreeable phase 
 of the subject. " The Chicago coeds 
 practised football tactics in their contest 
 for basket-ball prestige on their new ath- 
 letic field yesterday, and the result was 
 that one girl was carried from the game 
 and two others had to be revived 
 with water before they could continue." 
 (Newspaper clipping.) At Cornell, 
 which is one of the most conservative col- 
 [164] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 leges, the women pattern after the men, 
 the " freshmen " trying to break up the 
 sophomore young women's supper. They 
 captured a member of the upper class and 
 drove about the city in a hack during 
 the evening. (Mr. Finck, in the Inde- 
 pendent, ) {/ 
 
 Moving-up day appears to be an anni- 
 versary peculiar to Syracuse ; what its na- 
 ture may be is not essential to the story ; as 
 the years passed it was attended with more 
 serious disorders. In 1902 the disorders 
 were so great as to exact pledges from the 
 students that the riotous proceedings 
 would be omitted in future. The year 
 1903 witnessed open defiance of the 
 faculty, while riot reigned upon the hill. 
 " Chancellor Day dwelt upon the breach 
 of trust, the betrayed confidence, and the 
 deceitful conduct of the freshman class." 
 The result was the suspension of the 
 freshman class "until all trace of last 
 night's rowdyism was removed." (Syra- 
 [165] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 cuse Journal, May 11, 1903.) The fresh- 
 men were rebellious, meetings were held, 
 they absented themselves from chapeL 
 " The seats on the freshman side of the 
 house were entirely vacant, the students 
 of neither sex being present." ( Syracuse 
 Evening Herald, May 11, 1903.) " Re- 
 fined and cultured " young women aiding 
 and encouraging a crowd of half -fledged 
 youth in defiance of law and decency is 
 the spectacle offered by coeducation in this 
 instance. It is highly probable that the 
 young men would not have resorted to 
 such extremes if they were not applauded 
 by the young women. At Northwestern 
 University the young men were accus- 
 tomed to stand upon the campus and 
 whistle fraternity airs near Willard and 
 Pearson Halls, to which the young women 
 would respond by joining them. Dean 
 Martha Crow discovered that the young 
 women would leave very early for prayer- 
 meeting for the purpose of meeting the 
 [166] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 men. " Then came rumors, then revela- 
 tions, and at last the declaration that the 
 girls must never again respond to calls 
 beneath their windows." (Press despatch, 
 Syracuse Evening Herald, May 15,1903.) 
 Instances such as have been given could 
 be increased by the score in colleges where 
 the unrestrained social relation of the 
 sexes is permitted. But sufficient evidence 
 is given to prove that it is the social life 
 that suffers the greatest peril. If educa- 
 tion is to form character, if it is to create 
 the wholesome sense of social reserve, that 
 is the safeguard of woman in after-life, 
 then the facts that we have cited make 
 unrestricted coeducation the most danger- 
 ous social experiment ever undertaken. It 
 is all the more dangerous to the moral 
 well-being of the women students from 
 the fact that these students come from 
 the middle class, as we understand the 
 word here; that is, they are the daughters 
 mostly of poor parents, and all that they 
 [167] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 know of social life and its amenities is 
 learned in the crude environment of a co- 
 educational college. The professors them^ 
 selves, to whom they look as models of 
 social deportment, leave college or tech-^ 
 nical schools to take their chairs, and are 
 grossly ignorant of social conventions, 
 which may be regarded as one of the 
 causes of the social irregularities that have 
 been allowed to exist. 
 
 Syracuse University was one of the first 
 of the coeducational institutions to admit 
 the inability of the faculty to exert any 
 restraining influence over the social rela- 
 tions existing among the students. Up 
 to the present year men and women were 
 allowed to live in the same house. The low 
 standard of scholarship of students so situ- 
 ated, and social irregularities that resulted, 
 have caused the faculty to extend to stu- 
 dents in mixed boarding-houses and dor- 
 mitories the same rules which have been 
 established at Winchell Hall. The new 
 [ 168 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 rules say in part: " The university author- 
 ities have become impressed with the im- 
 portance of a httle more care in the room- 
 ing habits of the students at the institution. 
 Therefore, hereafter, our friends who take 
 student boarders will kindly restrict their 
 roomers to one sex. We wish also to urge 
 upon you that our women students will 
 not be allowed to retain rooms in any 
 house if they are allowed to receive young 
 men callers in their rooms. We will be 
 grateful to you if you will inform us 
 promptly if your roomers do not regard 
 reasonable hours, or if you have what you 
 beheve to be just complaint of any kind. 
 Hereafter students will not be allowed to 
 room or board at any house that is not 
 registered at the office of the registrar of 
 the university." (Syracuse Evening 
 Herald, June 6, 1903. ) If we are obhged 
 to have the sexes trained in mixed col- 
 leges, every friend will rejoice at this 
 complete breakdown of the practice of un- 
 [169] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 restrained social relations between men 
 and women students. As we have shown, 
 in opinions quoted at the opening of this 
 chapter, this feature of the method, which 
 has caused such damage both to the social 
 well-being and scholarship at Syracuse, is 
 regarded as a necessity in the formation 
 of character and correct social habits. "It 
 takes the simper out of a young woman," 
 as one able authority on coeducation puts 
 it. It ought, indeed, where young women 
 receive men in their rooms. One of the 
 benefits that coeducationists hold before 
 the public from which they recruit their 
 ranks, is that the free mingling of the 
 sexes in college education makes the 
 men more manly and the women more 
 womanly, and trains young men in the 
 courtesy and respect which they ought to 
 show toward women. In view of what 
 has already been related, a more ridiculous 
 claim can scarcely be imagined. But, leav- 
 ing that out, we are not in debt to coed- 
 [170] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ucation for the position women hold in 
 America. Among no other people and 
 under no other civilization has woman 
 enjoyed so high a place as here. Chival- 
 rous courtesy and respect have been 
 awarded her from the strenuous days of 
 the Colonial mothers to the present. This 
 innate chivalry and grace which the Amer- 
 ican man bears to the American woman 
 is not the product of the university or the 
 college. It is found in all walks of life, 
 and has been the admiration of foreigners 
 and the boast of our manhood. It is the 
 impulse that has impelled men to grant 
 to woman her claim to equal political 
 rights, to better pay for her labor, that 
 has given her social freedom from the re- 
 straints that hedge her in older civiliza- 
 tions, and exalted her to a level that else- 
 where she has never attained. This springs 
 from an impulse higher than education, 
 that had its origin in our hard struggle 
 for political life and freedom, when 
 
 [ in ] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 woman bore her share in the stress and 
 privation by the side of her male com- 
 patriot. She earned then her recognition 
 and sanctification in the hearts of men 
 who loved herHhat has outworn the gen- 
 erations, and has worn ever since with 
 matchless grace her crown of American 
 womanhood. The shameless claim that 
 coeducation will make our young men 
 more considerate for women ought to 
 brand it as a sham and an insult to our 
 manhood. 
 
 The evidence shows that there is noth- 
 ing in coeducation to elevate, but every- 
 thing to lower, women in the esteem of 
 her fellow students. In fact, when young 
 women are exposed to the deteriorating in- 
 fluences of a college for both sexes, she 
 invites her own degradation. She demands 
 education after the manner of men, but 
 she also demands treatment such as men 
 give to men. The writer became aware 
 of this fact by seeing two students pass 
 [172] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 in the street. They were walking rapidly, 
 affecting an athletic stride; without lift- 
 ing his hat and with a cold stare, he said, 
 "Hello, Nan;" she returned a curt 
 " Hello, Jack," and both passed rapidly 
 on. This, it appeared, was correct form. 
 Some young men insist on lifting their 
 hats, but they are regarded as Miss 
 Nancys, and the practice is frowned upon 
 by the women. This, of course, is a mere 
 trifle, but trifles make for home life, which 
 the extremists claim coeducation promotes 
 in all its sacredness and purity. 
 
 [173] 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Love and Marriage 
 
 The following was sent to the press 
 through the news agencies, and was widely 
 published: "Chicago, June 20: Ter- 
 minating courtship lasting throughout 
 their college course, four Northwestern 
 University students announced their en- 
 gagements on the stage of the Auditorium. 
 Following the announcement of the 
 scholarship awards, the betrothal of two 
 young men to two young senior coeds was 
 made known. It was the first time in the 
 history of a Western university that the 
 announcement of student betrothals was 
 officially made by the university officials." 
 The chancellor of a minor university, on 
 [174] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 being interviewed concerning student 
 courtship and marriage, is reported to 
 have said that the more marriages the 
 better, as it was a good place to fall in 
 love. As the conversation reported was 
 never denied, it is assumed to be correct. 
 Vital statistics record only three events in 
 human life: birth, marriage, and death. 
 Marriage implies in its relationship more 
 of happiness and morality, or more of 
 falsehood, deceit, and crime than can be 
 crowded into any other act between man 
 and woman, but under the morbid stimulus 
 of coeducation it is stripped of the beauty 
 of holiness and trotted out upon a stage 
 to be greeted by the college yell. It is 
 true that these young and immature peo- 
 ple were only betrothed, not married, and 
 let us hope that these shrinking, timid 
 maids, with native modesty refined by the 
 exquisite culture which the advocates of 
 coeducation would have us believe is a 
 special feature of their method, were dis- 
 [175] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 enchanted and brought back to the stern 
 reahties of Hfe by the strident college 
 
 yell. 
 
 In the towns in which these bisexual 
 colleges are located, nothing so tends to 
 bring these institutions into disrespect as 
 the apparent indifference of the college 
 authorities to the open love-affairs be- 
 tween the students. They are openly 
 spoken of as " match factories." Court- 
 ship seems to be a continuous perform- 
 ance, and whether with a view to mar- 
 riage or not, only the Providence which 
 can scan the human mind in its secret 
 places knows, but for the sake of purity 
 and innocence let us hope. It may well be 
 that the chancellor, to the interview with 
 whom we have just referred, took counsel 
 with his fears when he said the more mar- 
 riages the better. He was a Christian 
 gentleman, and an old man and shrewd, 
 and from his long experience with life 
 [ 176 ] 
 
\ 
 
 FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 he probably was in full accord with St. 
 Paul. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how staid 
 and serious men, to whom is entrusted the 
 education of young men and women, can 
 see any good in student courtship and 
 marriage. It is conceded by all educators 
 that the terminal aim of education is the 
 development of character. A character 
 justly balanced, with discrimination and 
 a clarity of vision, and a character made 
 strong in the direction of self-control, is 
 the best and highest test of a well-trained 
 mind. To one who regards a question of 
 this kind without prejudice, it would ap- 
 pear impossible that an educator could 
 claim that a young man or woman re- 
 ceives as a product of his intellectual 
 training this high criterion fully formed 
 with his diploma, but rather he is given 
 the right direction, he has acquired a 
 standard grounded on rectitude and honor 
 by which he can measure the character that 
 [177] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 will mark him as a man in that higher 
 education he must acquire in the great 
 university of practical hfe. The advo- 
 cates of student marriages make the pos-« 
 itive assertion that it is better for the 
 man and the young woman to get married 
 while life is all untried and is as yet a 
 formless ideal. They are deliberately told 
 to get married as though it were a part 
 of their college curriculum, and to step 
 forth from the sheltering arms of their 
 alma mater man and wife, untrained and 
 unarmed, to battle with life, the most un- 
 certain quantity and quality, for good or 
 otherwise, that can be condensed in the 
 human document. Surely men will allow 
 their prejudices or their predilections to 
 give strange distortions to their moral 
 vision. 
 
 The writer is willing to leave the ques- 
 tion to the arbitration of any man who 
 has acquired eminence in his profession, be 
 he doctor, lawyer, or engineer, if a student 
 [178] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 can leave college a married man before he 
 has entered upon his professional studies, 
 and give to them the same time, the same 
 earnest and thorough work, as one who is 
 unmarried, and whose mind is not pre- 
 occupied by thoughts and emotions for- 
 eign to the work before him. The coed- 
 ucationists say that he can. Further, the 
 question can be left to the same arbitrator. 
 Can a young professional man, doctor, 
 lawyer, or engineer, married at the outset 
 of his professional career, have the same 
 opportunity of commanding all the 
 chances that make for success and emi- 
 nence, as the young man unhampered by 
 a wife until he has acquired a fixed posi- 
 tion and a settled income? The coeduca- 
 tionist again says that he can. There is 
 no holding any argument with such peo- 
 ple. They defy all the traditions of 
 experience, good judgment, and settled 
 standards. There is not an instance in 
 the literature of the question in which the 
 [179] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 advocates of coeducation have discussed 
 the subject cahnly, philosophically, and 
 with any evidence of clean hands and 
 hearts. They approach a great problem 
 of education, one that lies at the nucleus 
 of the higher education of women, with 
 rank assertion, their only argument being 
 abuse and ridicule of those who doubt or 
 disbelieve their methods. They are educa- 
 tional pachyderms, and the only argument 
 that can penetrate is the one that holds up 
 before them the dollar-mark. Then they 
 can perceive some logic on the other side, 
 and hasten, like the Northwestern Uni- 
 versity, to segregate, but not abandon the 
 two-sex idea. 
 
 Many coeducational colleges deliber- 
 ately encourage courtship and marriage. 
 President Wilkinson, of the Kansas State 
 Normal School, says that the college pre- 
 sents the best time and place for match- 
 making. In President Thwing's book, 
 "The College Woman," he mentions a 
 [180] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 college in which a day following com- 
 mencement was set apart as the day of 
 weddings. Former President Fairchild, 
 of Oberlin College, approved of college 
 engagements. President Thwing says that 
 coeducation does promote love and matri- 
 mony in college, but that it does not pro- 
 mote scholarship. (Mr. Finck, in the 
 Independent.) 
 
 In all that has been said by coeduca- 
 tionists about student courtship and mar- 
 riage, not a word has been spoken about 
 the rights of parents, or guardians, or 
 family interests in these marriages. This 
 side of the student marriages has been in- 
 sultingly ignored. If the college faculty 
 approved of these marriages, such a tri- 
 fling matter as the consent of parents or 
 family interest in the marriage of the son 
 or daughter might safely be regarded as 
 a neghgible matter. President Jordan, 
 in his paper in the Popular Science 
 Monthly, who endeavors to be fair and 
 [181] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 candid after the coeducational way, while 
 approving of these marriages, leaves out 
 all paternal wishes or solicitude for the 
 interest or happiness of the son or daugh- 
 ter. If you ask these people why they 
 do this, they will tell you that coeduca- 
 tion has so sharpened the mind and refined 
 the judgment of young men and women 
 that they may safely be left to their own 
 discretion about marriage. It is impos- 
 sible to conceive of any other answer that 
 will justify this indifference to the most 
 sacred of human ties, that of the parent 
 for his child. A professor in a college 
 for both sexes, to whom I spoke about 
 student courtship and marriage, stated 
 that such marriages were supposed to have 
 the parental sanction before they were 
 approved by the college authorities. But 
 why should the heads of colleges, like 
 President Jordan, discuss the subject at 
 all; why should another college presi- 
 dent recognize it from the commencement 
 [182] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 platform ; why not ignore it ; why should 
 a professor claim, as though it were a 
 merit, that his college only recognized 
 those engagements when they have the 
 approval of the parents? Could the fact 
 be beaten into the heads of men respon- 
 sible to the public for the conduct of these 
 two-sex colleges that they are bringing 
 education into disrepute, that they are 
 making their institutions the subject of 
 ridicule in the public press, that their func- 
 tion is to educate, and not to organize 
 matrimonial agencies, that they are help- 
 ing to wreck professional careers, that to 
 nag on premature marriages they are 
 helping to fill the divorce courts with the 
 pitiful tales of broken hearts and sinful 
 lives, that they are helping to fit the matri- 
 monial yoke upon necks which in after- 
 life will hold in bonds that are a mockery 
 to call holy tired and helpless women and 
 hopeless, irritable men? It is disgusting 
 that President Jordan should assert that 
 [183] 
 
Woman's Unfitness 
 
 such marriages always turn out happily, 
 an assertion that it is perfectly safe to 
 challenge him to prove. Happy mar- 
 riages are not made that way. They come 
 deliberately to men who know that they are 
 able to surround the object of their love 
 with the material comforts and accessories 
 that belong to the wife of an educated 
 man, and to those who regard love as a 
 serious thing wherein the man seeks and 
 the woman learns to love. It does not 
 spring from the accidental propinquity of 
 hoiden girls and rollicking young men, or 
 from the formless attachments between 
 romantic girls fresh from the village high 
 school and unfledged youths whose ideal 
 of life and its responsibilities must be as 
 intangible as a dream. 
 
 One of the reasons for the complacent 
 attitude of coeducational colleges upon 
 the subject of student marriages is be- 
 cause women are cheap in the matrimonial 
 market. In one instance that came under 
 [184] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 the observation of the writer, the young 
 man was cutting his classes and giving up 
 his time to a serious love-affair with a 
 young girl student in a students' board- 
 ing-house. He was the son of a prominent 
 and wealthy man, and as soon as the affair 
 became known to his people he was 
 promptly removed and sent to a single-sex 
 college; the worst feature of the case was 
 that the state of feelings between the 
 couple was equally known to the girl's 
 parents, who were residents in a remote 
 part of the town, the girl going to the 
 boarding-house only for her dinner. This 
 is only one instance of many others in 
 which the one who is destined to become 
 the greatest sufferer is the one whose in- 
 terests are the least regarded. It may not 
 be known to the authorities of bisexual col- 
 leges, but it is a fact well known to others, 
 that some parents send their daughters 
 there for the deliberate purpose of securing 
 husbands, or amorous and designing girls 
 [185] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 persuade their parents to allow them to 
 attend for that purpose. The facilities 
 afforded by these institutions for such an 
 object make the opportunities afforded 
 by a summer resort appear poor and inad- 
 equate. The one gives a scant oppor- 
 tunity at a high price, and the other gives 
 an unlimited opportunity of four years 
 at a low price. Can any one, who knows 
 enough of life to measure the power of 
 women over men whose manhood has not 
 yet developed into the full leaf, doubt 
 what the result would be? In the oppor- 
 tunities afforded by coeducational methods 
 woman is not the tentative side of the 
 problem. It is man that is safeguarded 
 by the precautions of the parents or guard- 
 ians. It is his career that is interrupted 
 or rendered doubtful by a premature 
 matrimonial experiment. It is woman 
 alone whose future is secured by marriage. 
 This is the social status that is given to the 
 relative value of the union between the 
 [186] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 sexes, and this is the value that it must 
 be given in the coeducational institutions. 
 They may model their colleges to conform 
 to a coeducational basis, but they cannot 
 overthrow the usages of society. The 
 value that society places on marriage in 
 its ratio between the sexes is the value that 
 must be given it in the college as in social 
 life. Woman is the commodity, man is 
 the standard of value, and it is in this 
 system of brokerage that these institutions 
 assume to take a part. The liberty of the 
 sexes, which is an American idea, is the 
 license of coeducation. In justice to the 
 inexorable dictum of society, it is only 
 justice to say that the professional man, 
 whose success or failure in life gives social 
 status to the wife, is the only unknown 
 quantity in the matrimonial equation. Yet 
 the authorities of these colleges, hardly 
 any of whom are adepts in social hfe and 
 usage, assume in their ignorance to ap- 
 prove of student marriages. A generation 
 [ 187 ] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 past the young professional man on the 
 threshold of his career might marry with 
 some prospect of a successful future. 
 That time has passed. The increasing 
 complexity of business and social life 
 renders it constantly more difficult to earn 
 a living income in the professions. Take 
 the instance of a young doctor located in 
 a busy city. Between the free dispensaries 
 and the hospitals with rival ambulance 
 services, the clang of whose gongs can be 
 heard hourly in the streets, the poor is 
 as far beyond his reach as the rich. He 
 has no prospect except to wait, unless he 
 appeals to the public as the master of 
 some specialty, to secure which, if he is 
 poor, demands self-denial and sacrifice on 
 his part that but few have the courage to 
 encounter. The young lawyer is even in 
 a worse plight. The lucrative business is 
 in the possession of great firms with 
 special partners. Crowded as the courts 
 are with pending cases, the marked tend- 
 [188] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ency of the age is to avoid litigation. In 
 court calendars with hundreds of cases, not 
 more than ten per cent, actually reach a 
 jury. A man working alone with a col- 
 lege education and a degree in law may 
 regard himself fortunate if he can secure 
 a connection with some large firm as a 
 collection attorney, the accounts of which 
 he is not allowed to sue. He is generally 
 absorbed, if he is bright and active, into 
 some legal firm on a salary that is only 
 remarkable in its contrast with what his 
 education has cost him. 
 
 The young engineer or architect is con- 
 fronted by the same tendency of the age 
 to concentration of business and special- 
 ism. He is fortunate if he is able to se- 
 cure a salary, and it is needless to say how 
 small these salaries are to the young grad- 
 uate. And yet these young men, bright, 
 active, and energetic, if their mental fibre 
 is of the hard and elastic quality that 
 makes for success, will succeed. Now sup- 
 [189] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 pose one of these poor young men marries 
 on leaving college, are the conditions such 
 as to make home happy, can he lavish upon 
 a young wife the concentration of feeling 
 and devotion that the average young 
 woman believes that she is entitled to as 
 a wife, and will the first born be welcomed 
 with a joy untinged with regret? Will 
 the average young woman with social 
 ambitions give up a life of comfort and 
 ease to share the home of a young man 
 who is obliged to make this stern hard 
 battle, sharing in his privations, his rigid 
 self-denials, and give way to none of 
 those regrets which are sure to show upon 
 the surface and make life bitter? I ask 
 these questions not of professors of col- 
 leges for both sexes, or of such men as 
 President Jordan, but of people of com- 
 mon sense and with a practical view of 
 life, who are none the less capable of love 
 and sacrifice for the sake of those they 
 love. 
 
 [190] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 As more directly relating to the college 
 and the serious object of the training, 
 education, and moral discipline of its un- 
 dergraduates, student courtship and mar- 
 riage strike a blow that is fatal to the 
 ideal college life and purpose. The fun- 
 damental idea of the college is not to give 
 one an education, for the very good reason 
 that the human mind cannot be educated 
 in four years, but, as far as possible, to 
 perfect its graduates in the use of the 
 tools, so to speak, by the correct use of 
 which the finished student is capable of 
 educating himself. He has acquired the 
 habit of studious application ; he can logic- 
 ally arrange and coordinate facts; he has 
 acquired the faculty of correct reasoning 
 by his insight into the higher mathe- 
 matics ; in the laboratories, if he bends all 
 his energies to the task, he is placed in the 
 great highway to education, the knowl- 
 edge of how to observe and correctly in- 
 terpret what he sees. These are simply 
 [191] 
 
Woman'^s Unfitness 
 
 the instruments of education, and then the 
 college leaves him to educate himself. If 
 he, as a graduate of Yale or Princeton, 
 assumes the attitude before the world that 
 simply as such he is an educated man, he 
 is intellectually doomed, and might better 
 have limited his intellectual training to 
 the three R's, as he would then have pre- 
 served his rectitude against the damage 
 of a false assumption. The graduate who 
 realizes that his college has done much in 
 giving him a sure footing on the way to 
 education, if he follows that way in intel- 
 lectual humility, content to seek, to him 
 will come the satisfying consciousness of a 
 fulfilment of his intellectual life and of 
 work well and wisely done. 
 
 The untrained youth who enters college 
 and secures all this in the brief space of 
 four years is the subject of a moral and 
 intellectual revolution. It is a system of 
 brain-building that will demand the con- 
 stant use of his highest faculties. If, 
 [192] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 while he is undergoing this evolution, the 
 professor or college president who be- 
 lieves that he has time for the distraction 
 of love-making must have lost sight of 
 the purpose and aim of the training, 
 which the observing public has too gen- 
 erously taken for granted. If to athletics 
 can be added student love-making, where 
 in the name of common sense is there room 
 for what they are pleased to call higher 
 education? From the standpoint of 
 common experience, as well as from that 
 of the physiologist, let us consider what 
 sex-love means as it comes to the healthy 
 young man and woman as student lovers, 
 probably for the first time in their lives. 
 With the student adolescence is completed 
 and mature functional life has begun. The 
 conscious life is held in the thrall of the 
 emotions. It breaks through the thin 
 crust of the untried and immature re- 
 straining forces of the mind. All the 
 higher brain attributes become slaves and 
 [193] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 accomplices of the overmastering impulse, 
 which runs riot through the realm of the 
 higher intellectual life. This is not too 
 highly colored when we consider that it is 
 an organic emotion that springs from the 
 subconscious life of nerve centres, over 
 which the will has no control, and mounts 
 upward into the supreme centre of the 
 spiritual life, the cerebrum. Here it 
 revels in the imagination, invades the ideo- 
 motor centres, impairs the memory, dis- 
 turbs the logical sequence of ideas, and 
 becomes the motor factor in the conscious 
 life. A college professor, in speaking 
 about student love, said that it was a good 
 thing for young men and women, as 
 " they must learn to control such feelings." 
 Very good; that form of learning is not 
 included in the college curriculum; but 
 control does not mean to suppress when 
 it refers to the strongest emotion known 
 in the life of man ; it means concealment, 
 which is another unhappy feature of stu- 
 [194] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 dent love. It is a college education in 
 deception and addiction to deceit. An 
 emotion which is as nearly a gift from 
 God as any that can find its being in weak 
 hmnan nature is made a thing to be hidden 
 away, and its contentment, for which the 
 touch of a hand or a loving word suffice, 
 is made a sin or a wrong-doing. These 
 young people who are thrown into the 
 environment of stimulating propinquity 
 have a right to love, and, as President 
 Jordan says in his Science Monthly paper, 
 " the wonder is rather that there are not 
 more.'' Under the conditions, however, in 
 which it exists, student love-making gives 
 the first lessons in concealment, and the 
 first conviction that there may be a per- 
 sonal gain in acting a lie. What may be 
 done openly is safe, that which must be 
 concealed is dangerous. When love leads 
 to assignation in student life it is potential 
 immorality. Can anything that is possible 
 to enter into student life offer more serious 
 [195] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 interruption to the current of mental 
 activities that favor the best results from 
 his time and opportunities? In some col- 
 leges there are chairs of psychology, with 
 laboratories and instruments of precision, 
 so-called. It is fair to ask these professors 
 in colleges for men and women in the in- 
 terest of science to apply their method of 
 research to the investigation of student 
 love, and deduce from their ascertained 
 facts to what extent the proper observance 
 would be disturbed by the outbreak in any 
 two students of opposite sex of a serious 
 instance of this emotion. It is a proper 
 subject of scientific investigation, but was 
 it ever attempted in the interest of coed- 
 ucation? On the contrary, it is favored and 
 encouraged. It is safe to take as sober 
 a minded man as President Jordan, in 
 the article just referred to, as one of the 
 most conservative two-sex college presi- 
 dents. He speaks with a tone of regret: 
 "It is a constant surprise that so many 
 [196] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 college men turn from their college asso- 
 ciates and marry some earlier or later 
 acquaintance of inferior ability, inferior 
 training, and often inferior personal 
 charm." In President Jordan's opinion, 
 which goes to show how little he under- 
 stands of love, and how little he appre- 
 ciates the men who go to college to study 
 instead of making love, he voices the al- 
 most universal sentiment of coeducational 
 authorities in regard to student love and 
 marriage. Its existence is a thing hostile 
 to the student life, fatal to the best efforts 
 of mind, a ruinous waste of some part of 
 the too brief four years that must do so 
 much in shaping character and developing 
 the student habit, and forms no part of the 
 argument these people offer upon the sub- 
 ject of coeducation. In this they are de- 
 ceiving the patrons who entrust their sons 
 and daughters to their care, and are giving 
 a retrograde movement to the cause of 
 higher education. 
 
 [ 197 ] 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Shadow Side of Coeducation 
 
 A SERIOUS subject seriously considered 
 may contain many things that will give 
 painful reading to some, and be regarded 
 as of doubtful propriety by others. This 
 chapter would have been omitted had the 
 statements it contains been based upon any 
 other evidence than the personal knowl- 
 edge of the author. As such it must stand 
 as a document against a policy in educa- 
 tion that has made such a shameful record 
 possible. The sin and disgrace recoil^ not 
 upon the innocent victims, but upon those 
 whose ill-advised and crudely matured 
 plans of coeducation have brought to- 
 gether an ill-assorted concourse of both 
 [198] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 sexes without the sohcitude and tender re- 
 straints of home. With singular inconse- 
 quence the imperious laws of sex have been 
 overlooked. It appears impossible to ex- 
 plain the mental attitude of coeducational 
 college authorities upon the subject. It 
 is charity to believe that it is due to igno- 
 rance. The denominational influence, 
 which each college was founded to pro- 
 mote, was supposed to throw ample re- 
 straints about the students, forgetting that 
 there are border-lines in spiritual growth 
 and fixity beyond which religion never 
 passes, and artificial moral restraints are 
 overwhelmed by organic impulse that 
 obeys the strenous demands of the higher 
 law, and this law is the law of the God 
 of nature. Facing such a problem as this, 
 what is done to adequately safeguard the 
 students, presupposing that coeducation is 
 to continue in its present form? 
 
 Religious influence, almost without ex- 
 ception of a denominational character, is 
 [199] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 the most active agent in the moral restraint 
 of the students. The promotion of Chris- 
 tian associations among the students, with 
 enforced attendance at college chapel and 
 regular church attendance are the main 
 influences under the direct control of the 
 college authorities. Membership in the 
 better class of secret societies is in many 
 instances dependent upon the correct con- 
 duct of the student. The suppression of 
 any known infraction of the college rules 
 and regulations relating to conduct or 
 class work, and the college has gone as 
 far as it can, either in mixed colleges or 
 in those dealing with but one sex. As 
 a matter of fact, faculties of mixed col- 
 leges are organized on the basis of colleges 
 for a single sex. The vast difference in 
 the government of institutions implied by 
 the presence of both sexes is not recog- 
 nized. The chairs are filled mostly by 
 young men, the majority of whom are 
 unmarried, whose duties begin and end 
 [ 200 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 with their class-room work, and however 
 anxious they might be to get in touch with 
 the social and moral life of the students, 
 they have but little tact to go outside of 
 their pedagogical work. In talking with 
 a young professor about a case that was 
 known to both of us, he said: "I have 
 had an interview with the young man and 
 seriously cautioned him, and it has done 
 no good; of course, I made a mistake; I 
 ought to have taken the case before the 
 faculty; now if I were to do so I would 
 be denounced by both classes as a spy and 
 an informer, and not only lose my influ-- 
 ence among them, but I might even en- 
 danger my position." 
 
 The majority of the smaller colleges 
 have no dormitories with proper separa- 
 tion of the sexes, but students are taken 
 into families for board and lodging open 
 to both sexes. It was stated by one pro- 
 fessor that this was encouraged as being 
 better than separation of the students, as 
 [ 201 ] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 it tended to create an atmosphere of 
 " home Hfe." Surely, it must be a pro- 
 fessional idea from the point of view of 
 coeducation if a boarding-house could 
 create the atmosphere of a home simply 
 by the commingling of young men and 
 women. The students are placed upon 
 their honor to preserve a proper and dis- 
 creet deportment toward each other. In 
 older countries, where the sex problem is 
 taken practically, the deportment of the 
 sexes is placed upon a standard of per- 
 sonal honor; yet a vigilant oversight is 
 never relaxed by those who are responsible 
 for the reputation of young women. In 
 this country, among coeducational insti- 
 tutions, this would be resented as an 
 insulting suspicion of a young woman's 
 character. Attending a college for men, 
 she demands the liberties and license of 
 young men, and for the honor of our 
 young women be it said that she acquits 
 herself in her self-respecting attitude 
 [ 202 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 toward her own and the other sex in a 
 manner that would justify, if nothing else 
 were needed, the theory and practice of 
 coeducation. But the advocates of coed- 
 ucation have no right to trade upon the 
 innate nobleness and fortitude of char- 
 acter of our young women, without re- 
 specting it and throwing about it every 
 possible protection. Lead us not into 
 temptation, is the way the Christian is 
 taught to pray by One who knows the 
 human heart in all its weakness. Thou- 
 sands of the young, the flower of Ameri- 
 can youth, are being so led by so-called 
 Christian colleges, with what results in 
 wrecked lives or in unforgetable misery 
 the Lord who taught us so to pray alone 
 knows. The young human being at the 
 beginning of functional activity needs the 
 directing and restraining hand of those 
 who have not outlived the memory of the 
 tribulations of their own youth. This is 
 not a surveillance that imphes doubt or 
 [203] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 suspicion; it is the natural solicitude of 
 those who love and trust, but would shield 
 from harm, temptation, or the appearance 
 of evil. The affections and emotions are 
 the vulnerable places in a woman's armor, 
 irrespective of age. Should she be young, 
 untried, ignorant of the world and of men, 
 warm-hearted and affectionate, in full 
 health and with abundant nutrition, she 
 is safeguarded only by her high and 
 romantic ideas; if any coeducator alleges 
 that such an example can be thrown 
 among a miscellaneous gathering of both 
 sexes for four years without moral risk, 
 I have no words that are proper to use 
 which will fitly describe that man's igno- 
 rance of human nature. As a physician, 
 we have watched the after-career of young 
 girls, tenderly reared in Christian homes, 
 who, at the psychological moment have 
 lain prone before the victorious emotions. 
 This type of young woman never recruits 
 the ranks of the unfortunate. It is her 
 [204] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 one glimpse at the shadow side of hfe, 
 whence flows the fountain, to taste of 
 which is not always sin, and that it is 
 not sin is the horror of it. That it did 
 not come of unholy desire, but of emotions 
 and affections that are like peerless gems 
 in the diadem of womanhood, makes the 
 memory abide with her always, regrettable, 
 unappeasable. The material side of her 
 future may not be touched. I have known 
 many of them afterward to become happy 
 wives and mothers, but the galled spot 
 was there, just where the neck-yoke that 
 bears the burden of life presses the hardest 
 upon her tender bosom. How many in- 
 stances such as this has coeducation in our 
 colleges made possible? Do the members 
 of the faculty know, or, if they know, 
 will they give us their experience? The 
 dean of a college where the sexes are 
 mixed told me he did not believe that it 
 had ever occurred, and those who brought 
 such charges against Christian colleges 
 [ 205 ] 
 
WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 were unregenerate or unworthy of belief. 
 The authorities of mixed colleges have no 
 other defence than a general denial. 
 
 This is more a question of physiology 
 than of morality, in the need of a suspen- 
 sion of the unrestrained social contact of 
 the sexes during a period of early crisis 
 in functional activity. This is the rule 
 on the part of intelligent parents in every 
 well-regulated home. That this crisis is 
 outlived by every young man and young 
 woman of about twenty is the theory upon 
 which coeducation bases its factor of moral 
 safety. The sexual attributes are often- 
 times referred to as an instinct. In the 
 lower ranges of animal life it is actually a 
 madness. Man, who can look into the 
 depths of his own emotions, knows that 
 fasting and prayer and the macerations 
 of the flesh will not suppress those feel- 
 ings, which are necessary for the perpet- 
 uation of his race. These spring from the 
 activity of organic life, the products of 
 [206] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 nerve centres and of ganglia, with which 
 the supreme nerve depot, the brain, has 
 nothing to do. The range of the potential 
 activity of these emotions has reached its 
 maximum when physical life has gained its 
 first maturity. It is at this time, when the 
 mind is plastic and open to the impressions 
 of its environment, that wholesome, re- 
 straining influences are needed for sup- 
 pression and self-government. At this 
 time the young instinctively flock together 
 in song and dance, which is right and inno- 
 cent; but in the normal relations of the 
 sexes these periods of enjoyment cease, 
 and all come under home influence and re- 
 straint. It is not so in mixed American col- 
 leges of the minor class with the students 
 in common boarding-houses. The strain on 
 the forces of self -suppression must be 
 enormous and in some cases pitiable. Is it 
 any wonder that the moral tension some- 
 times exceeds its hmits, and breaks under 
 the strain? Education under conditions 
 [207] 
 
W" 
 
 WoMAN^'s Unfitness 
 
 such as these appears impossible in its 
 higher forms. The chief end of education 
 is to form character, to build up a high 
 degree of receptive intelligence, which will 
 prolong itself beyond the period of train- 
 ing in constant accretions of knowledge 
 and self-government. But here is edu- 
 cation inviting the issue of battle with 
 the forces which it is one of its aims to 
 direct and control ; trying on the one hand 
 to lead to culture and a spiritual life, while 
 on the other it is cultivating by environ- 
 ment the lowest form of organic emotion, 
 which is obtruding itself into the conscious 
 life, and is not interchangeable with any- 
 thing spiritual, or mental, which education 
 can create or promote. 
 
 There ought not to be any divergent 
 opinions upon this vital point in coeduca- 
 tion. Those who believe in it and those 
 who do not ought to be in accord here, and 
 make the social life of the sexes possible 
 only in the class-room. >The extreme to 
 [208] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 which college athletics are carried is an- 
 other element of weakness in the American 
 theory of coeducation. ^^A young woman, 
 who will resist all the blandishments of 
 mind and form, will, in spite of religious 
 training, high social standing, and educa- 
 tion, drift into abject sadism in the pres- 
 ence of the prowess of brawn and muscle. 
 It has been so in all ages of the world; 
 from the classic Olympian games, the 
 bloody victories of the arena, the valor of 
 the savage warrior, women have loved and 
 applauded. 
 
 It may be objected that we are going 
 far afield, but it must be remembered that 
 we are speaking about the basic emotions 
 that sway and shape human lives as the 
 wind sways the sturdy oak, and not the 
 love that the poet sings, or that has 
 adorned history with the subhmest exam- 
 ples of self-sacrifice and devotion that live 
 eternally as inspirations. Furthermore, 
 the stimulating effect of athletic exhibi- 
 [209] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 tions by men upon the emotions of young 
 women at their most susceptible age, ap- 
 pears to be overlooked by those who have 
 grafted the mixed element upon colleges 
 organized solely for men, and to which 
 women, irrespective of fitness, are obhged 
 to conform. 
 
 Guardedly as a matter of this nature 
 must be discussed for the general public, 
 enough has been said to show the possible 
 evils that may result from forcing higher 
 education along hnes hostile to the phys- 
 ical and moral well-being of young men 
 and women. There are the potential evils, 
 but the actual ones form one of the darkest 
 chapters in the history of coeducation. 
 
 To give specific instances of moral 
 downfall directly traceable to the unre- 
 strained relations of the sexes in colleges 
 where coeducation is encouraged to its 
 social limits is painful to the writer, and 
 is sure to be anything but agreeable to the 
 reader. But it becomes a duty in view 
 [210] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 of the fact that the advocates of coeduca- 
 tion never defend the method, but assault 
 any one in harsh and insulting terms who 
 may venture to question its merits. Noth- 
 ing but hard facts, revolting as they may 
 be, will force the conviction that they who 
 object to coeducation as it is conducted 
 in mixed colleges have valid reasons for 
 their objections, and have a right to de- 
 mand a respectful hearing. To the de- 
 tailed instances that are offered in evi- 
 dence, many more could be gathered from 
 the police of Syracuse, who maintain a 
 strict surveillance over those who frequent 
 houses of assignation. It, however, ought 
 not to be necessary to add instances as 
 culminative evidence to convince all right- 
 thinking people of the actual evils inherent 
 to the mingling of the young adult sexes 
 in coeducation. 
 
 The son of a well-known professional 
 man sought the advice of a physician for 
 the cure of a venereal disease contracted 
 [211] 
 
WOMAN^'S UnFITTSTESS 
 
 from a student. The patient stated that 
 several young men were ahke affected, 
 contracted from the same source. Two of 
 them later sought the advice of the same 
 physician. With the purpose of prevent- 
 ing the further spread of the disease, one 
 of the patients was induced to bring the 
 young woman to the physician. She was 
 a small brunette, about twenty-two years 
 of age, very evidently in poor health. She 
 was a student in the classical course, and 
 well along in her junior year. She felt 
 too keenly the disgrace of her position to 
 give confidence to her physician, and it was 
 not until after several weeks, when her 
 health was nearly restored, that she was 
 induced to relate her history. She was 
 the only daughter of a widow living in a 
 small village, who had nearly exhausted 
 her scant resources in educating her 
 daughter. She had received her prepar- 
 atory education in the local academy, 
 and was admitted to college, conditioned 
 [212] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 in two topics, which she made up be- 
 fore the completion of her sophomore 
 year. During her second year her ac- 
 quaintance with a fellow student had 
 ripened into love, and they became en- 
 gaged. So far as worldly position was 
 concerned he was rather superior socially 
 to the young lady. When he informed 
 his parents of the engagement, positive 
 objections were made, he was removed 
 from that college and entered in another 
 institution. In the meanwhile, they were 
 for many hours daily in each other's so- 
 ciety, often alone, and love's dream had 
 ended in a fateful reality. Her lover had 
 submitted so readily to the orders of his 
 people, and he had withdrawn from his 
 engagement with so little show of feeling, 
 that to her unhappiness was added a dan- 
 gerous element of cynicism and doubt of 
 the existence of goodness and purity. She 
 was of an ardent, passionate nature, and 
 in her unhappy and discouraged state of 
 [213] 
 
Woman s Unfitness 
 
 mind nothing but the material side of life 
 appeared left to her. The first was not 
 the final step, but not from waywardness. 
 It was the morbid, hysterical seeking after 
 sympathy and consolation, the wounded 
 spirit, as it were, finding a balm and heal- 
 ing in the very thing from which it had 
 received its hurt. In her weakened powers 
 of resistance, the continued fret and 
 temptation of her environment, were added 
 burdens to drag her down. The accident 
 of disease appeared the one thing needed 
 to show to her the degradation of her 
 position, and that what was once sancti- 
 fied by love, as so many falsely reason, was 
 now becoming sin. She rescued herself, 
 as many another has done, and completed 
 her college career with moderate success. 
 After teaching school a few years she mar- 
 ried, and is now the mother of several 
 children. 
 
 The daughter of a man in a good social 
 position in a neighboring town entered col- 
 [214] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 lege. She was given a letter of introduc- 
 tion to a physician, well known to her 
 father, soliciting his care when she was 
 in need of professional services. She pre- 
 sented her letter at the only interview the 
 physician ever had with her. He never 
 saw her after, except on rare occa- 
 sions in the street. One stormy night in 
 November, while waiting near the prin- 
 cipal railroad station for a street car, 
 nearly opposite a notorious " Raines law 
 hotel " which had been raided many times 
 by the police, all of which had been duly, 
 and elaborately, reported in the local 
 papers, he saw a couple emerge at the side 
 door. The young woman, especially in 
 manner and dress, differed so completely 
 from the class of women who frequent 
 such resorts, that he gave her close atten- 
 tion. Something familiar in her face and 
 figure recalled the young lady of the letter. 
 On board of the well-lighted car the iden- 
 tification was complete: it was the same 
 [215] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 young lady. The problem the doctor had 
 to decide was a delicate one. Between 
 loyalty to his friend and his duty to the 
 young woman, whose physical well-being 
 was left to his charge, there was inter- 
 posed the instinctive reluctance of a man 
 to be regarded as an intruder where he had 
 no business. At any rate, the letter of 
 introduction warranted his speaking to 
 her ; she professed not to know him, which 
 may readily have been the truth, as a year 
 and a half, or more, had passed since the 
 interview. The mention of her father's 
 name and the letter recalled the incident. 
 She showed not the least embarrassment, 
 but there was a glint of defiance and 
 bravado about her face and manner that 
 suggested that she was carrying it off 
 with a high hand, and which, so far as the 
 doctor was concerned, relieved the situa- 
 tion of some of its delicacy. She flushed 
 hotly, not with shame, for she was evi- 
 dently violently angry, when she was in- 
 [216] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 formed of the frightful danger of visiting 
 a resort that was constantly under the 
 espionage of the police, and might have 
 led to her arrest. The resentful interview 
 on the car ended in a reluctant promise to 
 call upon the doctor. It needed a sharp 
 letter to make her keep her promise. The 
 battle that followed was one that threw 
 a strong light on one side of the many 
 phases of human nature. It resulted in her 
 finally consenting to change from the uni- 
 versity to a single-sex college for women. 
 This occurred many years ago. The lady 
 is unmarried, and keeps house in a fault- 
 less manner in a motherless home. As a 
 matter of fact, so long as it was regarded 
 as a simple question of veracity between 
 the two, the young woman was arrogantly 
 defiant, and it was only when she was 
 convinced that both she and her student 
 lover had been seen and identified by the 
 detective who was assigned to watch the 
 [217] 
 
WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 house that she consented to change her 
 college. 
 
 A young woman in her junior year in a 
 certain college was admitted to a private 
 room in a general hospital suffering from 
 sepsis, caused by an attempt to avert the 
 consequences of an affair. The young 
 woman was too sick to submit to any direct 
 inquiries into her history. The appear- 
 ance of the family that gathered at her 
 bedside was that of the better class of 
 country people. The condition of the 
 patient became so desperate that it was 
 thought proper to take some member of 
 her family into counsel. An older sis- 
 ter was selected to bear the burden of the 
 revelation. Astonishment and incredulity 
 was what was to be expected under the 
 circumstances. Such an event in the girl's 
 life was nearly impossible from what she 
 knew of her sister's character. Modest, 
 diffident, and retiring, truthful and sin- 
 cere, she would not believe such an affair 
 [ 218 ] 
 
roR Higher Coeducation 
 
 possible, nor was her faith shaken until 
 she listened to the confession of her sister. 
 The girl was loyal to her lover, and aside 
 from his being a fellow student his name 
 never passed her lips, in spite of her sis- 
 ter's earnest solicitations. The girl finally 
 recovered, but many months passed before 
 her restoration to full health. Aside from 
 the fact that she left college, nothing was 
 known of her after-history. 
 
 All criminologists know that cases of 
 sexual depravity occur, and are as fre- 
 quent in one sex as the other. They also 
 know that no station or occupation in life 
 is exempt from the occurrence of sporadic 
 cases of this unbalanced condition of the 
 organic emotions. It is not an anomaly, 
 therefore, that the quiet ranks of students 
 in a mixed college should be invaded by 
 the sexual pervert. But what is singular 
 is the fact that the young woman, the sub- 
 ject of this report, passed through college 
 in spite of the suspicion against her which 
 [219] 
 
WoMAK''s Unfitness 
 
 existed among the students. She had her 
 intimates among the female students, sev- 
 eral of whom were observed to be her con- 
 stant associates when in the streets. As a 
 student she was more than usually bright 
 and quick. She was also a medical case, 
 and as her ailment necessarily revealed her 
 character she talked with a total absence of 
 reticence. It was impossible to associate 
 any consciousness of sin or wrong-doing 
 with the acts which she openly confessed. 
 She professed to believe that all young 
 men and women were just like herself in 
 respect to conduct, and so far as the young 
 men whom she met are concerned she may 
 have had grounds for her belief. She was 
 too shrewd to have anything to do with 
 the fellows on the " hill," as she expressed 
 it. She became engaged to one of them, 
 who graduated a year before her class, and 
 who secured a position on a newspaper. 
 When she graduated she went West and 
 they were married. Their married life 
 [ 220 ] 
 
FOR Higher Coeducatio 
 
 N 
 
 was not successful, and in a couple of 
 years she became a divorced woman. This 
 case would have been omitted were it not 
 for the sincere belief that in a college for 
 women only such a character could not 
 have passed through four years of college 
 life without detection and expulsion. It 
 demonstrates the strange need of over- 
 sight in the individual, and indiif erence to 
 one of the most important sides of educa- 
 tion, that which aids in character building. 
 There is nothing in a classical curriculum 
 that does it. It is the handiwork of the 
 instructor who sees in the upbuilding of 
 a symmetrical, perfectly poised character 
 the best side of education. 
 
 These cases occurred during a period of 
 about eighteen years. A limited number 
 of cases upon which to predicate a general 
 condemnation of a great system of educa- 
 tion, but the offences are of such a char- 
 acter, and so fatally opposed to all ideals 
 of both the methods and final results of 
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WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 education, that a single instance directly 
 traceable to the commingling of the sexes 
 in education is sufficient to condemn the 
 method. 
 
 A sporadic case is as positive proof of 
 the existence of a disease as an epidemic. 
 
 We have additional evidence furnished 
 by men in high position in mixed colleges, 
 and who ought to know of these things. 
 President Jordan, in his Popular Science 
 Monthly article, says " that evil results 
 sometimes arise — not often, to be sure, 
 but once in awhile." The final clause in 
 this extract is so puerile that one can 
 hardly believe that it is written by a sane 
 man. He traces the cause to adverse con- 
 ditions: when little girls of preparatory 
 schools and schools of music are mingled 
 with the college students, and given the 
 same freedom, and where young women 
 are forced to rent parlors and " garrets " 
 in houses of an unsympathetic village. 
 But the facts do not bear President Jor- 
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FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 dan out. Where do the young women 
 students always come from if not from 
 the preparatory school, and in both the 
 Northwestern University and at Syracuse 
 the social disorders originated in the dor- 
 mitories. President Jordan's attitude 
 toward this question is not that of a Chris- 
 tian gentleman. To confess the possibility 
 of such an evil to a girl because she is poor 
 and is living in a " garret " is grossly un- 
 just. It is an insult to the great army of 
 young women, who are poor and live in 
 " garrets," and yet. so live with soul un- 
 sullied, pure in body and in mind. This 
 is only another instance of the weak, silly, 
 and flippant manner that the advocates 
 of coeducation use in treating the serious 
 problems involved in their method. 
 
 The chancellor of Syracuse University 
 furnishes the next item of evidence. He 
 refers to it in the simple, manly way that 
 is characteristic. He does not explain it, 
 he offers no insult to a student because 
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WoMAN^s Unfitness 
 
 she rooms in a " garret," he makes no 
 statement whether the instances are rare 
 or otherwise; we simply know that the 
 evil exists and is punished. He is speak- 
 ing of the disciplinary practice of the in- 
 stitution. "It is never the practice to 
 dismiss a student for a single act, unless 
 it be immorality." (Syracuse Evening 
 Herald, February 4, 1903.) 
 
 With an entire lack of the fitness of 
 things on the part of an ardent coeduca- 
 tional advocate, Prof. E. E. Slosson places 
 the blame for the social evil in mixed col- 
 leges upon the women alone. He says: 
 " There are girls who are not fit to be 
 sent to a coeducational college; who get 
 harm and who do harm. When such are 
 detected, the president usually invites 
 them into his private office and gives them 
 the same advice that Hamlet gave to 
 Ophelia." (The Independent) With 
 rare tact he attempts to propitiate the 
 mothers of these erring daughters, by add- 
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FOR Higher Coeducation 
 
 ing that in fairness he ought to state that 
 these cases are not often congenital. 
 
 The friends of coeducation may answer 
 that such instances occur in the same class 
 outside of college life. This is true; but 
 is not the answer a fatal objection? If it 
 is a recognized evil, as it certainly is, what 
 precautions have they taken to render the 
 evil impossible in college life? In what 
 way have young men and women been 
 safeguarded against moral contamination? 
 This is what good government and clean 
 society demand. The authorities of mixed 
 colleges must come up to the moral stand- 
 ard of the best homes in the communities 
 in which they exist. They must prove that 
 they do so, and that their system of mixed 
 education contains methods of supervision, 
 direction, and suppression in matter of 
 character and morals, otherwise society 
 will suppress them in the interest of good 
 government. 
 
 THE END. Y 
 
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