Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/522

Rh The trustees held several meetings to consider the applications. Beside Miss Craddock's, there were two others which the faculty referred to the trustees, and which appear not to have been reached in the regular course of business, Miss Florence Kelley, a post-graduate from Cornell University, daughter of Judge Kelley, who applied for admission as a special student in Greek, and Miss Frances Henrietta Mitchell, a junior student from Cornell, who asked to be admitted in the junior class. Our information comes from these ladies, who were notified that their cases would be presented. The question of coëducation, which has been seriously occupying the minds of the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, was settled last evening, at least for the present, by the passage of a resolution refusing the admission of girls to the department of arts, but proposing to establish a separate collegiate department for them, whenever the requisite cost, about $300,000, is provided. There has been an intelligent and honest difference among both trustees and professors on this interesting question, and the diversity has been complicated by the various grounds upon which the pros and cons are maintained. There are those who advocate the admission of girls to the University as a proper thing per se. Others consent to it, because the University cannot give the desired education separately. Others hold that girls should be admitted because of their equal rights to a university education, although their admission is very undesirable. Others oppose coëducation in the abstract, conceding that girls should be as well educated as boys, but insisting that they must be differently and therefore separately educated. These draw a clear line between "equal" and "similar" education, and hold that no university course of studies can be laid out that will not present much of classical literature and much of the mental, moral and natural sciences, that cannot be studied and recited by boys and girls together, without serious risk of lasting injury to both.

Would it not be better, all things considered, to abjure this kind of classical literature, and instead of subjecting our sons to its baneful influence, give them the refining, elevating companionship of their sisters? If we would preserve the real modesty and purity of our daughters, it is quite as important that we should pay some attention to the delicacy and morality of the men with whom they are to associate.

If a girl cannot read the classics with a young man without contamination, how can she live with him in all the intimacies of family life without a constant shock to her refined sensibilities? So long as society considers that any man of known wealth is a fit husband for our daughters, all this talk of the faculties and trustees of our colleges about protecting woman's modesty is the sheerest nonsense and hypocrisy. It is well to remember that these professors and students have mothers, wives and sisters, and if man is coarse and brutal, he invariably feels free to show his worst passions at his own fireside. To warn women against coëducation is to warn them against association with men in any relation whatsoever.