Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/550

550 The city of Cleveland has been stirred for weeks on this question of woman's higher education. Western Reserve College, founded in 1826, at Hudson, was moved to Cleveland in 1874, because of a gift of $100,000 from Mr. Amasa Stone, with the change of name to Adelbert College, in memory of an only son. A few young women had been students since 1873. In Cleveland, about twenty young ladies availed themselves of such admirable home privileges. Their scholarship was excellent—higher than that of the young men. They were absent from exercises only half as much as the men. Their conduct was above reproach. A short time since the faculty, except the president, Dr. Carroll Cutler, petitioned the board of trustees to discontinue coëducation at the college, for the assumed reasons that girls require different training from boys, never "identical" education; that it is trying to their health to recite before young men; "the strain upon the nervous system from mortifying mistakes and serious corrections is to many young ladies a cruel additional burden laid upon them in the course of study"; "that the provision we offer to girls is not the best, and is even dangerous"; that "where women are admitted, the college becomes second or third-rate, and that, worst of all, young men will be deterred from coming to this college by the presence of ladies." An "annex" was recommended, not with college degrees, but a subordinate arrangement with "diploma examinations, so far and so fast as the resources of the college shall allow."

As soon as the subject became known, the newspapers of the city took up the question. As the public furnishes the means and the students for every college, the public were vitally interested. Ministers preached about it, and they, with doctors and lawyers, wrote strong articles, showing that no "annex" was desired; that parents wished thorough, high, self-reliant education for their daughters as for their sons; that health was not injured by the embarrassment (?) of reciting before young men; that young men had not been deterred from going to Ann Arbor, Oberlin, Cornell, and other institutions where there are young women; that it was unjust to make girls go hundreds of miles away to Vassar or Smith or Wellesley, when boys were provided with the best education at their very doors; that, with over half the colleges of this country admitting women, with the colleges of Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Holland and France throwing open their doors to women, for Adelbert College to shut them out, would be a step backward in civilization.

The women of the city took up the matter, and several thousands of our best names were obtained to a petition, asking that girls be retained members of the college; judges and leading persons gladly signed. The trustees met November 7, 1884. The whole city eagerly waited the result. The chairman of the committee, Hon. I. W. Chamberlain of Columbus, who had been opposed to coëducation at first, from the favorable reports received by him from colleges all over the country, had become a thorough convert, and the report was able and convincing.

President Angell of Michigan University, where there are 1,500 students, wrote: "Women were admitted here under the pressure of public sentiment against the wishes of most of the professors. But I think no professor now regrets it, or would favor the exclusion of women. We made no solitary modification of our rules or requirements. The women did not become hoydenish; they did not fail in their studies; they did not break down in health; they have been graduated in all departments; they have not been inferior in scholarship to the men. We count the experiment here successful."

Galusha Anderson, president of Chicago University, wrote: "Our only law here is that the students shall act as gentlemen and ladies. They mingle freely together, just as they do in society, as I think God intended that they should, and the effect in all respects is good. I have never had the slightest trouble from the association of the sexes."

Chancellor Manatt of Nebraska University, for four years engaged in university work at Yale, in answer to the questions as to whether boys would be driven away from the institution, replied: "This question sounds like a joke in this longitude. As