THE REACTION FROM COEDUCATION. 21 



in these new fields, and they will go or stay in proportion as they do 

 better or less well than men. The picture which one learned professor 

 has recently drawn of an uprising of men to force by violence a return 

 of women to their proper sphere, is the product of an inflamed imagina- 

 tion attempting to portray an oriental Utopia. In reality men are 

 chiefly responsible for the changes now going forward, but they are 

 neither the doctrinaires of academic dignity nor yet the leaders of 

 cotillons; they are the seekers after commercial, industrial and pro- 

 fessional efficiency. So long as the economic situation remains what 

 it is as regards the principles and motives that control in it, no amount 

 of merely hysterical criticism and opposition is likely seriously to 

 modify the case. And so long, therefore, as many women prefer self- 

 support to marriage on the terms they find the latter offered to them, 

 women will remain primary items in the economic situation, and they 

 cannot be treated in this realm from the merely sexual point of view. 



Coeducation is a reflection, often unconscious, of the tendencies 

 which have produced this condition. It represents historically, as well 

 as intrinsically, the democratic disposition to offer equal educational 

 opportunities so far as possible to every human being. The touch- 

 stone by which it tests worthiness for such opportunities is social ser- 

 vice. So long as women show themselves worthy by this standard to 

 receive the highest forms of education, they will be given opportunity 

 to obtain it, and moreover they will probably, in western institutions 

 at least, obtain it under coeducational auspices. Justly or unjustly 

 the western mind is suspicious of a fallacy lurking in the proclaimed 

 equality of instruction in women's colleges and annexes, with that 

 given in men's colleges. Then, too, if there were no other considera- 

 tions, the economic waste involved in supporting separate institu- 

 tions for men and women would tell heavily in favor of coeducation 

 in many western communities. 'Equal but different' is not in educa- 

 tional matters a generally palatable doctrine away from the Atlantic 

 seaboard. If the male is intellectually an altogether superior indi- 

 vidual, the female ought on democratic principles to be given a chance 

 for improvement by contact with him. 



As a matter of fact coeducation is one of the most characteristic 

 expressions of the social evolution of modern and especially western 

 life. It is not now, and is not likely soon to become, an adequate or 

 satisfactory expression of social and educational ideals in old commu- 

 nities or at all events in the conservative strata of such communities, 

 inheriting as these do directly and easily the traditions of the past, 

 and consequently clinging tenaciously to custom. The few instances 

 in which the system has made its way into New England institutions 

 of collegiate rank are essentially sporadic and serve rather than other- 



