28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which was offered 1o men. It is a significant fact that the early 

 objections to it were primarily women's supposed physical in- 

 ability and the danger to womanly character. The traditional 

 curriculum was as well adapted to the needs of women as to the 

 needs of men in nonprofessional occupations. It was rightly 

 felt that there is a virtue in culture, irrespective of the aims of 

 the individual. 



By the Morrill Land Grant of 1862 coeducation was assured, 

 potentially at least, in one institution in every State. The other 

 provisions of the act, compelling the teaching of agriculture and 

 the mechanic arts, also indicated the rise of a new and broader 

 idea in education. The colleges thus founded were not intended 

 primarily for rich men's children, but for the sons and daughters 

 of the great middle class. Coeducation seems to have been a con- 

 cession to the American sense of fairness. If the farmer's boy 

 should have a school, then the farmer's girl must have a school 

 too ; it was obviously cheaper to educate them together, while 

 social tradition, less developed among the farming classes and in 

 the States west of New England, offered no obstacle to this pur- 

 pose. While, therefore in New England coeducation was still 

 mentioned with horror as an impropriety,* in the more crude and 

 democratic West it was having a natural and wholesome growth. 



The logical consequences of coeducation in these institutions 

 were evidently not anticipated. The boy who went to the State 

 college took lectures in scientific agriculture or mechanical en- 

 gineering, with so many hours a day on the farm or in the shop, 

 under a trained instructor; the girl who went to college took 

 whatever was considered strictly ornamental in the course 

 French, literature, ancient history, rhetoric, with a certain number 

 of hours per day of domestic work. But the hours of sweeping, 

 bed-making, and dish-washing were illuminated by no applica- 

 tion of scientific principles from the mind of a trained instructor. 

 In fact, nobody knew very well what she was there for ; it seemed 

 only fair that she should " have a chance too/' but a chance 

 for what ? Why, to marry, of course ! But nobody ever said 

 that aloud, and nobody thought of adapting her training to her 

 probable and desirable business in life. 



The West had solved the problem of woman's education by 

 offering her the same curriculum under essentially the same con- 

 ditions of life and discipline as those of men. The disasters to 

 coeducation which had been prophesied had not occurred. Girls 



* Young men and young women have been taught together in the Maine Wesleyan 

 Seminary, Kent's Hill, Maine, one of the best known classical and preparatory schools in 

 New England, since at least 1828, and in the seminary at Cazenovia, N. Y., since 1830. 

 EDITOR Popular Science Monthly. 



