American Women's Colleges through European Eyes, 1865-1914

In March 1904, at a time when Prussian Ministry of Education was giving serious consideration to admission of women to institutions of higher education, it received a petition signed by rectors of eight of Prussia's nine universities. The rectors expressed strong opposition to introduction of coeducation and called instead for creation of a separate university for women, they suggested that professorial appointments would open to best scholarly talents among women. To support this viewpoint, they noted that in United States, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr colleges employed 249 women as professors, versus just 88 men.' Several months later, when International Congress of Women gathered in Berlin, President Martha Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr answered Prussian rectors. Although she had vigorously defended need for women's colleges in an essay prepared for Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, Thomas now urged German women to press for coeducation, the only way in which women can secure so good an education as men. Here and there, she continued, where a woman can control conditions a rigid academic standard may be maintained, as I believe is case at Bryn Mawr-but such a standard has only a life tenure at best.2

Economic history · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Medicine · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Optometry

• État des lieux de la mixité. Historiographies comparées en Europe

  Rebecca Rogers•Clio•2003

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