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March 2005 EOP Newsletter
- From the Director
- EOP Represents at the Harlem Renaissance Night!
- Financial Aid Report
- “Forgetting College?” by Joshua Myers
- Women’s History Month
- Feature Article: American Higher Education for Women
- Student Spotlight
- EOP 26th Annual Banquet
Feature Article: American Higher Education for Women
Women and men in American higher education -- sharing equal campus turf -- pursuing comparable academic goals -- obtaining commensurate qualifications -- achieving equivalent career status. Such an image may be easier to conceive as we begin the 21 st century, but the American academy did not always promote the notion of equality among the sexes. The historical origins of American higher education expose a contrary account -- one where men directed and occupied the core of university life -- while women existed on the peripheral of the early academic community.
Could a woman be a scholar, a wife, and a mother? Could her feminine physique sustain the demands of college study? What would become of her reproductive capacities? In the latter 1800s, as America was beginning to embrace the notion of educating women alongside men, women’s acceptance into the academy came under forceful attack, the most notorious from a book entitled, Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for the Girls published in 1873 by Dr. Edward Clarke, a Boston physician. Clarke’s book emerged after examining a number of young women who were attending college in New England and who were suffering from irregular, absent, or very heavy menstrual cycles. Based on these cases, Clarke concluded that a women's biological functions coupled with higher learning were plainly at odds. The medical theory Clarke advanced was that a woman’s muscles and brain could not function simultaneously. If they did, then a woman would harm her bodily development. Clarke maintained that the critical stage for a woman's sexual growth coincided with the college years -- a time period that was originally designed for men. If women attempted to learn -- thus -- exercising their brain at this critical period of development -- they could jeopardize or even halt their potential to grow and mature as women. Of women in this predicament, Clarke reported, “They graduated from school or college excellent scholars but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile” (p.39). Ultimately, Clarke maintained that if women did choose to expend their energies on learning, they would endanger their “female apparatus.” According to Clarke, although a woman was capable of learning, she was not able to “…do all this, and retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system” (p.18).
Sex in Education claimed much attention during the time, challenging a woman's ability to maintain her femininity while engaged in scholastic activities. Many professionals of the period acknowledged the importance of women’s health, but because there were so few women attending college during that time, it was eventually concluded that higher education was not the culprit to women’s ills. And yet it was decades later, and seventeen printings of Clarke’s book, before his incredulous claims were refuted. Even today, sentiments of Clarke linger as evidenced by the inciting remarks of President Summers of Harvard University who recently suggested that “…innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.”
Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for the Girls provides a provocative glance back at some of the seminal seeds that obstructed women’s educational progress while extends a subtle reminder that the battle for educational parity between the sexes continues to persist today.
