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The Trouble with Coeducation: Mann and Women at Antioch, 1853–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

John Rury  and
Glenn Harper
John Rury
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Glenn Harper
Affiliation:
Ball State University
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Extract

Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to Antioch “by evidence of a broader spirit.” She graduated four years later and went on to become the country's first ordained female Universalist minister, a women's rights activist, and a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In the 1850s, however, she was particularly interested in what Antioch's first president, Horace Mann, described as its “Great Experiment”: coeducation.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , Winter 1986 , pp. 481 - 502
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. Willis, Gwendolyn, ed., Olympia Brown, Autobiography (Racine, Wis., 1960), 17–18.Google Scholar

2. Catalogue of Antioch College, 1853–1854 (Cincinnati, 1853).Google Scholar

3. The best biography of Mann is Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York, 1972); also useful is Tyack, David B. and Hansot, Elisabeth, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York, 1982), 56–63. Both of these accounts emphasize the importance of Mann's religious background for his later career, particularly his inability to accept the Calvinist tenet of original depravity.Google Scholar

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25. The faculty member was Rebecca Pennell, Mann's niece, who threatened to resign in late 1853 because she was receiving only half the pay of the male faculty. In asking to be released as an officer of the college and appointed to the Preparatory Department, she noted, “my name would not then be paraded before the world, as a show of anything false or unreal.” Letter from Pennell to the Antioch College trustees, 13 Jan. 1854, Straker, Mann Notes, 3124-26. Pennell remained on the college faculty until 1858.Google Scholar

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35. A good overview of early student societies at Antioch is provided by Stein, Geoffrey N., “Antioch's Literary Societies in the 1850's” (Undergraduate thesis, Antioch College, 1965).Google Scholar

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43. In a letter that Mary Mann wrote to her sister, Sophia Hawthorne, she explained that Ada Shepard—a recent Antioch graduate and tutor for the Hawthorne children—had not gotten her women's rights ideas at the college. “Her coming has saved her from being a furious womens rights woman. All the influence exerted here is adverse to the thing. But as this is where women can be fully educated it brings among others that very class of women greatly to Mr. Mann's annoyance. He makes them inexpressibly uncomfortable here but he tries to modify them.” Mary Mann to Sophia Hawthorne, 18 May 1858, Straker, Mann Notes, 2026.Google Scholar

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46. Quoted in the Christian Palladium, 1 Aug. 1857, 188.Google Scholar

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51. This letter is filed in the Antiochiana Collection, Antioch College Archives.Google Scholar

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55. Address by Mrs. S.W. Dodds of St. Louis, Mo., to Crescent Society of Antioch College, Antiochiana Collection, Antioch College Archives.Google Scholar

56. Stein, , “Antioch's Literary Societies,” 56.Google Scholar

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58. For information on the marriage rates and careers of collegiate women, see Solomon, Barbara Miller, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, Conn., 1985), ch. 8; also see Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Berkin, Carol Ruth and Norton, Mary Beth (Boston, 1979), 177–201. Marriage rates for women from all institutions, coed or all-female, were between 70 to 80 percent in this period, and the overwhelming preponderance of graduates went into education. Women like Olympia Brown, or Oberlin graduate Antoinette Brown, who became ministers were extremely rare.Google Scholar

59. Brown, , Acquaintances, Old and New among Reformers, 17.Google Scholar