Collegiate Education of Women [pp. 337-344]

THE
OVERLAND MONTHLY.
VOL. XVI. (SECOND SERIES.)-OCTOBER, 1890.-NO. 94.
-COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
THE higher education of women is no
longeran experiment: many of the questions connected with its earlier stages
are entirely set at rest, and every year
more and more women are seeking advanced education. The girls in the high
schools already outnumber the boys, and
the proportion of college women is increasing, so that it seems not at all unlikely in thirty years more there will be
as many women as men studying in our
colleges, perhaps more.
In the West many institutions admit
women to the same classes as men, but
in the Eastern States it is more common to provide for the women colleges
exclusively devoted to their use. Each
system has been warmly defended, but
the drift today is towards co-education;
that is, the joint education of both sexes in the same classes.
The University of California, with
which I have been connected, is, like
most of the State colleges west of the
Alleghanies, co-educational. Ini every
department of it except military instruction women have been admitted on the
same terms as men, ever since its foundation. The object of this article is to
give our experience on some of the mooted questions in this branch of education,
and to compare it with the results ob
tained in other colleges. It will treat of
the collegiate education of women, without entering upon professional or graduate studies.
The history of the University is too
short and the number of its graduates
too few for much generalization, but we
can plainly observe certain tendencies.
The University was organized on a basis
of co-education at its foundation in I869,
and eight women entered in I870; the
next year there were twenty-eight women in all; the third year thirty-nine;
and from that time to the present'there
has been a continuous attendance of
women, in the general ratio of one woman to four men. Seventy-four women
have graduated, receivingdegrees according to the studies they have followed.
At Berkeley the women have shown
decided preferences for certain lines of
study, to the entire omission of others.
Taking the last four years as a guide,
no woman has taken as a study either
agriculture, mechanics, or mining: this
we should expect, as women very rarely
engage in these pursuits. One each
year has chosen civil engineering, two
each year on the average took chemistry; here again the smail numbers need
not surprise us, as these studies are
rarely followed in life by women. Six
VOI,. XVI.-22. (Copyright, I890o, by OVERLAND MONTHLY PUBLISHING Co.) All rights reserved.
~~~~~~ ~ ~Bacon & Company, Printers,