Women at The Johns Hopkins University: A History

Chapter 1: The Question of Coeducation, 1874-1877

The Founders of The Johns Hopkins University created a remarkable institution.  They sought to take the best aspects of all the world’s universities and mold them into an unsurpassable whole.  But even this bold and pioneering spirit was unequal to coeducation.  This history of women at Johns Hopkins is largely a history of exceptional women who refused to be excluded from this inspired education experiment and who, in turn, had important effects upon its course.

The Trustees selected by Johns Hopkins to found the University, none of them academics, conscientiously considered the many variables possible in an educational institution.  In 1874, they consulted Presidents Eliot of Harvard and Angell of Michigan on a variety of topics, among them the issues of coeducation.  Eliot replied that coeducation was “a thoroughly wrong idea which is rapidly disappearing.”  He advanced four arguments against it.  First, men and women students might be tempted to marry, which would be harmless, “in any community which is very homogeneous, where there are no diversities of pecuniary condition, and where the standard of scholarship is low;” but, Eliot continued, “the coeducation of the sexes is not possible in highly civilized communities.”  In cosmopolitan, heterogeneous universities, coeducation could produce such dire results as socially unequal and unacceptable marriages.  Second, Eliot felt the stresses of education might threaten a woman’s good health and, thus, her chances of making a good marriage.  Third, he believed that the women would retard the pace of instruction, to the detriment of the men.  Finally, Eliot maintained that the education of women should prepare them for “the life which is before them, a life fundamentally different from that of any man.”

President James Angell of Michigan supported coeducation in his own institution, but with faint praise.  He first explained that the University of Michigan was coeducational because “it is the general custom in the West to educate boys and girls together;” in addition, the citizens of the state had insisted that their taxes be spent to educate their daughters as well as their sons.  Angell had nothing to say of any particular advantages of coeducation but merely remarked

there has been no practical embarrassment arising out of the system.  Our girls for the most part are matured, and the greatest care is taken by myself and others in their general welfare. . . .The young men have, so far as I know, borne themselves with the greatest courtesy and prudence towards the ladies. –We have not a solitary rule about it.  The thing takes care of itself. . . . The girls to and from the College undisturbed.  When the boys are hustling about the streets, they fall back and let the ladies pass by.

Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Hopkins, was more inclined to agree with his close friend and associate, Charles Eliot.  Gilman resisted coeducation out of a genuine concern that mixing the sexes would have ill effects.  In his inaugural address, he expressed his reluctance to expose women “to the rougher influences which I am sorry to confess are still to be found in colleges and universities where young men resort.”  He voiced not only this concern, however, but also his hope that someone would endow a college for women in Baltimore as “a good solution of a problem which is not without difficulty, however it is approached.”  Gilman was, in fact, sincerely committed to the education of women.  He studied the matter and even pledged a thousand dollars to establish an institution for the advanced education of women in Baltimore, provided nine other benefactors would join him.  Gilman’s concern for women’s education is also evident in his assistance to the second president of Bryn Mawr College, M. Carey Thomas, whose letters to him reflect her gratitude for his advice and interest.

The Board of Trustees was by no means a monolith of opposition to coeducation.  A few of the Trustees, such as James Carey Thomas and George W. Dobbin, supported admitting to Hopkins “in the higher branches of education, any woman who. . .shall show herself properly prepared to receive such teaching.”  On November 18, 1876, Thomas called a special meeting “on the subject of imparting, to a well guarded extent, the benefits of the teachings of the University to females, as well as to males, suitably prepared by age and acquirements to profit by such teachings.”  The Board, however, “was not prepared to commit itself definitely to any course, but would leave the whole subject, until instructed to the contrary, in the hands of the President of the University.”  Wishful thinking and failure to confront the issue of coeducation head-on was characteristic of the Trustees and President for years to come.

Nevertheless, the issue of coeducation was not to be ignored.  In September 1877, Martha Carey Thomas, the Trustee’s daughter, applied to undertake graduate studies in Greek.  Just a month later, Emily Nunn, who had been taking Professor H. Newell Martin’s special Saturday teachers’ course in physiology (which included eleven women), applied for admission to the regular biology lectures.  The Trustees saw that they must enact some kind of policy, and on November 5, 1877, they adopted the guidelines, suggested to them by Gilman, that were to prevail for the next thirty years.  After reiterating Gilman’s hope for the establishment of a women’s college, they stated that they would continue to allow the admission of women to public and special lectures.  They also agreed to examine and “certify to the attainments of such women as may offer themselves as candidates for a degree,” but would not “for the present. . . receive young ladies as students in the usual classes, and as attendants upon lectures not specially excepted.”

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