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

Abstract

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. 1 In its very first catalogue Antioch announced itself dedicated to the principle of offering "equal educational opportunities ... for both sexes.'? Founded in 1853, it was among a handful of colleges at that time, most of them in the Midwest, that had opened their doors to women. Established by the liberal Christian denomination, with substantial support from Unitarians, Antioch also claimed to be nonsectarian and did not require students to belong to a particular denomination. What made the college most distinctive, however, was Horace Mann's decision to leave

Whiteness as Collective Memory in Student Publications at Midwestern Liberal Arts Colleges, 1945–1965

“…However, the first Black student to enroll at Kalamazoo College, Rufus Lewis Perry, who aspired to be a Baptist minister, did so in 1860 (Francis, 2008; Simmons, 2000). Antioch also was founded as coeducational but gave no consideration to race, yet gender inequalities were evident (Rury & Harper, 1986) and a controversy involving the admission of two Black girls to an affiliated preparatory school in the mid-1850s moved the board to set a specific policy to not reject a student on the basis of race in 1863 (Louima, Anderl, & Davis, 2013). For the remaining six colleges, I could not discern when or whether administrators revised college admission policies to allow specifically for the admission of students irrespective of race.…”