The Death of Women’s Colleges?
Single-sex institutions are becoming less and less popular, but they have a long and proud history.
By Emily Rutherford
April 9, 2009
Students run through experiments in chemistry lab at LeMoyne-Owen College where all the students in this lab at the co-ed college were female. (AP Photo/Greg Campbell)Three years ago, Carissa Chu faced a difficult decision. She had been accepted to both University of California–San Diego and Wellesley, one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in the country. “There are many legitimate reasons…why a young woman would choose to attend an all-women’s college,” Chu says. She speaks favorably of women’s colleges’ ability to encourage confidence and leadership skills. But in the end, she says she chose UC–San Diego because she “was ready for the ‘real world,’ where young men and women interact freely on a daily basis.”
“I don’t find it particularly empowering to think that education should be gendered,” she said.
The choice of where to attend college—particularly pressing at this time of year, when the traditional May 1 decision date is looming—naturally involves many factors. It can include a flurry of campus visits, comparisons of financial aid packages, and consideration of the merits of different academic programs. But some female students have yet another consideration: whether to choose a women’s college. And Chu is certainly not alone in her decision to attend a co-educational institution. Young women today are less likely than ever to choose a single-sex institution, and that might mean a shift in the cultural importance of these institutions.
All-women’s colleges and universities have a long and proud history in America, and were once recognized as a pre-eminent force for launching the careers of talented young women—particularly before top-ranked universities such as the members of the Ivy League admitted women. They have produced strong female leaders and role models, from Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton to Emily Dickinson and Betty Friedan. Many believe they are still relevant and necessary today. As Mount Holyoke College President Joanne V. Creighton put it in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A woman’s college…is the equivalent of Virginia Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own,’ a college of women’s own, free of many of the inhibiting presumptions of the male-dominated world.”
But while the number of co-ed colleges and universities continues to increase at a fantastic rate, the number of American women’s colleges has been in decline, shrinking from 233 in 1960 to 56 in 2006 (some went co-ed, and some simply closed). Even those stalwarts of women’s education that continue to weather the storm—like the remaining Seven Sisters Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Smith—have survived in part by expanding their recruitment overseas, particularly in the Middle East, where they draw women from very different cultural backgrounds than the liberal and politically-active students who have traditionally made up the population of schools like the Seven Sisters.
This certainly is not to do with any watering-down of women’s colleges’ feminist message, explains Michael Hulshof-Schmidt, Head of School at the International High School of Portland, who was a founding faculty member of the Atlanta Girls’ School and is a champion of feminist single-sex education. He believes that the changing strategies of women’s colleges have “more to do with finances than this false illusion that men and women are treated equally, or that women have equal opportunities.” Indeed, women still fall behind in pay and achievement in male-dominated industries. Why, then, don’t young women appear to see the value of the women’s college as a feminist and woman-friendly space?
Hulshof-Schmidt fears that there has been “a serious backlash against the women’s movement.” And maybe there has been. Maybe declining enrollment is related to the large number of Millennial-generation women who see “feminism” as an overly-radical term that doesn’t apply to them, and who therefore may shun the overt “college of women’s own” feminism voiced by Mt. Holyoke’s president. Co-ed universities, meanwhile, are no longer the hostile environments they once were for women, and popular opinion continues to shift in favor of a mixed-gender college experience. It seems almost as if the Yale student body’s outraged response to the university’s decision to delay the implementation of a gender-neutral housing policy is more in keeping with prevailing student views in favor of greater integration of men and women, rather than a single-sex experience.
And so today’s young women, like Chu, may be less inclined than Hulshof-Schmidt to see women’s colleges as a still-necessary institution. When asked about the choice not to attend a women’s college, a near-unanimous response is, “I wanted to have guys at my school.” Mayanne Chess, a freshman at Princeton, says that she did not apply to any women’s colleges because she saw a single-sex experience as limiting: “I wanted an environment representative of the real world, the same way you wouldn’t want to go to an all-white school, or an all-English-major school.”
Even women who do choose to go to women’s colleges can find the “limiting” environment problematic. Isabella Gambill, who is in her first year at Wellesley, says she had a difficult time adjusting to the single-sex environment. "I started filling out transfer apps because I couldn’t see how I could fit into a drastically different social environment than what I was used to. … It’s been really hard to find the social group that was right for me.” Gambill does believe that “the quality of class discussions and participation is higher than that of a co-ed school,” lending credence to the many voices in support of women-centered education, but her concerns about Wellesley’s social scene are in line with what appear to be the prevailing trends in women’s college choices.
However, women’s colleges aren’t dead yet. Take the experience of Casey Near, who chose to transfer from the University of Pennsylvania to Scripps College, a single-sex institution in California. Casey says, “I think women’s colleges are incredibly important in the 21st century. I go to a school where I am surrounded by women in leadership positions. The president of my school is a woman, the dean of faculty is a woman, the student body president is a woman. It’s not very long before you come to expect that in the world around you. And I think that’s where change happens.”
Emily Rutherford is a freshman at Princeton University and a staff writer at Campus Progress.
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Comments
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Are you seriously not going to mention men’s colleges once in this whole article?
One could easily argue that they are much more endangered than women’s colleges and certainly offer just as many advantages for the young men that choose to enroll there.
I was just a little caught off guard that the article didn’t mention them as well.
— Brandon - Apr 16, 11:47 PM - #Feminists have little tolerance for male only education. They sued to make VMI admit women while at the same time claiming that female only education should be unaffected by the decision.
And they won! Thanks to Justice Ginsburg, who had no problem performing the logical acrobatics necessary to force a male institution to admit women without forcing female institutions to admit men.
— Peter - Apr 20, 09:54 PM - #But there are thousands of years of oppression of women behind us, and sexism is still alive and well today. Women sometimes need their own space because the space they have in larger society is small (and cramped by sexism). The same is not true for men.
I’m not against all-male schools (my dad attended an all male college and loved it), I just think we need to acknowledge that womens’ and mens’ experiences are different.
Also, VMI was different because it’s a) a military institution and b) a public institution.
— Julie H. - Apr 30, 04:36 PM - #