The Women

For a month now there had been men students at many U.S. women's colleges, and the ivy-covered walls had not come tumbling down. Vassar had admitted 90, Skidmore 45, Bryn Mawr 3. The whole thing was admittedly temporary--to help absorb the nation's 800,000 collegiate veterans--but it had reopened the whole question: why women's colleges, anyway? Two prominent educators of women rose to it like Cyrano to an insult.

Said Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Columbia University's Barnard College for women (which is still a Parthenon): women's colleges had now to "justify their existence"--and could. Said she: "Our students can pursue their intellectual activities in the classroom uncomplicated by social intercourse with the other sex. . . . In coeducational institutions the women are definitely regarded as an inferior sex."

Said President Roswell G. Ham of Mount Holyoke (which now has one man student): "It is better under present conditions to educate the sexes separately. I found in my own undergraduate experience [at the University of California] that some classes were in the possession of the women--in art classes, in literature; he-men dodged them. There was not the give & take that is spoken of in song & story. ... At any rate, the automobile has changed things considerably and you do not get into a nunnery when you come to a woman's college. . . . The coeducational college glories in the football team. I often thank God that we have no football team. The individual girl has more chance to develop. . . . She is a beautiful decoration on the coeducational campus."

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