USA > Ohio > Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state, Volume I > Part 19
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Fifteen women were among the 55 in the first class of the college. The college acknowledged women's place in education in 1881 when Miss LENORE ENGLAND was named instructor of English. There are now 11 women on the faculty and others in the administrative staff. Women faculty members include MAY PYLE ANDREWS, English; DR. MARY AUTEN, biology ; AMELIA KIRKLAND, education; CLARA WORST MILLER, Latin; HELEN RUHLIN, physical education ; THELMA SLACK, speech ; EUNICE KETTER- ING, music; DOROTHY BROWN GARRIGUS, music; JANE ALBRIGHT, music ; LULU WOOD, librarian.
Coeds, who form half the student body of approximately 500, are not only leaders in scholastic and social activities but occupy many part-time positions on the campus. They are secretaries, clerks and assistant librarians.
Through the program of individualized education, known as the Ashland Plan, inaugurated in 1935 by President C. L. Anspach, coeds as well as men students are given advantage of the vocational guidance program, which pro- vides them with actual vocational experience while in school, and an oppor- tunity to select a definite vocation toward which to study.
FRANCES JULIETTE HOSFORD
The first college diploma ever granted to a woman in this country was conferred on Caroline Mary Rudd in 1841 by Oberlin College, first co-educa- tional institution of higher learning in the United States.
It would be hard to find a more fascinating story with women as its theme than the history of this famous college, as told by FRANCES JULIETTE HOSFORD in "Father Shipherd's Magna Charta".
Miss Hosford has to her personal credit a very fine record of scholarly attainment. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, President of Oberlin, in his preface to "Father Shipherd's Magna Charta" tells the story of how, in 1931, it was his privilege to award to Miss Hosford the degree of Doctor of Letters and that, in the course of this little ceremony, he paid tribute to the recipient in Latin. Miss Hosford had not known of this "impending Latinity". But she responded, without hesitancy "Gratias optimas, praeces, tibi ago".
Miss Hosford, who was graduated from Lake Erie Seminary in 1872. received her A. B. from Oberlin in 1891 and her M. A. in 1896, knows how to speak-and to write-effective English as well as scholarly Latin. She knew better, perhaps, than most educators, better even, than most sociologists
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what it was that caused this venture into the unknown and, from the con- temporary point of view, highly dubious if not dangerous field of higher education for women.
"It has been said" writes Miss Hosford in her book on Oberlin "that the cotton gin riveted the chains of the slave. The cotton gin also freed Anglo Saxon young womanhood.
"The opening of the machine age is deeply stained by its pitiless exploita- tion of labor but the revolt against its abuses brought into the world a different sense of human values and of social responsibility. Its material output and its new mental and moral attitudes both contributed to a profound change for the better in the lives of American women. The cotton gin, patented in 1794, began a new epoch though it took two generations for the output of cloth factories fully to supply the cloth and flax which had been raised and prepared on each farm for the clothing of the family. By successive steps, the tedious and difficult processes of sorting, carding, spinning, dyeing, weav- ing were first curtailed and then forgotten. The daughters of these spinning women stored the wheels in the attic, whence their descendents have brought them forth and restored them to places of honor.
"The improvements in transportation had an influence upon woman's destiny which can hardly be overstated. When canals and steamboats, mail and freight wagons were established, the home supply of candles, soap, sugar could be supplemented at need. Then and not until then could the daughter be spared from the toilsome life at home and be fitted out, though scantily, for a few years of study. The new day dawned upon womanhood when the complexities of primitive methods gave way to the conveniences of the machine age."
Miss Hosford taught school in Elyria, Ohio and in Painesville before coming to Oberlin in 1888 as tutor in Latin in the Preparatory Department. From that time until her retirement in 1920 she served in various administra- tive and academic capacities and was recognized as a vital factor in the work of the institution.
The "Magna Charta" Miss Hosford's title to her book on Oberlin was inspired by a paragraph in the first circular ever issued by the Oberlin Col- legiate Institute. It was written and sent out, dated March 8, 1834, by John Jay Shipherd, co-founder with Philo Stewart of the-then-highly experi- mental educational project. This paragraph stressed "the elevation of female character, by bringing within the reach of the misguided and neglected sex, all the instructive privileges which hitherto have unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs".
Although the Rev. Dr. John J. Shipherd-"Father" was a courtesy title- preferred that the name of "institute" be adopted in the beginning, rather than that of "college", but the early course of study was quite equivalent,
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he and the other trustees stoutly maintain, to that of Yale. And he was care- ful to obtain university privileges in the charter granted by the Ohio Legis- lature to Oberlin February 28, 1834. The name was finally changed to Oberlin College in 1850.
Oberlin opened for instruction December 3, 1833. There is extant in Oberlin Library the manuscript of the biography of Father Shipherd, written by his wife, ESTHER SHIPHERD.
This brave and resourceful woman probably had little conception how much there was to be read of her own contribution to human progress by way of education, between the lines of her colorful story of her husband's life and work.
She tells in one place of traveling from her father's home, Saratoga County, New York, back to Oberlin in May 1833, with her six weeks old son in a willow cradle squeezed into the front of an open buggy and of stopping to pick up the other three little boys of the family, left with friends, on the homeward route. "Two miles out of the road the underbrush only was re- moved and it was impossible to sit in the buggy and ride over the roots of trees. I was compelled to walk and to carry my babe in my arms. We came - to Plumb Brook and the bank was about 30 feet deep. We were much puzzled to know how to get down. But Yanky-like, we loosened the horse from the buggy and managed to get it down, then we turned the vehicle backward and let it go."
But these were mere trifles. "Families and students came in before quar- ters could be provided for them, as lumber must be hauled through the woods and no man would go a second time for love or money. We received a family of eight into our one room with seven in our own family, where we lived seven weeks. I would get my breakfast and clear away, then the other family, and so on through the day.
"But everything was driven with rigor. The morning bell sounded at five o'clock and families and students repaired to the chapel for prayers, which was well for those able to endure and as my husband was pastor at that time, I felt that I must do it for example's sake if no other".
Poor Esther. Presently she was so broken down that "I could not sweep my room and then the cows got into the woods, ate wild onions and spoiled the milk and butter. And all summer long there was not one green vegetable." She longed for the weeds of her old home that would at least have made a "mess of greens". But she carried on. Men were busy building roads, houses, workshops. Students were arriving. Every house must be filled. By the year 1837, four young women had completed at Oberlin their preparation for the full college course and had been admitted to the freshman class. MARY HOSFORD, youngest of the group was the first girl to be recorded as a stu- dent of the school. Her name appeared in the first catalogue. When she
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entered she was 13 years old, a daughter of William Hosford, one of the first colonists of the Oberlin settlement and later a trustee of Oberlin Institute. Mary's father was prosperous. They had even a piano in their home. Oberlin Institute encouraged music from the very beginning-Mary had a good sing- ing voice. Doubtless this did not detract from the interest of one of her male classmates, Caleb Fisher. Caleb was religious as well as musical and so was Mary. So they married not long after Caleb completed his preparation for the ministry-Oberlin classed religious and theological training as one of its most important courses-and that is all we know of Mary Hosford except that-
MARY FLETCHER KELLOGG entered Oberlin in the fall of 1835. Mary Kellog's home was at Jamestown, New York. Mary came with the express purpose of learning Greek. She intended to be a missionary and was deter- mined to read the new testament in the original. Since Oberlin was the only college in the land that taught such a thing as Greek to women, Mary made her father harness the family horse and covered wagon and drive her the 200 miles, mostly through forest roads. Mary seems to have gotten on in her studies swimmingly, through her freshman year. Then her parents moved south, taking her with them. That seemed like goodbye to Oberlin. But it wasn't. There was a young tutor at Oberlin, soon to become professor and later destined to become no less than president of Oberlin College. His name was James Fairchild. Soon-to-be Professor Fairchild journeyed to Louisiana and brought back Mary-as Mrs. Fairchild.
ELIZABETH PRALL came from New York City to enter Oberlin in 1834. She was 19 when she began the preparatory course and 25 when she was graduated from the college. Elizabeth, it is indicated, wished to prepare herself as a teacher. The matrimonial tradition, already beginning to estab- lish itself at Oberlin, was strengthened by Elizabeth. She married the Rev. William P. Russell, also an Oberlin graduate.
In the Oberlin College Library there is today the original of the first diploma granted to a woman by a college of this country. It was awarded, as previously stated, to Marian Rudd-her full name was CAROLINE MARY RUDD, who came (a girl of 15) to Oberlin from Huntington, Conn., in 1835.
Caroline Mary, it seems, also wanted to learn Greek. But why?
In all honesty, all common sense, in the name of all that we know and do not know of the nature, notions, ambitions, inhibitions, concealed desires and outspoken hopes, fears and predelictions of the much analyzed and psycho- analyzed girl of today, how could there have existed in the heart of even the exceptional young woman of yesterday this yearning for conquest of a classic language or even for the higher education which it symbolized.
To the writer this seems-although it may not be-a fair question. In equal fairness, the obvious arguments for the negative should be freely admitted.
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The closed door which so challenged the sense of just as well as the intellectual hunger of these exceptionally intellectual young women of yester- day is no longer closed. It is not yet wide open. But the many co-educational universities of today, taken with the women's colleges that provide virtually equal scholastic and, in instances, even more varied opportunity for satisfac- tion of the higher educational needs of young womanhood today, seem to have in large degree provided a supply equal to the demand.
Says Frances Hosford in "Father Shipherd's Magna Charta:" "In these days many women take a college course because they hope for better oppor- tunities in the professions." If these were the dreams of Mary's (Kellogg) group, they took a strange way to realize them. "Before they had received their first degrees, every girl in the group, including Mary Kellogg, was en- gaged or as good as engaged, to be married. And even had they looked forward to a series of independent years, they had no reason to suppose that a bach- elor's degree would produce a better job-there were no special plums to be plucked by the hand of a woman who could produce a bachelor's degree.
"Reading between the lines that have come to us directly from these girls, I think that the impelling motive was the pioneer urge-the urge that has explored the poles and sailed the air, the urge to pass beyond traditional limits and find a home in a larger universe. I think of these young women standing before the closed door and trying with their slender fingers to undo the lock. They did not know why they struggled and they could not imagine the eager thousands that would follow them. The door opened. And when such doors open, they never close again."
Very good, very true and very beautiful. But does it answer the chance question raised, not by Miss Hosford but by the present writer, as to the lack, in even the exceptional woman of today, of desire and purpose com- parable in quality and strength with the high hope and truly Spartan deter- mination of these young female intellectuals of yesterday ?
Spartan seems a fitting word, better than "militant", the term applied to groups of Ohio women soon to band together in movements of far greater and more general human interest-abolition of slaves, temperance, woman's suffrage. These causes were far more impassioned and impersonal than the chaste desire to gratify purely intellectual impulse. No form of self expres- sion can compare in beauty with this pure white flame. Doubtless it still burns brightly in many women, in many places. But is it still accompanied by that Spartanism, or if the term fits better, that aggressive spirit which inspired these women pioneers' earlier days ?
"Soft" is a criticism frequently lodged today against our younger gen- eration of both sexes. Here we are considering the justice of its application to women only and to the women of one state.
Do women-young and old-struggle today for rights and opportunities still withheld, as valiantly, as absorbedly, as did those of 100 or of 50 years ago?
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If ordinary observation and average opinion can be trusted to provide the answer, it is no. They do not have to. They can get what they want, many might add. But this addendum cannot be accepted without accepting also a very definite limitation in the opportunities open to the woman of today for service or, less altruistically, for work, or-quite frankly and naturally, for satisfactory self expression.
These opportunities are multiple, unquestionably. A woman is none the less a careerist because she happens to choose Hollywood as her chosen field. Or the insurance business. Or running a beauty parlor or majoring in house- hold administration or night club hostessing or debutanting herself skillfully into marital relations with one of the 70 richest families. There is no space and no need for listing the ways in which the modern young woman can gratify personal ambition.
What it is desired to point out here are the ways in which she cannot. She cannot become, she cannot-because no major party would support her- even run, for the vice-presidency of the United States. She can hardly enter the U. S. Senate except through initial appointment to fill her husband's unexpired term-one of the most absurd procedures imaginable-and perhaps a later re-election. She can rarely become a U. S. Congresswoman or a member of a state general assembly or a judge or a prosecuting attorney or a mayor or a county commissioner. She can rarely take her place in our representative government, local, state, or national. Yet it is 20 years since the nineteenth amendment granted women equal suffrage.
Is this what Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown and "Aunt Fanny Gage" envisioned when they made Ohio one of the crucial states in their campaign for "woman's rights"?
It could not have been. They knew the proportion of really able women much too well. They maintained with absolute honesty the unselfishness of their cause-it was not to rush women into office for which they were not fitted but to fit all women, as far as possible, for due exercise of their responsi- bilities, large or small, to a democratic government. When the League of Women Voters was organized by the personnel of the former suffrage workers, its specific purpose was to educate women for this same responsibility. Rarely has a task been more faithfully or more efficiently carried on. But after 20 years they have, it seems, no product worthy of their support.
But no, this is not even a fair statement of their position. The League of Women Voters could easily point with pride to at least a dozen women, as splendid material in every way for the office of, say, vice-president. They fall back on the only thing to be said-that it is too soon-the time is not ripe.
Nobody knows better, however, than leaders of this fine and authoritative group that it is not too soon but too late. The time is not ripe, it is over ripe.
Political parties were eager to take in woman suffrage leaders, follow- ing passage of the amendment.
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With that practical approach to politics which has, it seems, rendered entirely unnecessary any league for the enducation of men voters, they doubtless anticipated that women would promptly follow up their obvious opportunity. The women were defeated by their own altruism and the op- portunity passed.
Only by personal appointment or rare situations dominated by political strategy, can a woman today expect to participate in the activities of gov- ernment. These are the facts. Whose is the fault ?
Who can say? Perhaps there is no fault? Just natural reaction.
In any case there exists among women of Ohio-and of the United States -today, no effort, organized or unorganized, and no spirit to motivate such effort, for extending further the opportunities of women in either public or private service. The trend, indeed, seems more or less definitely the other way. The married woman holds her place in public service-teaching, gov- ernmental employ, etc., with increasing difficulty, yet there has been no con- certed effort on the part of other women to check this retroactive movement. What has happened ?
Are we today undergoing a definite reversion to femininity as our ideal ? Is this the underlying significance of the renaissance of ruffles and furbelows in woman's dress, of curls and coils in her coiffure ?
Let it be understood that the word "femininity" as used here is intended to be a very different word from "womanhood." It is as different as the word "cult" from the word "culture." Has, then, the revived cult of femininity, that is-to clarify still further-has the art of sex appeal become the dominant form of self expression and the main approach to attainment and achievement, of the women of today?
It should be obvious that the statement implies no indictment of that mating instinct which is the natural heritage of all women. No matter how widely it has been accepted, the theory of the denatured "blue stocking" cannot hold water a moment in the face of facts. A study made by Professor Louis D. Hartson finds that the marriage rate for Oberlin alumnae, while reflecting the general decline as compared with the pervading high rate of the past century, is still greater than the average marriage rate for women in general. And at the era when this college was one of the few centers of higher education for women, the marriage rate for Oberlin educated women was 971/2%.
One would hardly require an example other than that of Marie Curie, foremost woman scientist of her day, to refute this gratuitous albeit time honored assumption.
No, nature can be relied on to function adequately, brain or no brain. Over emphasis of "femininity" is as unnecessary today as it has always been. The romantic dictum "love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole
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existence" can never be established thereby. There never was a world in which it was wholly true. There never will be one.
What then, has happened to the woman of today? Why is she so un- responsive to the challenge of still unequalized opportunity which so roused her maternal forebears?
First, let us realize that the women we are writing about, past and present, are and always were in the minority. This is not peculiar to their sex. It applies to men as well. Minorities always do things or at least get them started. Majorities follow. We are not, then, analyzing forms of self-ex- pression characteristic of the majority of women of any day or age. We are only asking whether the type of urge so conspicuous in the individual and comparatively small groups of Ohio women whose purposes and achievements we have so far set down, seems negligible or non-existant in the comparable individual or small group of the present day.
But let us consider a little further. Let us bear in mind that these urges which caused women of the past to force their way into colleges, into pro- fessions, into reform, into the election booth, were but the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible spirit. It was the spirit of true democracy, the spirit, if you will, of a legitimate liberalism.
Let us not mistake the mere sign for the thing signified. This spirit un- doubtedly still exists and informs comparable women and minorities of women. It may be as positive and pregnant as it ever was. Young women, it is true, no longer seem to knock on the doors of government, seeking active participation. But countless young women are deeply absorbed in movements seeking to improve the entire institution of human government.
College girls no longer clamor for adequate instruction in economics, sociology, psychology or other sciences dealing with human welfare. They do not have to. The opportunity is theirs. But unnumbered young women are frankly assessing the principles and progress of the human institutions, economic, social and political, to which such knowledge applies. They are identified with numerous movements for what they believe to be the better- ment of these human and therefore still imperfect institutions.
Many of this younger generation are vocal, even vehement, in denunciation of dictatorships, persecutions, purges, exploitations, of injustices social and political, national and international.
Perhaps, indeed, the woman of today is no more wedded to the status quo than her sister of yesterday. Perhaps her urge to adequate self expression has only taken on another form. Perhaps, in this guise or disguise, the pioneer woman still marches on.
It may add interest to the brief history of Mary Hosford, first girl, as previously stated, to be registered at Oberlin College, to note that from a collateral branch of the family was descended Frances Juliette Hosford, the author of "Father Shipherd's Magna Charta."
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And for the innumerable patrons of the Cincinnati Public Library who have profited by its special services, the fact that Mary Cochran, head of the reference department, can point with pride to Caroline Mary Rudd as a grandmother may also have significance.
CAROLINE MARY RUDD
CAROLINE MARY RUDD (Mrs. G. W. Allen) was born in Huntington, Connecticut, July 31st, 1820. Her father, Hezekiah Rudd, who was a graduate of Yale College, kept a boarding school for boys. He prepared boys to enter college and older boys, temporarily suspended from college, studied - with him until they were re-admitted to their classes.
The little girl played with her dolls just outside of the class-room windows, and heard Latin and Greek declensions and conjugations as other children hear nursery rhymes. When she asked her father to teach her Greek, he was astonished at her rapid progress. "You have finished the whole course in three weeks" he said .
When she was seven years old, her mother died. Mrs. Rudd had been a beautiful woman, by descent partly Huguenot. Her death took away not only the mother of his three children but Hezekiah Rudd's partner in man- aging the school.
His older sister came to his assistance. This was SARAH RUDD, known to adoring nieces and nephews as "Aunt Sally". She was a woman then over fifty years of age, who apparently had devoted her life to helping rela- tives out of their troubles. She took the forlorn little Mary to her heart.
Within a year, Hezekiah Rudd remarried and his sister left. Shortly afterwards she came to Ohio, to be somebody's housekeeper in Cincinnati. When Oberlin College called the Rev. Asa Mahan of Cincinnati to be its first President, Sarah Rudd accompanied the Mahan family to Oberlin. Mrs. Mahan, busy with students' problems and with her babies, left the running of her house to Miss Rudd.
"Aunt Sally" liked Oberlin. She approved of education for women. She worried about the Connecticut boarding school, which was having lean years. and about the welfare of her niece. Mary's older sister had married and left the home town and her step-mother's attention was claimed by her own little children. So in 1836, when Mary was fifteen years old, Sarah Rudd wrote to her brother urging him to send Mary to her in Oberlin.
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