Omake: Female Education in the United States

This is an amazing Omake by Dark Dhampir from Spacebattle! Thank you for your contribution to the timeline!

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From Early American Feminism: Chapter 8 "Education"

"From its inception, the United States found itself ahead of almost every other nation on Earth in terms of access to and quality of education. Even in the colonial days, America had a strong history of embracing education, though this was chiefly a New England feature. Being a dominantly Protestant community, it was important for people to be literate in order to read the Bible, though then-modern advancements in trade and communication made literacy more and more valuable to everyone worldwide. The colonies also founded a number of universities for the express purpose of training new clergymen—many of which are still with us today, such as Harvard or William and Mary.

After the Revolution, however, the academic realm exploded into almost unprecedented growth. In the first term of its first elected president, Samuel Kim, the federal government passed laws making what we would now call elementary education a requirement in all states. Under the Kim administration, the government also founded, built, and financed five new universities for the sole purpose of providing access to higher learning to anyone who sought it, and the nation would only build more as it grew in territory, populace, and wealth.

The original private universities still flourished, however, in the early days of America these institutions had certain (for want of a better term) foibles that made them less attractive to certain demographics than the new, public ones. Cost was obviously a prohibitive issue for many would-be students (not only in regard to tuition but also other expenses, such as transportation and lodging), and even amongst those who could afford to attend such prestigious schools, there remained other hurdles. Remember, the earliest universities in America were founded explicitly for a career in the church, and while this was no longer their sole function, much of the history of these institutions as religious ones still remained. For example, all Harvard students were required to attend theology lectures and participate in on-campus church services. These requirements were permissible owing to the private nature of the schools. This issue also allowed these institutions to discriminate based on sex or religious beliefs (and on race, but this was an ever diminishing issue in post-independence America, due to the efforts of major political figures such as Kim, Washington, Jefferson, and others as well as widely publicized contributions by African and Native Americans during the Revolution). For all these reasons, plenty of aspiring young scholars found themselves faced with either impassible roadblocks on their academic journey or forced to sacrifice their integrity and lie to meet the universities' stringent standards.

Federal Universities, on the other hand, were explicitly forbidden from engaging in such practices. While white, Protestant men remained the dominant demographic in these new institutions (except in Quebec, where Catholicism was the popular religion), American universities saw markedly higher numbers of minorities and female students than any other institutions in the Western hemisphere, and by some accounts the entire world. While it would be a gross exaggeration to say that no other schools in the world accepted these students, the practice had always been on an individual basis: a black man attended Eton or Oxford now and again. A white woman did likewise, but this was something many orders of magnitude more. Not only were women being allowed to attend these new schools, but they were also actively encouraged to do so by their parents.

While this may seem strange given the prevailing sexism of the time—and, indeed, male students still outnumbered female students, often two-to-one—it does not take much to see the reasoning behind such an occurrence. Firstly, in America, women could vote. Under the original paraments of the U.S. Constitution, female citizens age 35 or older were entitled to vote in elections. While this development was shocking to 18th​ Century minds, it was obviously not a deal-breaker, since all fifteen states ratified the document. Now that women's suffrage was the law of the land, most men seemed to take a pragmatic view on the issue. If our daughters are going to vote, they said to themselves, then we had best make sure they vote well. Thus, women's education began in America as a necessary support system for the political process. It quickly became fashionable to upper-class fathers to send their daughters to universities, which in turn caused men to look to rising in society to emulate them.

Additionally, it is worth remembering that the "ideal" of women in this time as quiet, domestic, subservient creatures only interested in the raising of children, cleaning, sewing, and cooking was never as universally enforced as society might have claimed it was, especially in more urban areas. The common skeleton in many a merchant, lawyer, or banker's closets was that he had relied on his wife or daughter or sister to help him with his work. While some men were so stubborn as to deny their womenfolk any opportunity to come into contact with business matters, others to one degree or another relied on female family members to assist them as secretaries, household financiers, or even consulted them about trade deals or shipping routes. This was done out of sight, of course, but enough journal records show that it was far from unheard of. As education spread, many husbands and fathers began acknowledging their wives' and daughters' contributions openly. This, naturally, spurned other men to follow their example.

Unintentionally, this only encouraged women to seek to establish themselves as independent business persons. This came to a head-on March 2nd​, 1795 when Marie-Louise Lachapelle became America's first female doctor. While it would be too much to say this opened the floodgates on women's employment in America, it shattered the long-held notion that women were incapable of excelling in the sciences. Following her example, and with the encouragement of other pioneering feminists such as Congresswoman Abigail Adams, more and more women would begin seeking higher education as the United States moved deeper into the Industrial Age and began the Romantic Era. Thus, while British women were being pushed evermore out of sight as the nation began to enter the Victorian Period, their American counterparts, especially in the financial and industrial centers on the East Coast, were asserting themselves with an enthusiasm unmatched anywhere except France.

That said, this was only true amongst white and black communities. Other demographics in America were slower or—amazingly—faster to embrace this new philosophy. Indeed, the most enthusiastic adopters of women's education in the young nation were residents of the country's interior. Native Americans, particularly in the state of Iroquois, not only sent their daughters to universities in greater numbers than their white or African (and later Asian) neighbors, these women received more extensive educations as well. White and African women's education was still largely seen as in service to their fathers' and husbands' careers, limiting their college careers to "Liberal Arts Degrees" (some basic training in mathematics, literature, philosophy, geography, history, and natural philosophy). For all the progressive ideals of the nation's founders, the majority of Americans were reluctant to abandon traditional European ideas about gender roles. However, those roles were different in Native cultures, especially amongst the Haudenosaunee.

While by no means perfect egalitarians, the people of the Six Nations had long afforded women greater prestige and power than white women had historically been given. According to Haudenosaunee tradition, women had participated in their own councils since before the tribes had united into the federation that would later become the state of Iroquois. Under the constitution of this federation, male positions of power were granted or removed at the behest of these women's councils, and women could propose laws to the male council. Unlike the men, however, members of the women's councils could only be stripped of their power by their colleagues rather than answer to any other body.

Joining the United States had forced the Six Nations to drastically reorganize their government to fit the needs and requirements of the federal Constitution, but they still retained their traditional councils which still retained a great deal of power, often proposing laws for the state legislature or reviewing laws the state government had passed to see that they served the cultural requirements of their society. In effect, the tribal council acted as a kind of hybrid secondary executive and judicial branch. Because these councils followed the centuries-old structure almost to a T, Haudenosaunee men and women alike decided almost immediately that the liberal arts education their neighbors settled was insufficient for the task at hand and encouraged more rigorous standards of academics for their women. While Lachapelle's graduation from medical school is rightfully a widely-celebrated achievement in the history of feminism, what some forget was that Native women had been pursuing (and attaining) degrees in law from the beginning.

Obviously, the residents of Hisigi pulled from a different cultural background than the Haudenosaunee of Iroquois, yet they too saw it as preferable to have highly educated young people. The tribesmen and -women had quickly realized that sending their sons and daughters to federal universities was a necessary strategy for their own continued well-being and advancement in American society. History had proven time and again that a critical hurdle to white and Native relations was the lack of understanding between the two groups. European ideas about law, economics, religion, etc. were all so different than Native ones, that it was almost impossible to communicate even if both parties could speak each other's language. The Six Nations knew this too, and while cultural traditions were a major component in their decision to embrace higher education, journals, speeches, and publications from the time show that they had come to the same conclusion as to their southern neighbors: to survive in the world the whites had designed, they needed to understand it.

An added bonus both sides hoped for and soon celebrated was the exposure of whites and blacks to Natives. Federal universities, pulling students from multiple different states and all different backgrounds offered a unique chance for socialization amongst people who might otherwise never meet. The leaders of both states realized that the chance for men and women of European or African descent to work and study alongside Natives and see them excel in the same studies as themselves was the surest and easiest method of dispelling the ghosts of the "ignorant, savage Indian" stereotype that still lingered in American society—especially among those who had never personally encountered Native Americans.

To these ends, while Native Americans remained a minority in American Universities in terms of raw numbers, the percentage of persons with a federal education, especially women, in the states of Iroquois and Hisigi was consistently higher than most if not all other states in the Union.

Sadly, it would take some time before the trend would catch on amongst Asian American women, whose fathers and husbands remained stubbornly conservative in their views of gender roles even as they reshaped both their own and their neighbor's ideas of education and politics..."