The First Coeds
Lilian Hughes Neiswanger

The excitement and gaiety of the Commencement season of 1867 had changed to that sudden hush which befalls a college town the day after the graduates have departed for those four corners of the earth where they were particularly fond of imagining themselves in their extravagant Commencement orations.

The quiet of that summer was broken, according to the Greencastle Banner, only by the sharp crack of croquet mallets as local athletes won the state championship from Lafayette and by a Fourth of July orator who assisted Putnam County in "duly celebrating the nation's birthday."

But this peace was the calm before the storm, the lull before a battle which broke out on the campus the moment college opened in the fall.

For behind the quiet scene the twelve-year-old problem of whether or not women were to be admitted to Asbury was developing toward its climax.

On the 26^th of June, 1867, the Board of Trustees and Visitors of Asbury University, assembled in executive session, had voted to authorize the faculty "to receive female students into the regular classes of the University."

This action was the beginning of the end of "the best men's college west of the Alleghenies", the end of a long fight to put such action through the Board, and the beginning of a struggle between the students, a struggle which constitutes one of the most dramatic episodes in the entire history of coeducation."

For if the Trustees were ready for Asbury to become a coeducational institution , the students were not. The files of the Asbury Review for the spring of '67 leave no doubt as to the students' position on the moot subject. In the March 23^rd issue, the Review editor had taken exception to an article which he quoted from the Yale Courant. The Yale editor had written:

"The great problem of Women's Rights is becoming more and more the absorbing one of the hour...Harvard and Yale will not stand in the way to hinder the solution. When the time comes for action they will be found out in front."

To this the shocked Asbury editor replied:

"To the Courant's leader we take serious objection, and though we have not the time to place our objections in the form of an argument, we promise that if the Courant is in earnest in what it says, we will offer some reasons which we think are sufficient to refute the popular 'reform system.'

"As yet we are single! It is with some degree of hesitancy that we have made up our minds to catch the "skirts of progress" and cry,' Wo!'"

Yet as soon as the next Fall, the Review's editorial "we" was crying more than the rhetorical "wo!" It not only found time to present its objections "in the form of an argument," but failing thus to "catch the skirts of progress" resorted to irrational abuse, even vituperation.

In opposing the entrance of women to Asbury, the students reflected the conservative opinion of the time. A coeducational institution was still so new a thing under the sun that it was unnamed-"two-sex college, mixed-school", and "hermaphrodite" institution were terms which public speakers were using in debating the possibility, practicality, and morals of the phenomenon.

Only a few colleges were coeducational before Asbury. Oberlin, credited with having the longest, continuous coeducational record, was founded in 1833. Bount College and Antioch were pioneers, and two Methodist institutions, Northwestern and Lawrence College, founded in 1847, had been open to women from the beginning.

After the Civil War, which depleted many college campuses, and the Land Grant Act, which provided funds for democratic state colleges, state institutions in the west and middle west considered coeducation, and a number of them, particularly new ones, embraced the cause.

But it was one thing for a new college, rising on a freshly plowed cornfield, to try to get as many students as possible. It was quite another thing for a well-established men's university like Asbury, enjoying a high scholastic reputation and boasting a long roll of illustrious alumni, to risk reputation and prestige with a radical experiment in education.

Naturally, many of the alumni wished their alma mater to continue to be a Maker of Men. Naturally, the students who had come to Asbury wanted her to continue to be a Man's college and not take on the aspects of the much- discredited "Female Seminary."

So, the bitterness with which the Asbury men reacted to the feminine invasion of their masculine halls of learning may have been inevitable. Equally inevitable seems the feminist movement, instigated by the industrial revolution, which had reached the point where woman was demanding the education she needed for the new positions she was winning outside the home.

The conflict between man's domination and woman's ambition as they met on the Asbury campus was simply the combustion which is bound to occur when the irresistible force of social change meets tradition and custom.

Before 1870, any university admitting women was a pioneer. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Cornell were yet to settle the problem on their campuses and insure the success of the movement. As one of the first and one of the largest men's colleges to let down the bars against females, Asbury was a trailblazer and attracted wide attention and had considerable influence.

The students left the campus after the Commencement with a false sense of security. There was apparently no more reason to fear than in previous years.

Had not the Trustees resisted pressure since 1855, and when in 1861 they did actually vote to "submit young ladies to recitation" as the Faculty "in their discretion may deem proper," did not the Faculty refuse to "deem proper?"

Even the President's plea for a co-ordinate Female College, giving Asbury a Radcliff, was floundering because of insufficient funds to float the project.

The one significant point which the students did not grasp was that it had become expedient to change the unsuccessful campaign for a Female College to a campaign for funds for a University building and to mollify the contributors to the original fund by admitting "females" to the regular classes of the University.

That summer after the graduates and their fellow students had departed, the residents of Greencastle began to realize what had happened. The Banner reported an eloquent speech of one "G.H. Voss Esq." who told the people of Putnam County that:

"The golden morning start we now behold. Its golden light the crimson east reveals. Already most of our educational institutions have opened their doors on golden hinges creaking, while male, female with equal privileges walk therein, blessing God the while. All hail the Day when every Mother shall be full of learning, religion, and patriotism ..."

"On the conclusion of this speech," according to the Banner editor, "Dr. Bowman took occasion to say that the of'ficers of Asbury were willing and anxious to offer that school to all, irrespective of sex, and had been prevented from so doing by the want of funds to erect the necessary buildings. He further stated that if the people would respond liberally to the call of the building committee, Asbury would be offered to all, both male and female."

The editor adds:

"This is a practical proposition and affords the champions of female education a chance to prove their faith by their works. We hope that they will not lose their opportunity. Prof'. Locke will be happy to receive any contributions they may desire to make."

It became known that "Miss Bettie Locke" was tutoring with Prof. Lewis Rogers, principal of the Preparatory school and adjunct professor of Latin in the University.

"Miss Bettie"was the young daughter of the Prof. Locke mentioned in the Banner writeup. He was Dr. John W. Locke, professor of mathematics. Miss Bettie was elated when her father told her that now she could plan to attend a "real university" instead of the Wesleyan Female College at Cincinnati where there had been some family talk of sending her. Her father felt that she was a "bright" girl who should be educated. When only fifteen she had attended classes at Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas, where her father had been president for a term two years before.

It would be an expedient plan for a minister-professor with the meager salary of the time to send his daughter to college at home. There was a small private Seminary for Ladies in Greencastle then, but its scholastic standards were incomparable to Asbury. It was settled that when the fall term opened, Miss Bettie should enroll as one of the first coeds in this "man's college" and continue to keep house for her father, invalid mother, and two brothers.

Another Greencastle girl was keenly interested in the understanding that the bars would be down in the fall. She was pretty, curly- haired Laura Beswick, whose mother was the widow of a Methodist minister, and so more interested in having Miss Laura attend the Methodist university than the local female seminary. There was one of those scholarships too in the family which provided for free tuition for any son. Perhaps it would be extended to include daughters now that daughters were eligible to enroll.

West of town, about six miles, lived a third potential coed, Alice Allen, who was already a student in a small academy at Waveland, Indiana. She was ambitious to become a teacher and welcomed the opportunity to improve her college and be near enough her home to ride back and forth each day on her good horse Kate.

Before the summer was over a fourth girl became interested. Mary Simmons came to Greencastle from Missouri to visit relatives. When she heard the wonderful news that Asbury was going to admit women in the fall, she persuaded her parents to let her stay on.

Just as the first men to attend Asbury in the early days of its existence were mostly local residents, so the first coeds were girls who were living in or near Greencastle, although Asbury had for a long time been attracting men from other towns and other states.

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