The Benefits and Drawbacks of Coeducation

The more conservative opinion regarding women's education in the 20th century was one which favored single-sex education. As explained by distinguished historian Dr. Linda Eisenmann, “In the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars began to address the apparent access and achievement gaps for girls and women, several studies showed that successful women had attended women's colleges. Such findings provoked a question of whether girls and women receive more favorable treatment and support in single-sex settings.” Dr. Eisenmann concludes, however, that single-sex education for women resulted not from a motivation to provide women with special support, but rather because women were purposely “ostracized” from mainstream settings. She makes an insightful connection between American education and segregating “newcomers”: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and immigrants were all admitted to the American education system separately from white males, and women were no different when they sought a higher education.

In an article which directly contradicts Eisenmann’s conclusion, Jillian Kinzie, Auden D. Thomas, Megan M. Palmer, Paul D. Umbach, and George D. Kuh, attribute the reasons many supported single-sex education to “providing a qualitatively superior learning environment for their students.”  They reference a study which discovered that women who attend single-sex colleges are 1.5 times more likely to earn baccalaureate degrees in physical sciences or math than women at coeducational institutions. These scholars additionally argue that self-esteem and confidence, which are crucial to women’s performances once they graduate, are better developed by women at female colleges.

Despite such scientific evidence that supports the concept of single-sex education, a key problem women encountered was regarding the lack of prestige and necessary diversity in women’s colleges. Top-tier schools such as Harvard and Princeton remained all-male for much of the 20th century, and many women felt the system was structured in favor of men. Anne Allinson, a woman far ahead of her time, wrote an article in 1906 advocating for coeducation. She emphasized that “the faculty of the best state university is stronger than the faculty of the best women's college” and that in coeducational universities “there is a necessary student life, rich in wholesome activities, which, on the one hand, develops the sense of responsibility and communal feeling, and on the other stimulates and widens the imagination, and makes the mind more plastic to the influences of learning and of culture.”