Historical Tidbits: Berkeley and 19th century co-education

Daily Diary, Tuesday, September 19, 2023, Day 1114

Introduction: I confess, that like many historical fiction writers, I often choose my characters and plots as a way to explore certain subjects. For instance, my primary goal in starting to write my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series was to further explore and tell stories about the women I had studied for my history dissertation. Consequently, during the past thirteen years I have been writing these stories I have researched jobs women held in a variety of occupations including domestic service, spiritualism, dressmaking, public school teaching, typesetting, medical profession, clerks in department stores, and operatives in a woolen mill.

However, while doing the research about public school teaching for Bloody Lessons, the third book in my mystery series, I discovered that the University of California had opened up its doors to women in 1870, and I decided that at some point I would like to see what life was like for women attending a coeducational institution in this period. As a result, I sent two of my main characters, Laura Dawson and her beau, Seth Timmons, off to UC: Berkeley in Scholarly Pursuits, the seventh book in the series.

Co-education in General in the 19^th century:

Given my knowledge of the general history of gender roles in American society, I started my research into the lives of women students in the late nineteenth century expecting to find restrictive rules governing the lives of students, particularly female students. The information I found in the primary history of women’s experiences in co-educational institutions west of the Mississippi, certainly fulfilled my expectations.¹

For example, in the five western coeducational institutions that Radke-Moss studied in detail, men and women were expected to sit separately in classrooms and assembly halls, and in most of the institutions, women and men were to take different entrances into campus classroom buildings. In some cases, women and men were even expected to go to the library at different times, and at Oregon Agricultural College and the University of Nebraska, men and women were not to speak to each other while on campus.

The regulations Radke-Moss discovered also limited the opportunities for campus-sanctioned social interaction between men and women. Except for chaperoned literary society meetings and the offices of the student newspapers, there didn’t appear to be any on-campus activities where men and women could socialize, and none of the colleges she studied permitted dances on campus until the 1890s.

These rules also fit in with my own college experience at Oberlin College in 1967 when I enrolled. You would think that as the first institution of higher learning in the US to let women enroll, Oberlin College would have had a more progressive attitude towards women, but when I started there the rules were carried over from the 19^th century and included not just gender segregated dorms--women were never to enter male dorms, men could visit female students rooms for a couple of hours on alternating Sunday (if the door was open), but women (not men) had a curfew and had to sign in and sign out, and women couldn’t even ride bicycles without their parents permission. All that changed that year when students did a sit-in, and the college got a feature in Life Magazine a few years later for their now much more liberal policy. ²

Because of my own experiences and what I was finding in the general research, I went into my research on Berkeley itself with some pre-conceptions, but what I discovered was that, at least at the beginning, the rules at Berkeley in 1880 were considerably looser than I expected.

Co-education at UC: Berkeley:

First, There were virtually no formal rules governing student behavior in 1880-1881. Instead, there were ample examples of ways in which men and women freely interacted on campus. A lot of this information and all the pictures came from the Blue and Gold Yearbook, which was a goldmine of information.³

Berkeley 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook

Except for the fact that women could only use the Harmon Gymnasium the two afternoons a week when the men were off marching around campus as part of the required military drills, the few examples of physical separation between the sexes on campus seemed to be informal. For example, while there is a photograph of a large lecture class showing women sitting separately from men in the 1890s, I found no evidence of regulations requiring this, and the 1880-81 Berkeley Blue and Gold Yearbook has two illustrations that showed men and women sitting together in a classroom and in the library.  (Even though these illustrations are humorous—as are all the illustrations in this yearbook––they nevertheless show that this sort of fraternization between men and women happened.)

Additionally, none of the memoirs or reminiscences of Berkeley student life during this period mentioned any prescription against men and women talking to each other on campus. In fact, a lot of the satirical pieces in the yearbook recount lively interactions between men and women.

Berkeley 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook

There were also numerous extra-curricular campus activities that men and women participated in together, including the Durant and Neolaean literary societies, the Bible Club, the Philosophy Club, and several of the college glee clubs. This meant that practically every day of the week there was some excuse for men and women to spend time together outside the classroom. There was even a clubhouse dedicated to giving students a place to engage in these activities on campus, and I saw no mention that these meetings had to include a chaperone, although it was possible that was simply a given.

Strictly social activities were also permitted. Unlike the anti-dance policy that Radke-Moss found elsewhere, Berkeley held formal dances in the Harmon Gymnasium at least twice a year. One of these dances made the San Francisco papers because some of the male students became inebriated—supposedly having cadged alcohol from the band that was playing.

As for regulations regarding where students could live, and the imposition of special rules for women, I wasn’t surprised that Radke-Moss found rules very similar to the ones I lived under at Oberlin. For the five institutions she researched, the men and women’s dormitories were strictly segregated, with curfews for the women. For off campus housing, men were generally permitted to make their own arrangements, but women were either to board with respectable families or live in single-sex boardinghouses run by matrons, again, with strict curfews. The idea that women’s reputations required these rules was very much in evidence, although Radke-Moss found that students, like the students at Oberlin, often worked hard to figure out ways to circumvent these restrictions. An upper class woman informed me early on that if a female student didn’t want anyone to know they were out past curfew, they just didn’t sign out, and since my freshman dorm room was on the first floor, students who came in after curfew would simply knock on our window to go to the lobby and let them in.

As I discovered, the University of California, at least in the 1870s and 1880s, appeared much less restrictive. First of all, except for a brief experiment in providing on campus housing in the form of eight cottages for male students, there were no university-owned dormitories for students until the 1920s. This meant that all housing was off-campus, and as far as I could determine, there weren’t any written rules about off-campus housing.

For example, one of the female students at Berkeley in these years, May Shepard, lived in a boardinghouse run by her mother, who rented to both male and female students, including a Berkeley student who her daughter May subsequently married.  The university didn’t seem to have a problem with this, given that Mrs. Shepard rented one of the former “cottages,” from the university, despite the fact that she had both male and female students boarding with her.

In another case, a memoir by a student who attended Berkeley in the 1890s recounted how both male and female students rented rooms in his boardinghouse that was located a few blocks away from campus. This arrangement was not portrayed as at all unusual.

So, contrary to my expectations (or the experiences students in other late nineteenth century coeducational schools), the students at Berkeley faced fewer formal attempts to regulate their social interactions and behavior than.

This wasn’t to say that these students, particularly the women, felt free to do as they pleased. In fact, I suspect the main reason there were so few formal rules was that, in this period, Berkeley was essentially a commuter school, with a large proportion of its students, especially the female students, living with their own families.

This meant that after classes were over, many of these students were under the authority of their own parents. And, even if they lived away from home (which was more common among the male students) and misbehaved (as there was ample evidence that many of the men did), the university didn’t have any mechanisms in place to do anything about that behavior since the students didn’t live in university-controlled dorms or boardinghouses.

Interestingly, when the university did attempt to exert some authority over student behavior, for example, when the faculty temporarily banned fraternities in 1879, the parents reacted with a good deal of hostility––making it clear they felt the university had over-stepped its authority.

But in 1880, when my characters went off to Berkeley, the hand of the institution lay much more lightly on their lives than I expected. As you will see if you read Scholarly Pursuits, this lack of institutional control could, in fact, be problematic…for both male and female students––but that is an entirely different story.

1. Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (Andrea Radke-Moss, 2008)

2. https://isis2.cc.oberlin.edu/175/didyouknow-coed.html

3. Blue and Gold Yearbook; The University of California: 1868-1968 (Verne Stadtman, 1970) 

In case you aren’t sure how you got here, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. This is my newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. If you aren’t already subscribed but are interested in doing so, you can subscribe by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the little heart and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments!