ABSTRACT
Throughout most of the 1800s, women's educational opportunities were limited, mostly to the elementary level. Middle-class white women had more opportunities to attend secondary schools and colleges than other women. Before 1850, "female seminaries" presented the most common type of higher education available to (white) women (Sklar 1976; Solomon 1985). While Oberlin was the first college to admit female and black students, coeducation at the secondary level did not become common until about 1900, and coeducation at the college level developed even more slowly. By 1900, 98 percent of all public high schools were coeducational, and the percentage of coeducational colleges doubled between 1870 and 1910 (from 29 to 58 percent) (Tyack and Hansot 1990). Similarly, the number of (mostly white) women attending college increased substantially between 1870 and 1900 (from eleven thousand to eighty-five thousand), and women's percentage of all college students enrolled increased from about 20 percent in 1870 to almost 37 percent in 1900. By 1900, twice as many women were enrolled in coeducational colleges as in women's colleges.
