"O fairest Monticello": Monticello female seminary

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2000 by Mitchell, Barbara J

When Charles William Eliot was inaugurated as President of Harvard in October 1869 he stated his opposition to coeducation, partly because of the difficulty of controlling young men and women in such a situation, but mainly because, "the world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex." He said it would take generations of "civil freedom and social equality" to have the data required to even begin an intelligent discussion about the issue. (Later, in 1918, he finally agreed that women had proven their ability to undergo a four year college education in a female college.)20

A year later Julia Ward Howe assembled and published a selection of essays disputing Clarke's theories. She included such authors as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Caroline H. Dall, Mrs. Horace Mann, Professor Bascom (from a paper delivered at the Massachusetts Teachers Convention), Alida C. Avery who was the resident physician at Vassar, and Professor Fairchild from coeducational Oberlin. In Howe's opinion both male and female students suffered from too much studying, so she recommended a milder regimen for both sexes. She believed coed schools were best for everyone. She also denounced parents who pushed their daughters into a dizzying, exhausting social whirl in search of a husband:

You subject them to the extravagant, immodest rules of display; you expose them to the intercourse of flattery and folly, to the poison of heated and crowded rooms, late hours, and luxurious suppers .... Take courage . .. come to a loftier stand. Educate the future wives with the future husbands. Give the two in common the highest enjoyments and the happiest memories. Then shall the marriage wreath crown the pair in its true human dignity, never to be displaced or lost.21

In 1838 when Monticello opened, Baldwin was assisted by two teachers: Mary Cone for history and Philena Fobes for the natural sciences. Cone had been teaching at Ipswich and the original plan was for her to be the principal, but Godfrey and Baldwin concluded that a man should head the school. Baldwin wrote that the school "should embrace, in proper place and proportion, the masculine element, while the main work of instruction should be in the hands of females. Besides, this locality had its peculiarities, which, for the time being at least, demanded some special arrangements, whatever might be true of general principles."22

He was apparently referring to the not uncommon opinion that women should be wives, mothers and teachers, but an entry from Baldwin's journal about Mount Holyoke is revealing. "Was satisfied from my investigations that Miss Lyon's plan was defective in not having a gentleman at the head who should do all such things as would not fall within the sphere of woman."23

The curriculum was based on Yale's with the goal of an education equal to that afforded men. They began with a three-year program of two terms per year; an 18 week summer term beginning in April and a 22 week winter term beginning in October. First year students tackled algebra, geometry, botany, physiology, philosophy of natural history, domestic economy (using Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy as a text), rhetoric, ancient history, grammar, geography, the Bible, and composition. The last four subjects were on the schedule for each of the three years.