<< Front page News March 12, 2004

How lady activists were born

Oberlin College is undeniably a school for activists. It always has been. But the development of female activists at Oberlin is a complicated one. In light of Women’s History Month, it’s appropriate to examine it.

The original purpose of the school was to make evangelical ministers out of its men and evangelical teachers out of its women. The original female students for the most part embraced this ideal. They were committed to the idea of expanding their gendered “sphere” to promote the causes of community and family. Participants of the colony formed highly organized, nationally connected social, religious and charitable action groups.

The older women of the community formed a Maternal Association. This was a forum used to discuss how to raise pious, virtuous children. Professors’ wives, along with the younger students, put together a Female Moral Reform Society. The purpose of this society was to make sure that Oberlin men kept themselves and their urges (called “that monster of impurity”) under control. Surprisingly, the men were in full support of this and formed their own auxiliary for the organization — the third largest of that kind of group in the country.

Additionally there was the Young Ladies Literary Society, a group committed to improving the rhetoric skills of its members. It also gave its members the opportunity to gain experience organizing and running their own society.

Oberlin was put on the historical map by its abolitionist agitating. Women were a large part of this. There was an Oberlin Female Antislavery Society. Harriet Beecher Stowe asked Oberlin to admit two recently freed women and was active in the students’ commitment to becoming teachers to recently freed slaves and runaways hiding in Canada.

Many female graduates remained active abolitionists after leaving Oberlin. Lucy Woodock, a white woman, graduated in 1842. She went to Jamaica under the sponsorship of the American Missionary Association and spent her life educating freed people. Louisa Alexander and Amanda Thomas Wall were two African-American graduates who enrolled in Oberlin before the Civil War and later committed to the same purpose as Woodock in the American South.

However committed to racial equality the College at large might have been, there was still a little ways to go in terms of gender equality. Throughout the antebellum era, calls for women’s full participation in politics or public life were pointedly sidestepped. In 1849, questions were raised about the “behavior” of the Principal of the Female Department, a young widow. Ignoring appeals, the College fired her.

Although women organized and ran their own societies and went through extensive rhetorical training, they were excluded from public speaking. The only time they ever delivered speeches was at the completion of the Ladies Literary Course.

Until the Civil War, women never spoke at any commencement ceremonies.

In 1850, abolitionist Lucy Stone staged a protest against the prohibition of female graduates from delivering their own graduation addresses. Her composition was to have been read on her behalf by a male professor. She refused to write it.

By 1859 women were allowed to give graduation addresses, although for years the essays focused on more domestic,“womanly” subjects.


 
 
   

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