In today’s Oberlin campus with its co-ed bathrooms and gang showers, it is hard to imagine the College’s beginnings as the first co-ed college in the United States. However, the ladies lived and ate separately from the men. While everyone was required to do manual labor as part of their education, women were supposed to work separately as well in such fields as wool and silk manufacture, gardening and making clothes.

This changed in 1837 when four women enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program instead of the Ladies Department. Separations persisted into the middle of the 20th century. Female students were under far more stringent social restrictions than male students; they were locked into their dormitory at 9:30 p.m. and male students had virtually no curfew.

Before women’s suffrage many female students felt too intimidated to take certain government courses, but established practices of sexual divisions in labor didn’t begin to break down until the spring of 1950 when students formed the Pyle Inn eating and living co-op.

An example of how separated things at Oberlin were in the days before the suffrage movement is the Female Board of Managers. It was formed in 1836 and continued for several decades. The Board was made up of the “Lady Principal” and professors’ wives.

It was the disciplinary board for female students and during its first six months, all girls were on probation and could be immediately expelled if any so-called undesirable character traits or behaviors appeared. Faculty, staff and other students were encouraged to report such occurrences and the accused would be questioned by the board. If an additional student was then called upon to testify and refused to do so, they risked their own expulsion.

For all its pretension of being a perfectly stable, interracial community, the Ladies Board heard quite a lot of cases involving racial animosities between female students in the 1850s.

In 1851, a white student named Caroline Heldman (with two non-student friends) clashed with two African-American students named Josephine Darnes and Penelope Lloyd in the street. Back then, the streets in Oberlin were unpaved and mud. Planks were raised for pedestrians and neither Heldman and her friends nor Darnes and Lloyd would step aside to let the other pass. Heldman was pushed off and responded by screaming epitaphs at the two girls. Then Loyd, along with classmate Caroline Wall (who later married John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin alumnus and famous civil rights leader) wrote and delivered a detailed account of the incident in their composition class. All the students involved were called up before the Board and rebuked. Heldman had to apologize before the class for her behavior and Wall had to acknowledge the impropriety of her and Lloyd’s behavior, not for their conduct but simply for writing and speaking about the incident publicly.