Separatism and Equality: Women at the University of Chicago, 1895–1925 During Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge’s tenure, women students at the University of Chicago enjoyed both educational opportunity and female community. Anya Jabour
hen the University of Chicago opened its doors to women, it offered them unprecedented opportunities to enjoy a rich intellectual and social life. Madeline Wallin, a political science graduate student who arrived in 1892, prized the chance to obtain higher education at the pioneering coeducational university, which admitted women and men “on equal terms.”1 Alice Lloyd, who came to the university in 1901, described an intellectually exciting atmosphere, full of extracurricular opportunities such as lectures, concerts, and plays. Her account also suggests the importance of relationships among women, who remained a conspicuous minority on campus. When she attended a lecture on “Railroad Management and Operation,” she was relieved to see another female student there. “I made haste to ask her to
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Students studying in the reading room of Ida Noyes Hall, which was built in 1916 and originally served as a clubhouse and gymnasium for women students, 1932; photograph by Capes Photo. 30 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Fall 2020
let me sit by her since we two seemed to be the only women who aspire to being railroad presidents. She cheerfully granted my request saying that she was beginning to feel quite alone.”2 Marjorie Preston Schulz, a math and science student who received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1912, described much more frequent contact with male students in her letters to her aunt, including frequent field trips with both male and female students to study geological features. Schulz enjoyed being part of a mixed group in which men and women treated one another as physical and intellectual equals rather than as romantic interests, criticizing another female student as “boy crazy.”3 Elizabeth Boykin Wells, Class of 1924, likewise characterized male-female interactions as friendly and informal rather than romantic or sexual. Recalling that the media painted campus as “a den of iniquity,” she asserted, “I personally never saw any of the iniquity … at the University, the excitement was in the classroom.”4 Spanning four decades, these female students’ descriptions of their time at the University of Chicago coincided with Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge’s tenure as Dean of Women and Assistant Dean of Women, respectively.5 For thirty years—from Breckinridge’s arrival on campus in 1895 until Talbot’s retirement in 1925— Breckinridge and Talbot promoted women’s educational equality and protected women’s separate space at the University of Chicago, fostering both women’s intellectual achievements and female group solidarity. Their joint administration made the University of Chicago far more hospitable to women students than other coeducational universities, where the lack of a separate female community combined with a rowdy male subculture made women students outcasts rather than equals.6 Their combined efforts, according to one admiring student, laid the groundwork for “the unique intellectual and social freedom that the women of the University enjoy.”7
