Michigan Agricultural College in the Gilded Age

The first women were admitted to M.A.C. in 1870. They were allowed to live with faculty in the Faculty Row houses on campus until they finally received their own dorm in 1900 known as the women's building or Morril Hall. Their main course of study, Home Economics, was approached in the same way the college (and the U.S.) approached everything: scientifically. Women took classes in bacteriology, physics, biology, and chemistry along with sewing, cooking, and home medicine(3). These classes were designed to help women better understand sanitation and health in the home and the commnity.

 

During the Gilded Age, the U.S. was still struggling to find an answer to the "woman question" of whether or not they should receive higher education. In many ways, it seemed unnecessary to have college-educated housewives, just as it seemed unnecessary to have college-educated farmers who could simply learn from their parents. Skilled emplyment opportunites were rare for women at this time. So why did they bother to get higher education? Harriette Robson, a representative of the M.A.C. women's program, said it best in her 1899 address to the college: "granted that a woman is a free spirit, who is an end in and for herself, granted that hers is a soul as deep, as aspiring, as divinely different from every other human being's as a man's...who can deny her the broadest, freest expression of her own best self?"(7).

 

The reformers of the Gilded Age viewed college education as a way to solve world problems such as poverty and immorality, so why deny this further education to women who were key to raising the next generation? Over time education for women would become more than just a way to advance home-making and this is due to entrepreneurial women such as Herriette Robson.