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Oberlin
and Woman
By
Mrs.
Lucy Stone, Class of 1847
Added
to website September 13, 2017
Background: My
alma mater, Oberlin College, was founded in Ohio in 1833 with 44
students, 15 of them women. Four years later it allowed women
to enroll in the regular college degree program. Thus it became
the first co-educational institution in the United States.
Back
East, a feisty 25-year-old abolitionist named Lucy Stone learned
that Oberlin was granting degrees to women. She traveled to
far-off Ohio. When she received her baccalaureate degree in
1847, she became the first female college graduate from Massachusetts.
Three
years later she organized the National Women's Rights Convention in
Worcester. That was in 1850. Women would have to wait
another 70 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment
guaranteed them the right to vote. |
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But
long before that, Lucy Stone returned to Oberlin in 1883 on the
occasion of the Jubilee honoring the college's 50th anniversary.
For
this six-day celebration, the students had erected a
tabernacle in the park, capable of seating 3500 people.
On Saturday, June 30, one of the speakers was Ohio's Rutherford B.
Hayes, wounded five times in the Civil War and, until two years
before, the 19th President of the United States.
"Oberlin
has practically proved that young men and young women can be
educated together by the same instructors and in the same classes, up
to the highest standard of collegiate learning, without harm to
habits and character.
"Oberlin
is the pioneer college to teach that young people, white and
colored, can be educated under the same roof on terms of perfect
equality, with no loss of self-respect or dignity.
"I
shall never forget the affecting scene when I and the young soldiers
who were with me met a number of Union soldiers who had been been
wounded and made prisoners in one of the disastrous engagements in
the early part of the war. The men we met were from
Oberlin. We heard nothing from those men that was not worthy of
Oberlin. They were pale and weak and suffering, but they
uttered no word which their dearest friends at home would not be glad
and proud to hear them speak. God bless Oberlin!"
On
Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, July 3 and 4, the Musical Union with
its 140-voice chorus and four visiting soloists would present an
oratorio written 37 years before: Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah.
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It
was about 10:45 on the final morning, the Fourth of July, when Lucy
rose from her seat on the podium of the auditorium.
I've
excerpted her address from Nina Winterbottom's transcription in this
book, which is available online here. |
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Oberlin
is proud of her founders, of their poverty, of their faith, of their
perseverance. Their story will be told as long as one stone of
all they builded remains upon another.
Oberlin
is proud, but her highest glory in history will be that Oberlin was
the pioneer in establishing the co-education of men and women.
Oberlin is proud that it reached out its hand to the misjudged
and neglected sex and said, The leaves of the tree of
knowledge are for you as for us.
The
idea of equal rights was in the air. The wail of the slave,
his clanking fetters, his utter need, appealed to everybody for
help. Oberlin is proud that it reached down its hand to help
the slaves to their liberty.
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quoting
James Russell Lowell |
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But
new occasions teach new duties.
Time
makes ancient good uncouth.
They
must upward still, and onward,
who
would keep abreast of truth.
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Another
deed waits for Oberlin to add to its crown of honor. I should
be no true daughter of Oberlin, still less should I be true to
myself, if here to-day I failed to ask this younger Oberlin to take
another and the next step in the great movement for the political
equality of women.
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quoting
John Greenleaf Whittier |
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Our
fathers to their graves have gone;
their
fight is fought, their battle won.
But
sterner trials await the race
that
rises in their honored place
a
moral warfare with the crime
and
folly of an evil time.
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That
crime and that folly are the withholding from women the opportunity
of giving consent to the laws they are required to obey. It was
for this principle that our fathers contended in the war of the Revolution.
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A
Civil War battle flag, not from Oberlin's Company C but from another
Ohio volunteer regiment |
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As
I sat here, I looked up to your torn and tattered flag. It
marks the battle-fields where your soldiers carried it for freedom.
But
I remember that other flags are floating on our hilltops everywhere,
and they float over twenty millions of women who are taxed without
representation and governed without their consent. |
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Davis
was the president of the Confederate States of America |
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When
the war was ended and the Government asked in its reconstruction,
What shall we do with the Negroes? the answer was,
These men have fought our battle and carried our flag.
Now let them have the ballot. And they got it.
And
then it asked, What shall be done with the rebels? and
with one voice the people said, Let them have amnesty and
universal suffrage. And they got it.
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And
then it was asked, What shall we do with Jefferson Davis
the man who had been the greatest traitor to his country?
And the nation, looking over all its borders to find the worst
punishment it could inflict upon him, did not put him in
prison for life, did not set him to hard labor, did not
load him with chains that should clank in human ears but it
took away his right to vote!
It
made him the political peer of every woman in the land. |
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When
the women who had in camp and on the field nursed the soldiers, who
had turned night into day to raise supplies for the Sanitary
Commission and to help the brave boys in blue when these women
went to Washington and asked, In the reconstruction of the
Government, what will you do with us? the Government left us
all the peers of Jefferson Davis.
Now
it is to save women from this wrong and shame that Oberlin should
take its next step.
So
to-day, standing here and seeing what Oberlin has done for women,
pardon me for appealing
as
one of twenty millions who may be taxed, and fined, and imprisoned,
and hung, and have never a word to say about it |
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as
one whom the law touches at every point, reaching its hand into my
cradle and deciding all about my baby, what shall be its relation to
me and mine to it, that touches the dollar I earn, the deed I have to
sign, the property I own, and plunges me into the weal or woe of the
great Commonwealth of States, and leaves me no voice about it
in
behalf of twenty millions of women, on this good day I stand here in
Oberlin begging pardon for going beyond the limit of my subject to say,
O
men who have been so wise, so kind, and so just to women, take one
step more and help lift us from peerage with Jefferson Davis!
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