Marriage, Race, Suicide and Cornell University:
An Examination of Changing Sexual Standards, Decreasing Marriage and Birth Rates and Women's Education from 1890-1930

By John Palella

Educational opportunities for women in the United States constantly change; women have continuously been admitted to and shut out of the world of academia since the birth of the nation.  As politics, the culture, and social mores change so do women’s rights to an education as well as society’s reaction to her.  As the role of the woman in the culture and society transforms, the two react to it by abating education in sexual terms.  In this essay, I am exploring how and why society blamed educated women for causing “race suicide”.  I also discuss how as women’s roles changed in society, so did society’s treatment of women.  Using Cornell as a case study, I make the argument that even institutions of higher learning, the catalysts in why women were persecuted, joined in on the anti-education of women to promote domestication. Nineteenth century America witnessed a social phenomenon of decreases in marriage and as women gained social equality in twentieth century America, new sexual standards would abate their new found freedoms and be the cause of persecution.

Commonly known as the Progressive Era, 1890-1917, was a watershed in women’s intellectual history.   Following the Industrial Revolution, and into the Progressive Era, there erupted a fortuitous belief in Lamarckian environmentalism.  Women could be educated to help shape society’s character.  Women were the backbone of the Progressive movement, so why shouldn’t they be educated?  They broke from their traditional roles and used education to help them in their quest to heal the social malaise of America.

The eugenics movement of the Progressive era felt that this new untraditional and “masculine” role would stop women from marrying and reproducing which was counterproductive to their goal in creating the “perfect” society. Infertility became an obsession for the eugenics movement; the growing scientific field of genetics led some political leaders to embrace the notion of controlled breeding to favor "advanced" races. White Americans feared an "infertility crisis" in their neighborhoods. President Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1905 that immigrants and minorities were too fertile, and that Anglo-Saxons risked committing "race suicide” by using birth control and failing to keep up baby-for-baby. He feared that within two generations, the White Anglo Saxon race would die out.[2]  Immediately, the professionalization and education of women were blamed.  The perpetrator was supposedly college curricula which was teaching women how to be liberated and to revolt against marriage and the ideas of the “Cult of True Womanhood” which demanded that women be pious, domestic, subservient, and pure.

The social climate changed so drastically that any differentiation from the Victorian traditional culture posed a horrific threat. These fears were not limited to the eugenicists, but it was an integral part of the popular culture.  Women who were not living up to the prototype set for them, that they should be married and reproducing, were ostracized.  Moreover, their vehicle that allowed them to not marry, education, was deemed problematic in that it inhibited the reproductive procedures.

Politicians and men were not the only ones to blame women for the degeneration of the family in the United States. There were differences of opinions on what was causing race suicide, and the ramifications stemming from educated women.  However, there was  one underlying theme that was argued against and for.  Institutions of higher learning were causing women to not get married either because of the curricula implemented or the independent lifestyle guaranteed after graduation.

     If one looks to statistical evidence, the birth rates of college graduates, it does in fact show a decline since 1870.[3]  According to author’s Hall and Smith, just because the educated were having fewer children it did not mean that there would be a decrease in overall population.  History shows that educated classes are able to replenish themselves from the lower classes, and that it in no way results in a degenerate society.  Their article praises education and celibacy of women for the social and intellectual values, but knocked education for putting itself before motherhood.  They also blamed institutions of higher learning that did not instill ideals stressing marriage and family.[4]  Even though they directly say the population is not in danger, they still added fuel to the fire of opponents of college-educated women.

     The early 20^th Century was a period where the word “spinster” was common is most people’s vocabulary; women who were identified as a “spinster” experienced the negative implications and connotations that came with it.  Historically women were either married or nuns, and that being a nun was considered the only respectable celibate life for a woman.  An interesting paradox to the time and culture, even though women were blamed for choosing not to marry, was that one of the ramifications of being a spinster was that people thought they were rejected by men.  Agness Repellier argues that for spinsters, “envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness have been ascribed to her.”[5]  Repplier goes on to discuss that it was believed that many women did not marry and reproduce out of pure selfishness and to separate themselves from society.  The truth is that women stopped marrying because they didn’t have to anymore.[6]

      The “Race suicide syndrome” increased like a powerful epidemic; an underlying theme of the day was that mankind would only last as long as children were born and cared for.[7]  Disaster was waiting around the corner as the family weakened, and the perpetrator was college curricula. It was believed strongly that school weakened the family.  Women who weren’t educated felt that no matter what, ALL women were bound to be unhappy, and that the only logical thing to do was marry to share that unhappiness with someone.  Also, many women felt that even though some educated women had made some wonderful accomplishments, in the scheme of things, if they were not married or had children they played no important role in society and their life in essence, was a waste.[8]

     It would be unfair to only discuss the opponents of women being educated, as there were proponents as well. According to Frederick Henry Sykes, the only way to progress in an industrial society is for the reassertion and reestablishment of human values.  Women had achieved education before with no problems, and society flourished.  Also, he reminded the culture that it was society that forced women to be educated.  Finally, he argues that by women being educated, there is not chance of the degeneration of the family.  The family had survived and transcended over greater obstacles than the education of women.[9]

Despite his idealistic theory, universities would be blamed for causing women to not marry and to snub the ideals of family.

Women’s independence, through education was viewed as a vehicle to remain celibate, but this is not the case. Social and cultural mores at the end of the nineteenth century would forever change the institution of marriage, and women would carry on Eve’s legacy as the perpetrator.  At the turn of the century America, people began the trend of not marrying, and divorce became a social phenomenon.  It’s a key factor in what could have caused “race suicide syndrome”.  Author, Kate G. Wells once argued, “the trouble is not in marriage as an institution, for it is the ideally-perfect condition of life, but in one’s self as an individual and in life as a whole.  The reserve of the family conditions has melted away before the rush and swing of existence.”[10]  Marriage is an institution that over the course of history has altered and mutated paralleling that of society’s norms and mores.  As society enforced its convictions and standards on people and individuals, so it did on marriage and family life. 

     Separate spheres provided men and women an “escape” from marriage in the Nineteenth Century, and upon studying the institution of marriage itself, it is to no surprise these homosocial worlds were so embraced.  Critics of Nineteenth-Century marriage, such as B.O. Flower and Jesse Batton depict marriage as a meaningless, abusive method for men to dominate women.  Marriage, an institution that theoretically was founded in love, was a practice of mental, sexual, and physical abuse. In B.O. Flower’s article, “Prostitution Within the Marriage Bond”, Flower argues that marriage does nothing more than legalizes prostitution, and creates slaves.[11]  Women are taught from the earliest age that for them to be supported and live the “good” life, they must subdue themselves and devote their minds and bodies to their husbands.  Along with worldly goods and the house, they become properties of their mate.  Complimentary to this thesis, Batton characterizes Nineteenth Century marriages:                   

Women endured these hardships because society said it was their duty.  It would not be until turn-of-the-century America when new
mores, economics, and social props gave women the option not to marry.

  In a society that was modeled after, influenced by, and dependant on the structure of the family, it can be quite surprising to learn that there commenced a trend of middle-class people not marrying.  Why did middle-class people choose  celibacy over matrimony?  There isn’t one magic bullet solution to this, but author Kate G. Wells argues that there were social, cultural, and economic rationales, and they were gender specific. 

For women the catalysts that influenced the choice to be celibate were threefold:  philanthropy, higher education, and self-analysis.[13]  This was an era when women realized that their role on earth went much deeper than tending to the household and husband.  Women could live purposeful lives, and lend a helping hand to the greater good of society.  Philanthropy for most women was much more rewarding than marriage.  Furthermore, as a parallel, women viewed education as a fortification to their lives, and if they had to sacrifice one, marriage was viewed as an incidental loss.[14]  Why should women rely on men to support them, when they were afforded the option to depend on just themselves?  Moreover, to fully understand why marriage rates were declining, it must be reiterated that this era’s mores and economic facets changed family life in multifarious manners and there was no chance of marriage escaping the vicissitude.  Middle-class lifestyle, and psychological implications gave birth to an analytic and leisure based age.[15]  This allowed women in their leisure time to reflect upon what married life afforded them.  The images of their patriarchal households, where their militant father ruled the roost ran ramped through their minds.  The memories of the mothers warning them “beware of men” were prominent in their psyche. Women had a one-way ticket to independence, and they were going to use it. 

It must be noted that it was not just a women’s revolt to marriage; there was a male faction to this coup de matrimony. It was a period where men were supposed to provide their families with all of the accommodations, and a certain amount of affluence.  For many men, the cost of living was too high, and it was more feasible for him to engage in platonic and sexual relationships with other single women.  A second inducement for men not marrying was education: education for both men and women.  The higher average in education that was expected of most men put constraints on availability to marry.[16]  For most men, after four years of high school, they still had seven more years of college, where and when would the men have the time to start a family?  Finally, in a world where people fear what is foreign to them, men feared educated women.  How could a man marry a woman smarter than he? Non-marriage was as much psychological as it was societal, cultural, and economical.  

Educational advances, cultural shifts in middle class lifestyles, and economic opportunities not only made celibacy accepted but single persons, especially women, were praised for their decisions not to marry.  Marriage had been revealed for what it really was, a passionless problematic vehicle for men to maintain a lineage and to control women.  It robbed people of identity, and maintained the happiness of the institution of marriage as more important than that of the members. 

Marriage rates were declining, marriage was discovered as the faulty and oppressive institution it was, and women’s rights to an education were partly responsible, but were Roosevelt and the rest of the Progressives correct in their assessment that college curricula was a catalyst?  In my research, I discovered that Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, was considered one of the great liberal pioneers of the coed universities in educating women in the early 1900’s.  One would think that this would mean that women in college at that time were educated to thrive in the working world, become scholars in many disciplines, and allow them to flourish as self-sufficient individuals.  My finding proved that not only was I wrong, but so were a number of the critics of higher education as “spinster factories” and family “degenerators”.  Through both academic and social programs, women at Cornell were being educated to be mothers, wives and homemakers.  Domestication was the objective of the university.

My research also showed that as society’s contempt for the education of women grew, so Cornell’s attempt to domesticate women strengthen.  Originally Cornell University’s objectives were to be liberators of women, and give them equal opportunities to men, for education.  However, as the threat of “race suicide” strengthened, Cornell University took an active role in reversing it.  According to historian, Patricia Foster Haines, when Cornell opened in 1868 it attempted to further women’s education by opening a special administrative branch for women to guide them onto the traditional male academic root.  She asserts that, “Cornell’s founding fathers were eager to challenge the academic status quo with a revolutionary approach to intellectual and religious non-sectarianism”.[17]  However, to the detriment of women, sexual sectarianism at the turn of the century became too integral in the society and the culture.  The president and board of trustees at Cornell felt that the education of women was not important enough to risk the future of the young university.  By going against society’s contempt of a liberal education of women, Cornell faced the chance of being ostracized by the world of academia.

In 1872, Cornell thought it necessary to justify to society the admittance of women into the institution.  President White, and trustee, Henry W. Sage produced a study that proved that by admitting women into the institution the relationships between men and women are strengthened.  “Male female familiarity would provide a sounder basis for healthy marriages, and exposure to men would serve as a constant reminder to women of their duty to womanhood.”[19]  They also used statistics from Oberlin College that showed their female graduates’ marriage rates were on the rise.  With this study, Henry W. Sage decided to donate $250, 000 to the opening of Sage College for Women at Cornell University, which would forever change the role of women at the institution.[20]

During the earliest years of Sage’s existence, women were not forced to live there, follow a certain curriculum, nor participate in any social programs.  The only difference in official treatment of men and women was that women had to be eighteen to be admitted, while men could enroll at sixteen.  At first Cornell women were afforded many intellectual and social freedoms. However, by 1890 it was decided that the Cornell women had too many freedoms, and Sage threatened to take back his donation if the university did not tailor the women’s experience to that of a “female sphere”. 

Cornell University went as far as forcing its women students to live in the dorms, in order to ensue a “female sphere”.  Cornell then took on the role of educating women in the social graces.  In a 1910-1911 report, Gertrude Sharb Marting, the adviser of women at Cornell admitted that the dormitory was set up to prepare women for living in a private home.[21]  Cornell asserted the role of loco parentis over its women students.  It had the obligation of maintaining womanly character development to ensure the standards set by the contemporary middle class family.[22]  The only quota set by the college for the admittance of women was dormitory space.  This was not true for men.  When the women lived in the dorms not only did they follow strict lady-like rules, their dress and décor were monitored as well.  They were constantly reminded that someday they would use this rearing to properly run a home.

Even more radical than their social program was the movement to improve domestic life through education.  Despite Cornell’s founding fathers’ dream to challenge the academic status quo by abolishing gender lines, social implications would deem otherwise.  According to Andrew White’s reports to the Board of Trustees on marriage and family size, they had succeeded in channeling the women’s academic career into that of the female domestic sphere.  There then emerged a facet of Cornell that would leave its mark on its women population.

In 1900 the College of Agriculture at Cornell University decided to extend its “Farmer’s Reading Course” to reach the farmer’s wives and initiated The Cornell Reading Course for the Farm Home.  This developed into the College of Home Economics at Cornell University.  Home Economics took flight at Cornell as part of the wider movement to improve domestic life through education and the application of science.[23]  It was a vehicle in removing women from the academic and professional workforce.  As the number of women in coeducational universities increased at the turn of the century, the curricula tailored itself to the field of home economics.  For example, women would study nutrition instead of biology, or sanitation instead of chemistry.[24] 

     One of the requirements of the school for women students was to spend a semester working in what was called a “practice house”.  These were actual homes that Cornell University rented and had a group of college students maintain.  The girls lived there with their instructor and carried on every day activities of the home.  The women worked, slept, and were graded on how they ran the house, and treated the children.  The university went as far as bringing in live children, for the women to “play mother”.  This ideology led women to the belief that the purposes of acquiring an education were not to prepare for a lengthy career, but to become an educated wife and mother.[25]

Charlotte Conable, author of the book, Women At Cornell, The Myth of Equal Education asserted:

Even though Cornell University is only one example of a University that didn’t influence women to not marry or reproduce, adding to “race suicide”, in terms of institutions of higher learning at that time, it was not the exception, it was the rule! If one follows the treatment of women at Cornell, one is able to view that as society’s contempt of educated women strengthened so did Cornell’s attempt to domesticate.

Since the curricula of the universities were not instructing anti-domestication and the degeneration of the family, why were college-educated women being stigmatized?  It wasn’t until the emergence of the new sexual standards for women that celibacy and education would be frowned upon; the emergence of the “new” woman at the turn of the century could have been more detrimental to women than beneficial. The late 1800’s was an era that viewed women as dispassionate and unsexual beings.  The purposes of sex were to procreate and to satisfy the husband’s sexual desires whenever he so pleased.  It was thought that women were incapable of carnal desires, because Victorian principles dictated that women had a higher moral value than men did.[27]  They were the embodiment of purity and maintained the morality and sanctity of the family.  However, the early 20^th Century was a time of change for women, sexuality, and the family; the Victorian pious moral standards were challenged.  Marital advisers and sexual prescriptive literature asserted that women did indeed have the potential to enjoy sex, they strongly desired it, and expected their husbands to provide it.[28]  Women were now afforded a multitude of sexual freedoms, but were the freedoms total, or did the culture actually restrict sexuality for women in another manner?  Peter Laipson argues:

This new sexual ideology not only constrained women but it sent a crushing blow to a pivotal and integral aspect of society and every woman’s life: female friendships.  Female friendships were the life-blood to a woman’s happiness throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Historians, Rotundo and Smith- Rosenberg assert that through same sexed friendships (that in theory were grounded in love and intimacy, gender-wise, in practice, were incredibly different) there developed two different worlds of love, rituals, and intimacy.  Growing up in these homosocial worlds, where boys depended on boys for support, affection, and bonding, as did girls, it created a gap of understanding of the opposite sex that would have a negative impact on the emotional relationship of marriage in the late Nineteenth Century.  Marriage became an unemotional vehicle to maintain lineage and obtain property.

 Even though their importance slightly faded towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, they were still accepted.  In 1905, Freud gave three lectures that abated the fluidity of sexuality, pathologized relationships, medicalized sexuality, and constrained social relationships.[30]  People were either normalized as a heterosexual, or pathologized as a homosexual.  This paved the way for the scorning and pathology of female friendships.  Homosocial relationships were labeled “lesbian”, heterosexual relationships were accepted as the norm, and homosexual relationships were branded perverted.[31]

Freud went as far to attack all forms of separatism from the heterosexual world and truly narrowed women’s options by making them choose to either be a part of the mainstream culture and sexuality, heterosexuality, or to venture of into the agency of homosexuality and lesbianism.  Many women embraced the idea of lesbianism because it was synonymous with autonomy, and offered higher-class women a greater sense of independence, a theme that was paramount in this era.  It sparked an appearance of lesbian sub-culture.  This was a micro-society that was based on feminism, careers for women, refusals to marry, and not forcing oneself to adhere to the sexuality of men.  Women had an arena for emotional, intellectual, and physical stimulation.  It must be noted that if anything positive came out of Freud’s rigid sexual ideology, it was that it allowed sexual liberation for lesbians to flourish.[32]

Freud cannot be the only one to look to on why sexual mores transformed in this period.  It was also due to a slew of writers and prescriptive authors that outlined “Companionate” marriage, as Christina Simmons labels it.  They were the embodiment of the culture’s portrayal of gender relations since the early 1900’s.  Proponents of the new sexual identity for women thought it was imperative since their cultural, social, and intellectual identities changed as well.  Women’s role of being domesticated diminished because of increased education and paid work.  They were becoming professionals, and as college women they were active in intellectual, political, and charity circles.  The most radical change was that of closing the social gap between the two sexes.[33]  With women’s identities changing in multifarious ways, it is of no surprise that their “sexuality” was redefined.

The liberalization of sexual mores in the early twentieth century promulgated new ideals in sexuality, marriage, and birth control that would forever alter the structure of the American family.  First of all, a considerable portion of middle class men refused to marry the “modern” girl of the times.  Men viewed the women that smoked, drank, and participated in masculine activities as too “easy”, and as the antithesis of their mothers.[34]  They wanted the women to run the homes, and care for them.  Women as well viewed men not suitable to marry, as they were intellectually and culturally inferior.  Therefore, there grew a shortage of suitable men to marry.  Many women, who did marry and have children, took on the role of rearing them to be suitable for a woman to marry.[35]  It was no longer the role of the woman to please men, their independence was booming.

Women were not only going to show their fresh power by refusing to marry, they went as far as to take away what men, society, and the world so desperately relied on them most for:  their offspring.  The use of birth control proved to be an enduring weapon utilized to demonstrate the power of feminism.  Women banded together to create a branch of politics based solely on a female experience.  The unity of women founded on physical, emotional, and political bonds; aspirations; and self-determination united masses of women.  It was a powerful force to be reckoned with, and there was nothing men or society could do to stop them.  The birth control movement altered the essence of women’s rights and guaranteed them “free sexual expression and reproductive self determination.”[36]

Revolts against marriage, opportunities for education and new sexual standards were holistically transforming the status of the woman and closing the gap between the sexual hegemony men possessed.  Theodore Roosevelt, the paradigm of masculinity, and his cronies used the decline and in birth and marriage that accompanied the transformation of Western Society from a rural setting and an agrarian economy, to an industrialized economy, to abate the social accomplishments women were making and to retain them in their subordinate role. The Progressives were aware of the demographic implications brought on by industrialization. Before the 1870’s death during birth was so common that men would end up marrying two to three times, and having a number of children with each of those wives.  As mortality declined, so did the number of children born. Before the Industrial Revolution, a family depended on the number of children it had to help support the family by working for the family.  Now that the agrarian economy had diminished it was neither practical nor economical to have many children.  Race suicide was not as imperative as an issue as the chance of “misogyny suicide”.

Works Cited

Primary Sources:

Cattell, J.M. “School and Family”, Popular Science. Vol. 74 (January 1909).

Flower, B.O., “Prostitution Within the Marriage Bond.”  The     Arena. XIII (June 1895).

Shipman, Carolyn.  “The Anomalous Position of the Unmarried Woman”, North American Review. (1909).

Sykes, Frederick Henry. “The Social Basis of the New Education Of Women”.  (Vassar College Library, 1917).

Thompson, Warren S.  “Race Suicide in the United States”, The Scientific Monthly. V, (The Science Press, New York,

     1917).

Wells, Kate G. “Why More Girls Do Not Marry.”  North American Review. Vol 152, No. 2 (February 1891).

Wells, Kate G. “Why More Men Do Not Marry.” North American Review. (July 1897). 

“Why They Won’t Marry The Modern Girl.” Delineator.  (1921).

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Battan, Jesse F.  “The ‘Rights’ of Husbands and the ‘Duties’ of   Wives: Power and Desire in  The American Bedroom, 1850-1910.”  Journal of Family History.  XXIV (Sage Publishing  Inc., 1999).

Conable, Charlotte Williams. Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

Cohen, William & Charles F. Westoff. “Demographic Dynamics in America”, Free Press.  NY (1977).

Ford, J. Halbert Better Homes in America: School Cottages for Training in Home Making (Cornell Archives).

Gordon, Linda. “Birth Control and Social Revolution.” A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women. Ed. Nancy F. Cott & Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1979).

Haines, Patricia Foster. “Women, Men & Coeducation: Historical Perspectives from Cornell University-1868-1900.” (Presented at the Berkshire Women’s History Conference at Bryn Mower, Pennsylvania, 1976).

Laipson, Peter. “Kiss Without Shame for She Desires It: Sexual Foreplay in American Marital Advice Literature, 1900- 1925.”  Journal of Social History. XXIX (March 1996).

Meyer, Jill. “The Mothercraft Movement at Cornell, (Cornell Archives, 1990).

Palmieri, Pat. “The Race-Suicide Syndrome: Marriage Rates and Birthrates of College-Educated Women”. In Adamless Eden. (Yale University Press, 1995).

Palmieri, Pat. “U.S. Family History Seminar”.  Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY. (February 7^th, & 28^th, 2001).

Rodrigue, Jesse M. “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement.” Passion & Power, Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss & C. Simmons. (Temple University Press, 1989).

Rossiter, Margaret W.   Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins          University Press, 1977).

Rotundo, Anthony E. “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States,  1800-1900.”  Journal of Social History.  XXIII, no. 1. (1989).

Simmons, Christina. “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat.”  Frontiers. (1979).

Swett, Margaret. “In the Absence of a Husband, What is a Girl to Do?”