What was the place of women in universities on the other side of the Atlantic? In America, significant steps towards gender and racial equality haven’t always come from the big city. In these respects, a small liberal arts college in northeastern Ohio broke new grounds in higher education.

Carnegie building, Oberlin College (Crédits : Daderot)

There are a few reasons why you may have heard of Ohio, known to most people only from the Interstate. One of them might be that the 7th most populated U.S. state is a recurring “swing state”: Ohio is in fact the only one of the 50 states to have always voted for the victorious side in every presidential election since 1964. Another reason is the Cavaliers basketball team and its former player and star LeBron James or perhaps the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Apart from politics, music or sports, however, another distinguishing feature that you may not suspect adorns the “Buckeye State”.

Oberlin College, a quiet, friendly 440-acre campus with just under 2,900 students, is located 45 minutes southwest of Cleveland, Ohio’s third largest metropolitan area. Among its alumni figure Lena Dunham, creator of the TV series Girls, as well as Jerry Greenfield, one of the two nice guys behind the Ben & Jerry’s ice creams that you devour while binge-watching (oh, come on, don’t deny it, I can see you). The anti-Vietnam war, left-wing activist Jerry Rubin also attended the school; leaving the protests on Main Street, he took a right onto Wall Street, becoming a successful businessman and multimillionaire in the late 1970s.

But ever since it was founded in 1833, Oberlin, known nationwide for its Conservatory as well as for its very liberal student body, has had a strong tradition of inclusiveness. It was the first higher education institution to graduate women and, ultimately, African-American women.

And one might wonder: of all places, why did these milestones happen in a small, newly found town in northeastern Ohio?

Utopian and tumultuous times

A quick jump back to the early 1830s is needed here; a time when communications were radically transformed not through smartphones and emojis, but by the invention of telegraphy and a brand new language called the Morse code.

It also was a period when Europe and America alike were torn by the debate over slavery. Lane Seminary, just outside Cincinnati, in southwestern Ohio, was no exception to this. “There was a strong debate initiated by students there, who were against slavery”, says Ken Grossi, Oberlin College’s archivist. “Cincinnati sits on the border with Kentucky, a slave state at the time. And when those students realized that they wouldn’t get their abolitionist ideas through, they broke away,” Grossi relates.

Some of the students were therefore invited to travel approximately 200 miles north, to the freshly established Oberlin Collegiate Institute. Two Presbyterian ministers, John Jay Shipherd and Philo Stewart, had a vision for a religious community and an avant-garde school for both men and women. Their inspiration for the name came from Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, an Alsatian pastor who never travelled to the U.S., and didn’t even live to see the school’s foundation (he died in 1826), but whom Shipherd and Stewart admired for the social Christianity policies he had implemented in his native Alsace.

The students from Lane Seminary agreed to come to Oberlin, under conditions. “The ‘Lane rebels’ were interested in seeing people of color at the College, Ken Grossi explains. It was a split vote and Reverend John Keep [Oberlin’s first acting president] cast the decisive ballot.”

Oberlin College, “peculiar in that which is good”

Oberlin College’s cofounder, Philo Stewart, was undoubtedly more than a century early when he stated that one of the institution’s prominent objectives would be “the elevation of the female character, by bringing within the reach of the misjudged and neglected sex all the instructive privileges which hitherto have unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs”.

Lucy Stone delivered abolitionist speeches across the USA. (Crédits : Congrès américain)

A circular distributed when the college first opened also reasoned that by educating women and men in the same place “neither can be elevated without the other and that their responsibilities in the work of life, though different, are equal.” Such an assertion was not common in those days, and when John Jay Shipherd, the college’s other cofounder, wrote in a letter in 1834 that the Institute was “peculiar in that which is good,” it certainly was no understatement. Though women followed a separate course during the first four years of the Collegiate Institute, by 1837 it was decided that they would be enrolled in an A.B. degree (the equivalent of today’s Bachelor of Arts). Mary Kellogg, Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall were admitted in 1837, and all but Kellogg (who dropped out for financial reasons) graduated in 1841, making them the first American women to earn Bachelor’s degrees.

They also paved the way for more renowned female graduates. At a time when it was considered inappropriate for women to speak in public, Lucy Stone (class of 1847) travelled across the country to deliver abolitionist speeches, having been hired to this paid position (!) by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Stone’s friend (and later sister-in-law), Antoinette Brown Blackwell (class of 1847 as well), also an abolitionist voice, became the first female in the country to be ordained as a Protestant minister.

The condition of women and that of African-Americans were deeply connected early on at Oberlin, though it did take a couple decades to achieve equality. Lucy Stanton Day Sessions was the first woman of color to graduate from an American college when she received a literary degree in 1850 – she became an anti-slavery activist as wel – and Mary Jane Patterson, the first black woman to earn an A.B. in 1862.

Mary Jane Patterson was the first black woman to earn an A.B. (Crédits : Archives Oberlin)

In the meantime, Oberlin’s inclusive tradition had already translated into graduating its first African-American male student, George Boyer Vashon, in 1844. In fact, by 1900, one third of all black professionals in the U.S. held undergraduate degrees from Oberlin College.

Strong progressive principles, tried and tested throughout the years

Whether it is as a key stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses to assist slaves escape to free states or to Canada, and during the Oberlin-Wellington rescue event, or when the College welcomed close to 40 Japanese-American students who had been forced under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 to leave their homes and campuses for internment camps, or when Oberlin decided in 1970 to allow coed dorms and 24-hour visiting between men and women, as made famous by a Life Magazine cover, this small Ohio liberal arts college’s history is sprinkled with key events and significant “firsts.”

“It’s an honor to be the archivist here; there’s such a great history, says a proud Ken Grossi. People here knew that they were defying the law when they were, for instance, rescuing runaway slaves. But they believe in causes and will keep defending them regardless of what other people think”, he adds.

In 2017, the Board of Trustees appointed Carmen Twillie Ambar as Oberlin College’s 15th president. The first name might have hinted to you that Ambar is a woman. Something her first name doesn’t say, though, is that she’s black.

The first African-American woman to hold that position in Oberlin’s 186-year history. Carmen Twillie Ambar is also among the 5 % of American university presidents, according to data from the American Council on Education, to be a woman of color.

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