Article 9: Fair and Tender Ladies Versus Jim Crow: The Politics of Co-Education

Co-education. What does it exactly mean? In the current vernacular, coeducation means the education of the sexes together within an institutional setting. Once a phenomenon, today, women enjoy nearly equal status on campuses that were at one time bastions of “maleness.” Moreover, the counter-culture revolution of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, ushered in a new dimension of co-education aside from “mixed” classes (females/males), when student protests led to co-ed dormitories, an unthinkable arrangement only a few decades before. Yet, an older version or interpretation of co-education existed prior to the turn of the 20^th century and well until the mid-century mark. This version understood coeducation to be a “mixing” not of the sexes, but of the races—Blacks and Whites attending the same college or university.