A Challenge to Coeducation? Media Reports on Hazing Among Female College Students Around 1900

Since the phenomenon first emerged, violent hazing at colleges and elsewhere has mostly been seen as a manly vice. As women enrolled in U.S. colleges in larger numbers during the nineteenth century, educators debated whether women would be subjected to ritualistic violence by their male peers. Would they be brutalized? Or, would a female presence on campus mollify male aggression? To many college administrators, coeducation hinged upon the ability to shield women from the rites of men.

Around 1900, however, media reports on hazing among female students emerged. This paper examines the effects of these reports on debates on women in higher education. The notion that women were not only victims but occasionally also perpetrators of brutal acts challenged the idealization of female gentility in the late Victorian period. Based on journalistic texts and on administrative material stemming from university archives, this talk explores the moral panic that followed reports on hazing among female college students. Media reports on hazing cases among women were often titillating in nature, and (surely mostly male) journalists mused at length about the behavior of unobserved women in female-only spaces. Some commentators hinted that these incidents were a consequence of coeducation, claiming that women were merely copying male students. Advocates of female college education insisted that women students, unlike men, mostly refrained from cruel rites and focused on academics. In speeches, educators at women’s colleges urged the students to avoid these rituals lest public opinion turn against female higher education. Overall, hazing among women challenged widespread perceptions of female docility. In their reporting and their comments, however, the media and college administrators were quick to affirm that this behavior was merely an aberration.