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From President Robert A. Wild, S.J.
The same week this issue of Marquette Magazine reaches your mailbox, the university will be awarding an honorary degree to Sister Helen Prejean, whose work ministering to death-row inmates was chronicled in the movie Dead Man Walking. As well, the university will be hosting a panel discussion with women entrepreneurs and another with alumnae from different decades. We will dedicate a statue of Mother Teresa and hold a food drive to honor the impact this one religious sister had on the epic-sized nation of India. That is a very small sample of the activities populating each week during the Centennial Celebration of Women at Marquette that will run through next July. Yes, we are pulling out all the stops on this celebration because we frankly couldn’t be more proud of the pioneer role Marquette played 100 years ago in giving women access to Jesuit education.
To appreciate how radical a step it was to seat men and women side by side in undergraduate classes in 1909 requires a sense of history. Back then women didn’t have the vote and wouldn’t receive it until 1920. Though it is true that the Jesuits historically taught only males in their schools, the tradition that men and women be educated separately was a deeply entrenched practice at most public and private institutions that wouldn’t change until many decades later.
Into this cultural climate stepped Marquette’s Jesuit president, Rev. James McCabe, S.J. His concern was to solve a problem: the need the teachers in Wisconsin’s Catholic schools, most of them religious sisters, had to keep pace in terms of academic training with their peers in the public school system and the lack of schools willing or able to provide such training to them. In Father McCabe’s mind, this was not a conundrum that deserved long deliberation. I suspect he said something like “This is a problem Marquette has the ability to solve. We can and we will make certain these sisters and the lay teachers in those schools get the education they need,” and then he announced that Marquette’s doors would be open to these women, certain that the problem was indeed solved.
To say that Father McCabe’s action was universally embraced would be quite erroneous. There was muttering about it among the Marquette Jesuits, complaints undoubtedly from alumni and a flat refusal by Father McCabe’s own religious superior, Rev. Rudolph Meyer, S.J., to approve the enrolling of women at Marquette. But so confident was Father McCabe in the correctness of his decision that he told Father Meyer that he would appeal the matter to a yet higher authority, the Jesuit’s General Superior in Rome. When, I am sure to the surprise of many, a favorable decision arrived from that personage three years later, the issue in question was already a fait accompli with several women about to graduate.
Unfortunately Father McCabe was then no longer at Marquette. Angry that Father McCabe had jumped the gun and admitted women even before hearing from Rome, Father Meyer sent him elsewhere to teach high school and college as a form of punishment for his enterprising ways. But at Marquette, nothing changed, the women stayed and the doors to them remained open.
At some point in its history every institution has to wrestle with the question of whether to open its doors to this or that group. When Milwaukee’s first bishop, Rev. John Martin Henni, pressed the Jesuits to open Marquette College, his intent was to make a college education available to the children of the immigrants, Catholic and Protestant alike, who were flooding into Wisconsin in the 19th century. Back then most colleges had no interest in educating such people, but Marquette College, the bishop insisted, would be an exception. In 1909 Father McCabe successfully insisted that Marquette, now a university, expand its horizon further and admit women into its undergraduate classes alongside men, the first Catholic college or university in the world, we believe, to do so. And again in 1969 at the strong urging of many faculty and students, the then-president, Rev. John P. Raynor, S.J., approved the establishment of the nation’s first Educational Opportunity Program, a support program that would enable Marquette to serve more effectively the needs of students from low-income urban families, many of them students of color.
And so sometimes readily, sometimes more reluctantly, Marquette has in fact been a pioneer in breaking down barriers to admittance for qualified individuals, and we should be proud of being such. However, this also presents us with a challenge. For it forces us perennially to ask the question, “What qualified individuals are still out there knocking on our door?” A good question to keep in mind as we reflect upon all the good things that have happened here at Marquette since we began to admit women a century ago and began the highly successful EOP program 40 years ago. A good question, indeed.
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