The Doors Were Open

In the summer of 1869, newspapers around Indiana printed short notices about the state university’s new catalogue. Most of each notice was numbers: 13 professors and tutors, 239 students, 41 graduates. Tuition was now free. The trustees had bought a geological cabinet. In the middle of the list, in the same flat tone, was a line about women.

“Ladies are admitted to the College Classes, on the same terms as males,” the Decatur Eagle reported on July 30. “One young lady, Miss Sarah P Morrison, graduated with honor, at the last Commencement.”³

The Bloomington Progress ran nearly the same words on July 21.⁴ The Brookville Indiana American ran a shorter version on Aug. 6: “Girls are admitted to the College classes on the same terms as males. One young lady, Miss Sarah P. Morrison, graduated at the last Commencement.”⁵

That one young lady was 35 or 36 years old. She already had a diploma from Mount Holyoke. She had already worked as a teacher. As the university’s own history told it two decades later, she had asked to be let in, and her asking turned out to matter.

A professor’s daughter

Sarah Parke Morrison was born near Salem, in Washington County, in 1833, according to the state historical marker that now stands there.¹ Her father, John Irwin Morrison, had come to Indiana from Pennsylvania in 1826. He graduated from Miami University in Ohio in 1829, and in 1835 he founded the Salem Female Institute, according to the biographical sketches in Theophilus A. Wylie’s Indiana University, Its History from 1820, published in 1890.²

Indiana University was in her life from early childhood. In 1840, Wylie wrote, John I. Morrison became “Professor of Languages in the Indiana University,” and he held the post until 1843.²

Decades later, Sarah wrote about that move herself. Her family memoir, Among Ourselves, came out in several volumes in the early 1900s. In the third volume, Catherine and Her Household (1904), she wrote mostly about herself in the third person. She said Dr. Andrew Wylie, then president of the university, had visited the Institute and “offered a Professorship to the Chief,” the chair of Ancient Languages, Latin and Greek.⁶

She remembered the new dresses. “Perhaps the best remembered dresses the two little girls ever had were the ones ‘for Bloomington,’” she wrote. Hers had a little more trimming “as she was the older, eight, or nearly!”⁶

She remembered the town, too. Bloomington was not like Salem. “In Salem, teaching—while considered a highly meritorious employment—was not regarded as in Bloomington,” she wrote, “where the highest Teachers, in the University only, were regarded as ‘Professors’ and the College circle the charmed enclosure of the intellectual elite.”⁶

She recalled that the college had marked off its own world. “The line between town and college was plainly marked,” she wrote, quoting another family note, “with little disposition to pass it.”⁶ Every Sabbath afternoon the president preached, and Commencement was “the glory of the year.”⁶

That world was made for men. A professor’s daughter could live beside the college, but she could not enrol in it.

“Awkward, shy, dull”

The memoir does not flatter its author. After the family went back to Salem, she wrote, “Sarah had now got to be a big girl; growing, awkward, shy, dull. Something must be done.”⁶

Her parents were teachers, and they treated a struggling daughter as a problem to solve. She was kept in from play as punishment. Then, she wrote, “her father took her in hand.”⁶ Being corrected by her own father in front of the class hurt most of all. “That the boys as well as girls should see my own Father do it,” she wrote, “was the killing part of it.”⁶

She also described an illness when she was about 12. Her mother told her the doctor doubted she would recover. “I was not going to die, I said to myself,” she wrote. “I had any amount of contempt for the Dr.’s opinion. So I got well.”⁶

Wylie’s sketch gives the rest of her schooling. She studied at the Salem Seminary her father had founded. She “graduated in 1857” from Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts.² The state marker’s notes cite records connecting her with women’s colleges in Ohio in the 1850s.¹

By the 1860s, then, she had already done what a woman of her time could do. She had finished a women’s seminary and gone on to teach. What she did not have was a degree from a men’s college, and the state university of her home state did not offer women one.

The petition and the vote

The fullest account of what happened next is in Wylie’s 1890 history. Wylie put the change in the college year 1867–68.

In the year before, Wylie wrote, Isaac Jenkinson, a trustee, “offered a resolution to admit females to the same studies and the same standing as the males.”² Jenkinson, in Wylie’s words, “was a strong advocate” of co-education, and he had helped open the Fort Wayne Female College to men.²

The rest of the board was not ready. According to Wylie, “no member but himself approved of the resolution presented.” Judge Bascom E. Rhoads offered a substitute to admit women to “partial rights and privileges,” and the board voted it down too.²

Then, Wylie wrote, “the original resolution was then pressed, and about the same time a petition was presented by Miss Sarah P. Morrison, asking that the law of the University should be so changed that females, with regard to their studies and privileges, should be put on the same footing as the males.”²

His judgment was direct: “This request of Miss Morrison, coming when the question was before the Board, had, without doubt, influence in the Board’s deciding in favor of Mr. Jenkinson’s resolution.”²

The margin was as thin as it could be. “The motion, however, was carried only by a majority of one; four in favor, three against it.”²

Wylie added a detail that makes the story stranger and better. Morrison, he wrote, “knew nothing of the agitation of this question by the Board.” The answer she got was polite and a little sly. She was told that “the laws of the University with regard to this matter required no change, and that its doors, with all its rights and privileges, were open to females.”²

In other words, the board answered her as if the doors had always been open. In fact, they had just voted to open them.

The state marker puts the vote in 1867. It also says it plainly: “Responding to a petition from Morrison, Indiana University narrowly voted to begin accepting women on equal terms as men in 1867.”¹ Its notes point to university advertisements printed that fall and to the 1867–68 catalogue. They also cite an account Morrison wrote herself in 1911, “My Experience at State University,” which is held in her papers at the Indiana University Archives.¹ Hoosier First has not seen that manuscript, so this story does not quote it.

One young woman, then twelve

Morrison did not start as a freshman. “Miss Morrison then entered the Sophomore Class at the beginning of the next year, 1868-9,” Wylie wrote. About nine weeks later, other young women entered the freshman class, “and before the end of the second term there were twelve female students.”²

Wylie gave the change some scale. In 1868–69, he wrote, women were “about ten per cent. of the whole number of the students in the four college classes.” By 1886 they were “about thirty-three per cent.”²

He was careful not to claim Indiana was first. He wrote that he did not know of any college before 1866 that had admitted both sexes to the same privileges, “excepting Oberlin University, Ohio, and the Fort Wayne Female College.” Oberlin, he wrote, had opened its halls in 1837 “to all the children of men without regard to sex or color.”²

Wylie’s sketch says she “entered Indiana University and graduated, in 1869 receiving the degree A. B., and three years after the degree A. M.”² Because she came in with a Mount Holyoke diploma and entered as a sophomore, her time as an undergraduate was short. The catalogue notices that summer reported it in one sentence. By the Decatur Eagle’s wording, it was “with honor.”³

The state marker calls her the university’s “first female graduate in 1869.”¹ Wylie put her place in history more precisely, and maybe more proudly. She was, he wrote, “the first of her sex to formally apply for admission to the University on the same terms as were afforded to young men.”²

On the faculty

After graduating, Morrison kept teaching. Wylie lists her as a “pupil teacher at Vassar College” and “one of the instructors at the summer school for teachers at the State Normal, Terre Haute.”²

Then she came back to Bloomington as faculty. “From 1873 to 1875 she was connected with the University,” Wylie wrote, “first as tutor, and afterward as adjunct Professor of English Literature.”²

The state marker says she became “the first female IU faculty member in 1874.”¹ It cites the university’s annual reports for 1873–74 and 1874–75. The two accounts fit together: tutor from 1873, then adjunct professor.

There was a family connection. Wylie’s sketch of her father says John I. Morrison, by then living in Knightstown, served “in 1874-78, President of the Board of Trustees of Indiana University.”² So the first woman on the faculty taught there while her father led the board that governed it. The sources Hoosier First read do not say how that came about, or what either of them thought about it, so this story does not guess.

Her time on the faculty was short. “Since 1875,” Wylie wrote in 1890, “she has been busily engaged in temperance and religious work, and in studying and writing.”²

Temperance, Friends and the “fame of her radicalism”

The state marker says she “spoke widely for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Society of Friends.” It adds that she “advocated for equal representation of women as IU faculty and administrators,” and its notes cite letters she wrote to the university’s president and trustees in 1905, 1906 and 1911.¹

One of those temperance appearances was in the Indianapolis Journal on Jan. 30, 1886. Under the headline “Work for Women,” the paper described a meeting of church women in an Indianapolis parlor about new kinds of charitable work. “Miss Sarah P. Morrison read Matthew viii, 1-4, commented briefly on the sympathy of the touch of Christians, and led in a fervent prayer for the baptism of sympathy,” the Journal reported. The state president of the WCTU then introduced her, and she “presented, in beautiful language, a few thoughts on the spirit and mission of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.”⁸

Her memoir has a livelier version of the same convictions. She remembered going to “the first Prohibition Convention at Indianapolis” as “Delegate from Bloomington.” She wrote that she had been “converted” to the cause at Martinsville by people who wanted “not a word against the old parties.” Those people, she wrote, failed to meet her, “perhaps the fame of her radicalism having preceded her.” Then she added in parentheses: “(This is the best fame to have.)”⁶

She came home wearing her badge. On the way to the Bloomington post office, she wrote, “some one she passed said, ‘That’s right!’”⁶

A writer

Morrison wrote poetry and family history. In 1891 she published A Monody: To a Father’s Memory, printed at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Mass. It is a long poem of grief for John I. Morrison, who had died at his home in Knightstown on July 17, 1882.^7,2 It begins: “O Day of Death, how dark thy gray and shadowy wing; — Eclipsed the natural sky, hushed everything.”⁷

Among Ourselves is something else: a sprawling, digressive history in several volumes of her mother’s side of the family, which its title page calls the Morris-Trueblood branch. It was published by the Publishing Association of Friends in Plainfield, Ind. It mixes letters, family records, opinions and memories. In its pages she sometimes says “I” and sometimes “Sarah,” and she argues with her younger self. Writing about her own childhood troubles, she addressed parents, teachers and herself: “O parents, and O teachers, and O Sarah, in fault nearly to this day!”⁶

Back to school at 75

She did not stop studying. In the summer of 1908, the Syracuse Journal printed an item headed “An Old Student.”

“Miss Sarah P. Morrison, aged 75 years, recently matriculated at the state university at Bloomington, and makes a specialty of Greek and versification,” the Journal reported on July 16, 1908. “Miss Morrison was the first woman to graduate from the school.”⁹

The state marker’s notes show that the story went national. They cite a New York Times item that June headlined “Still A Student at 75.”¹ Hoosier First read the Indiana report itself; the marker is the source for the Times headline.

Her father had taught Greek at Indiana University in 1840. Sixty-eight years later, his daughter enrolled there to study it.

What she opened

The board’s reply told her the doors “were open to females.”² That was not quite true when the trustees wrote it, and it was not quite false. They had voted four to three to make it true, and her petition, by the account of the university’s own 1890 history, had “without doubt” helped them do it.²

Within one school year there were 12 women in the college classes. By 1886, Wylie counted women at about a third of the students.² In 2021, the Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana University’s Office of the Bicentennial put up a marker for her near Salem, along North Shelby Street, near where she was born.¹

She had been the girl outside the college circle in 1840, and later the “awkward, shy, dull” student her father took in hand.⁶ She ended her life known as the woman who asked, at the right moment, to be let in, and who kept coming back to learn.

How she died

Sarah Parke Morrison died in 1919. The Indiana Historical Bureau’s marker gives the year, and its notes cite an Indiana State Board of Health certificate of death dated July 9, 1919, and an Indianapolis Star report of July 10, 1919, headlined “Noted Woman Scholar Dies.”¹

Hoosier First has not seen either document; both are held in subscription databases. The sources it could read do not record the cause or the circumstances of her death, so this story does not state them. The Library of Congress record for her 1891 Monody gives her dates as “1833-1916”; the state marker’s death certificate citation supports 1919.^1,7

The marker’s notes also mention a grave at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, but the only source cited for it is a volunteer grave-photo website. Hoosier First could not confirm the burial with the cemetery or with an official record, so this story does not include a grave location.