“Most parents would be concerned if their kids were exhorted to have sex by campus-sponsored speakers or encouraged to get promiscuous at orgies hosted by the college and attended by both students and faculty.”

So read the Nov. 5, 2003 FrontPage Magazine article condemming Oberlin College as a hotbed of licentiousness. This is not a new perception. Forget Safer Sex Night; in the 1800’s joint education of the sexes was enough to make outsiders suspicious. In 1839, Lyman Beecher was widely quoted for saying, “…This Amalgamation of sexes won’t do. If you live in a Powder House you blow up once in a while.”

In 1837 Delazon Smith, who had been expelled from Oberlin, published a book called History of Oberlin, or New Lights of the West. It became very popular for critics and was popularly called “Oberlin Unmasked.” He described the coed atmosphere as immoral and leading to dissolute relationships between the sexes. According to Oberlin historian Robert Fletcher, this was described with “some erotic detail.”

The state of affairs described by critics like Smith could not have been further from the intentions of the school’s administration, which had strict rules regarding relations between the sexes. Women were not allowed to take walks with men without getting special permission. Those who did not live with their parents couldn’t walk in fields or woods at all without the principal’s permission. After 1865 men and women were not allowed to accompany each other to religious meetings. The next year, marriages between students were forbidden on pain of immediate expulsion.

Women had to be in their rooms by 8 p.m. (7:30 in winter). This rule was enforced zealously as it was the most often broken. One woman was denied permission to spend an evening a week with Mrs. Finney to practice singing. Female students opposed this rule and in 1861 held a debate, arguing that the 8 p.m. rule should be enforced for the men as well.

Students were forbidden to be in the room of a member of the opposite sex. This was arguably the most important College rule. There were no exceptions; if a man was in a woman’s room he was immediately expelled. The most famous case of this rule’s enforcement took place in 1836. Two sophomores named Walter Smith and Jonathan E. Ingersoll visited a female friend of theirs who was lying sick in her room. They had carried a trunk to her floor and were told by the girls who had been taking care of her that they could go in. This resulted in expulsion for both of them despite extensive student petitions advocating extenuating circumstances.

Not all students were opposed to the restrictions. Moral societies were formed for the purpose of promoting chaste ideals. For a while it was almost a fad on campus. Things like novel-reading were banned as being too provocative and the bland vegetarian Graham diet was enforced to prevent masturbation.

The most flagrant example of student zeal took place in 1840. A teenage student name Horace Norton wrote several “obscene” notes to a young woman who turned them into the Female Principal. She gave them to her husband, Professor Henry Cowles, who gave them to a fellow professor, Timothy B. Hudson. Subsequent letters were intercepted by theological student/postmaster, H.C. Taylor.

Finally Norton asked the girl to meet him in the woods, presumably for the purposes of “immoral relations.” Taylor and some friends wrote a note in girlish handwriting accepting the invitation. Norton was instead met with a posse of about fifteen students. They spent a long time trying to convince him to repent. When he refused, they stripped him to the waist, laid him against a log and gave him twenty-five lashes.

Although many were outraged, the “lynchers” as they were called were never punished by the disciplinary board.