or the University of Cincinnati, this academic year marks the centennial of a milestone that rewrote the history of education. It was 100 years ago, in 1920, that UC became the first university in the country to admit women into the co-op program.

When UC introduced cooperative education to the world in 1906, the opportunity to take part was limited to engineering students. That’s only natural; its creator, Herman Schneider, became the dean of the newly formed UC College of Engineering that same year and later would serve as the president of the university.

Initially, co-op was open only to engineering students and, therefore, only to men. In 1920, UC increased its range of co-op disciplines, opened opportunities to more students and broke with tradition by becoming the first university in the country to admit women into preparatory programs for engineering. The seven young women who enrolled in chemical and commercial (business) engineering that fall also became the first to take part in cooperative education.

Against all odds

For these first women of co-op — often dismissed as “co-eps,” or worse, “co-eppettes” — paving a new path led to many dead ends.

Most employers refused to hire women co-op students, and those that did expected the women to fit a certain mold. They were paid less than their male counterparts, and duties such as answering the phone, filing documents and even washing dishes fell to them, according to “The Ivory Tower and the Smokestack: 100 Years of Cooperative Education at the University of Cincinnati” by M.B. Reilly.

“We like the feeling of being pioneers,” recalled 1921 chemical engineering co-op Mary Blood. “It would be somewhat nicer if there were more of us, but then, it seems that the enthusiasm makes up for the present lack of numbers.”

It’s no wonder that when the first class of four UC women co-ops graduated in 1925, one of the men in their class was won over by their tenacity, as he observed: “Courage is the chief virtue of the comparatively unknown co-ep. They certainly have earned [their degrees] after their long struggle against many handicaps, not the least of which was public opinion.”

A legacy of leadership

It was such struggles that slowly forced a widening path for others to follow. Indeed, 1920 co-op pioneer Helen Norris Moore went on to pursue graduate studies at UC and eventually taught at the university. Early commercial engineering co-op Wanda Mosbacker, who attended UC in the early 1930s and graduated almost a decade after Moore, went on to lead UC’s entire co-op program from 1969-75. 

World War II had a dramatic impact on UC's co-op program. In 1943, the university opened up all engineering programs to women in order to meet pressing industry demands brought about by World War II. 

As employers of all stripes finally began hiring women co-ops and graduates in greater numbers, UC women stormed the workforce. “We’d previously been prepared to be secretaries,” recalled 1942 business co-op graduate Florence Endebrock Schroeder, “[but] I was [soon] tracking the company’s financial operations, keeping stats, making financial forecasts, projecting sales and measuring cash flow. We were the ones telling the company when they needed to go to the bank to borrow more money.”  

Throughout the decades since, women co-ops in engineering, business and design have steadily advanced in the spirit of the first women co-ops.