USAO: Oklahoma's Women's College That Became Something Else

A few miles south of Chickasha sits one of the quieter footnotes in the history of Oklahoma's first legislature. When Oklahoma became a state in nineteen oh seven, one of the first things lawmakers did was create a college specifically for women. It was the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, though it would not carry that name for decades.

The school began as the Oklahoma Industrial Institute and College for Girls, founded in nineteen oh eight and located in Chickasha by the first state legislature. It was one of only seven public women's colleges ever established in the United States, and its location in Grady County came partly because of a land donation from a local rancher named J. B. Sparks, who donated land that had been part of his daughter Nellie's own Chickasaw land allotment, in her memory.

For the first half of the twentieth century, this was Oklahoma's only public institution for women. Graduates went on to teaching, nursing, domestic life, and increasingly to professional careers that the state's male-dominated universities had not always welcomed. The school quietly navigated the contradictions of a society that believed in women's education while also believing women should stay in prescribed roles.

In nineteen sixty-five, after nearly six decades as a single-sex institution, the college went coeducational. The name changed to the Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts. In nineteen seventy-five it became the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Today it is the only public liberal arts university in the state, built around an interdisciplinary core curriculum and a modest enrollment. It is a small school that started as a political compromise and quietly became something with a distinct identity of its own.