Before 1870, the state had chartered only one women’s college, the Catholic Notre Dame de Namur (Santa Clara in 1868), to grant the baccalaureate degree. The nondenominational protestant Mills College was open, but not yet chartered, and the state’s “Normal School”, which trained high-school teachers, gave only two-year degrees (Barth, 4-8). The state moved the Normal School from San Francisco to San Jose in 1870, the same year women were admitted to the university, making the older institution a less convenient option for San Franciscans who might have been content with a two-year program. Thus the great importance of the Regents’ Resolution for California’s young women was that it gave them their first opportunity to earn a four-year degree at a chartered non-Catholic college in their own state.
In addition to being the only institution that offered a four-year college degree, UC’s other advantages included its secularism, which opened it to women of all religions and no religion. Its status as a university also promised a far larger intellectual compass and a broader curriculum than the local women’s colleges. Indeed, even the best women’s colleges of the East, as Vassar’s president John Raymond explained, had adopted a somewhat outmoded curricular model at the very time their male counterparts were moving beyond it: “While education for men has outgrown the old college system . . . that for women has but just grown up to it” (quoted in Rosenberg, 26). Finally, UC’s coeducational status, which would prove to have some costs, also guaranteed that women’s educational experience would be equal to men’s. They would feel less handicapped in competing for jobs or cooperating with male colleagues after graduation.
The university’s location (directly across the bay from the state’s largest population center, San Francisco) was also expected to become an advantage. However, when the new university started holding classes on its own Berkeley campus 1873, it had only two buildings for instruction, and the town was almost nonexistent (Stadtman, 59-60). Most of the few hundred students attending in the first decades commuted many hours daily to reach the isolated campus. Organized on the model of German universities (as opposed to the British collegial model), UC provided no living or eating facilities (Kerr, 93-97). Even as the town developed, students had to organize and compete for scarce living space, a competition in which women were often disadvantaged. The university's indifference to the students’ living conditions was to be an enduring trait, with many consequences for the history of the women in attendance. In the early decades, it might have insured that the women who chose the university were willing to go far out of their way for an incomparable education.
