The diary of Lydia Short indicates that college study at Butler University provided somewhat more positive experiences for women than scholars such as Jill Conway, Ronald W. Hogeland, and LeeAnna Lawrence found in other coeducational institutions where women still occupied their prescribed roles. The second woman to graduate from Butler University (Indianapolis, Indiana), Short's account of her collegiate experiences are more optimistic than similar accounts of women students at schools like Oberlin where women were forbidden to talk in class, read their own essays, or speak on a public platform. Through coeducation at Butler, women not only adjusted to a male model of rhetoric, but made rhetoric their own and in the process shaped rhetorical training into a liberating activity for themselves and their male classmates. Butler's Board of Directors established its coeducational policy on the principle that "The same mental training is good for both men and women...both may receive important benefits from associating in classroom work." Short's diary discusses: (1) her reactions to the traditional "woman's role"; (2) her experience in adapting her writing to male rhetorical models; (3) her own standards for critical analysis of spoken and written discourse; and (4) her experiences composing and delivering her own commencement salutatory titled, "The Power of Verse." (Contains 31 references and an appendix describing Butler's Female Collegiate Course of 1859-60.) (SAM)