Abstract
As Second Wave feminism took hold in late 1960s and 1970s America, its new analytical perspectives worked gradually into the practice and the scholarship of most fields, including women in higher education. By the 1980s, a new scholarship on women was burgeoning that used innovative tools to reexamine the history of how women had entered, experienced, confronted, and altered higher education in the United States. Although some of the new scholarship was crafted by researchers being newly trained, the initial work to recast women’s higher education history was advanced by many women (and some men) who were already established scholars as the feminist movement grew. In other words, the new history was being written by those who had grown up – personally and educationally – in an earlier, pre-feminist paradigm, and they were now building a new history even as they worked to reframe their own experience. This chapter examines the beginnings of the new scholarship on the history of women in higher education with a particular eye on how several key scholars, between 1970 and 1985, built an initial analytical framework for the field, and sometimes reflected on the challenges of doing so. Patrica Albjerg Graham, Geraldine Clifford, Barbara Miller Solomon, Jessie Bernard, Jill Ker Conway, Helen Astin, and others crafted analyses that differed dramatically from work in the late 1950s and 1960s, paralleling the changes occurring in American life. This chapter examines four themes that held particular resonance for the era: the origins and impact of a “women’s sphere”; teaching as a “woman’s profession”; women’s use of collegiate education; and statistical understandings of women’s careers.
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Notes
- 1.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
- 2.
New York: Harper, 1959.
- 3.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (Summer 1978): 759–773.
- 4.
Teachers College Record 76 (February 1975): 421–429.
- 5.
The history of U.S. feminism is often discussed as “waves.” First Wave feminism developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries push for women’s rights, especially suffrage. The Second Wave emerged in the 1960s, marked by movements around civil rights, war, sexuality, and reproductive freedom. It focused on “liberating” women through raising their consciousness about victimization; “the personal is political” became a common slogan. Second Wave feminism was eventually criticized for its essentialism around “universal womanhood.” Third Wave feminism emerged in the 1990s to address postmodern understandings of a gender continuum and varied identities. See, for instance, Nancy Hewitt, No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, Rutgers Univ. Press, 2010).
- 6.
New York: Norton, 1963.
- 7.
“Sex-Directed Educators” is the title of chapter 7; a “New Life Plan for Women” is chapter 14. Quotation at 357.
- 8.
Ibid., 370.
- 9.
Rudolph (New York: Knopf, 1962); Veysey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
- 10.
Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), especially chapter 2.
- 11.
New York: Harper, 1959.
- 12.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1956.
- 13.
Cuthbert, reprint New York: Garland, 1987; original 1942.
- 14.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964.
- 15.
See Mary Ann Dzuback’s chapter in this volume for an alternative view of women’s strategy for building knowledge.
- 16.
A good general source for this era is John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
- 17.
For overviews of this era, see Academic Women on the Move, eds. Alice S. Rossi and Ann Calderwood (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1973), especially Jo Freeman’s chapter 1, “Women on the Move: Roots of Revolt.”
- 18.
Geraldine Joncich Clifford’s “’Shaking Dangerous Questions from the Crease’: Gender and American Higher Education,” Feminist Issues (Fall 1983): 3–62, is a much longer provocative analysis and research agenda. Its 1983 publication, however, captures later scholarship.
- 19.
Graham, “So Much to Do,” 421.
- 20.
Ibid., 423. For Horner, see “Femininity and Successful Achievement: A Basic Inconsistency,” in Feminine Personality and Conflict, eds. J.M. Bardwick, E. Douvan, M.S. Horner, and D. Gutman (Belmont, CA: Brooks Cole Publishing, 1970).
- 21.
Graham, “So Much to Do,” 425.
- 22.
Ibid., 427.
- 23.
Contemporaneous scholars published several fuller reviews of the literature. The strongest is Sally Schwager, “Educating Women in America,” Signs, 12, 2 (winter 1987): 333–372.
- 24.
American Quarterly 18, 1 (Summer 1966): 151–174.
- 25.
For a later review on woman’s sphere, see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds: Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History, 75, 1 (June 1988): 9–39.
- 26.
Conway, “The First Generation of American College Women” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1968); and “Perspectives on the History of Women’s Education in the United States,” History of Education Quarterly, 14, 1 (Spring 1974): 1–12; quotation at 1.
- 27.
Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Frank Stricker, “Cookbooks and Law Books: The Hidden History of Career Women in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of Social History, 10 (Fall 1976): 1–19; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
- 28.
Hogeland, “Coeducation of the Sexes at Oberlin College: A Study of Social Ideas in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Social History, 6 (Winter 1972/1973): 160–176.
- 29.
Gordon, “Co-Education on Two Campuses: Berkeley and Chicago, 1890–1912,” in Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History, Mary Kelly, ed. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979), 171–193; Charlotte Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Amy Hague, “What if the Power Does Lie Within Me?: Women Students at the University of Wisconsin, 1875–1900,” History of Higher Education Annual, 4 (1984): 78–100; Dorothy McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment: 100 Years of Women at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970); Florence Howe, “Why Educate Women? The Responses of Wellesley and Stanford,” in Myths of Coeducation: Selected Essays, 1964–1983 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 259–269.
- 30.
“An Academic Gresham’s Law: Group Repulsion in American Higher Education,” Teachers College Record 82 (Summer 1981): 567–588.
- 31.
Feminist Studies, 5 (Fall 1979): 512–529. See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29.
- 32.
“Separatism,” quotations at 512, 514.
- 33.
Palmieri,“Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1880–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (Summer 1983): 195–214.
- 34.
“The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3–25.
- 35.
“Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 1837–1850,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 27–46.
- 36.
“After College, What?: New Graduates and the Family Claim,” American Quarterly 32 (Fall 1980): 409–434; quotation at 410.
- 37.
“The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39 (September 1983): 17–29; see also Perkins’ chapter in this volume. Although the “women’s sphere” notion was ultimately rejected, it did provide scholars a useful tool for showing how women violated it.
- 38.
Brumberg and Tomes, “Women in the Professions,” 276. Their review article helps situate “feminized” fields.
- 39.
Kimberly Tolley, “Teaching,” in Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States, Linda Eisenmann, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 423.
- 40.
See Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
- 41.
“Daughters into Teachers: Educational and Demographic Influences on the Transformation of Teaching into Women’s Work in America,” History of Education Review 12,1 (1983): 15–28; “‘Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse’: Educating Women for Work,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education, Harvey Kantor and David B. Tyack, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 223–249; and “Shaking Dangerous Questions.”
- 42.
“Shaking Dangerous Questions,” quotations at 7, 12.
- 43.
“The Female Schoolteacher in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 10 (Spring 1977): 332–345.
- 44.
For Willard, see Scott “The Ever Widening Circle”; for Beecher, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
- 45.
Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
- 46.
Perkins, “The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood,’”; Vaughn-Roberson, “Sometimes Independent but Never Equal – Women Teachers, 1900–1950: The Oklahoma Example,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 39–59; Oates, “The Professional Preparation of Parochial School Teachers, 1870–1940,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 12 (January 1984): 60–72.
- 47.
Christine Ogren discusses the lack of integration in “The History and Historiography of Teacher Preparation in the United States: A Synthesis, Analysis, and Potential Contributions to Higher Education History,” Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, 28 (2013), 405–458.
- 48.
Ginzberg, Life-Styles of Educated Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), and Ginzberg and Yohalem, Educated American Women: Self-Portraits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
- 49.
“Life after College: Historical Links between Women’s Education and Women’s Work,” in The Undergraduate Woman: Issues in Educational Equity, Perun, ed. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982), 375–398. Antler, in “After College, What?”, also explored Wellesley graduates’ paths, labelling them as “daughters,” “wives,” or “independents.”
- 50.
Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1978).
- 51.
Frankfort was criticized for neither recognizing Palmer’s feminism nor accounting for other influences on women’s choices. See Patricia Palmieri, “Paths and Pitfalls: Illuminating Women’s Educational History,” Harvard Educational Review, 49, 4 (November 1979): 534–541.
- 52.
Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984).
- 53.
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 54.
Graham, “Expansion and Exclusion,” quotations at 770.
- 55.
Susan Boslego Carter, “Academic Women Revisited: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns in Women’s Employment as College and University Faculty, 1890–1963,” Journal of Social History, 14 (Summer 1981): 675–700; Astin, The Woman Doctorate in America: Origins, Career, and Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969).
- 56.
Astin, 26, 32–33
- 57.
Ibid., 75.
- 58.
Carter, 683.
- 59.
Ibid., 689.
- 60.
“Perspective on Academic Women and Affirmative Action,” Educational Record 54 (Spring 1973): 130–135.
- 61.
“Women’s Colleges and Women Achievers,” Signs 3 (Summer 1978): 795–806.
- 62.
“Women’s Colleges and Women Achievers Revisited,” Signs 5 (Spring 1980): 504–17.
- 63.
For review of Solomon’s themes and their impact on historians, see Linda Eisenmann, “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women’s Higher Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67 (Winter 1997): 689–717.
- 64.
Solomon, 208.
- 65.
Ibid., 210.
- 66.
Ibid., 211.
- 67.
“Men Were the Only Models I Had,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 12, 2001, B7–11. See also When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2002).
- 68.
Chronicle, B7, B8.
- 69.
Astin, The Road from Serres: A Feminist Odyssey (n.p.: Marcovaldo Publications, 2014), quotation at 81.
- 70.
Ibid., 108.
- 71.
Ibid., discussion of Commission work at 111–112; quotation at 113.
- 72.
The collected essays are Myths of Coeducation; the memoir is A Life in Motion (New York: The Feminist Press, 2011).
- 73.
A Life in Motion, 229.
- 74.
Ibid., 247.
- 75.
Ibid., 254.
- 76.
See essays in Myths of Coeducation, especially “Myths of Coeducation” (1978).
- 77.
A Life in Motion, 265, 315.
- 78.
The Road from Coorain (New York: Knopf, 1989); True North: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1994); A Woman’s Education (New York: Knopf, 2001).
- 79.
A Woman’s Education, 36.
- 80.
Ibid., 44.
- 81.
Ibid., 41.
- 82.
Ibid., 16.
- 83.
Ibid., 114.
- 84.
Solomon, xvii.
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Eisenmann, L. (2018). Building the New Scholarship of Women’s Higher Educational History, 1965–1985. In: Nash, M.A. (eds) Women’s Higher Education in the United States. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_12
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