A History of Women's Education in the United States: Thomas Woody's Classic. Sixty Years Later

Abstract

Although sixty years have passed since its original publication in 1929, Thomas Woody's monumental two-volume treatise A History of Women's Education in the United States remains the authoritative, indeed the only, comprehensive survey of the history of women's education in the United States. Women's lives have changed greatly since the appearance of this now-classic study. Moreover, recent decades have seen an explosion of scholarship in women's history and the history of education, inspired by the social ferment of the 1960s, including feminism, and the methodologies and interests of the new social history. This essay will reappraise Woody's treatise in relation both to its own times, the 1920s, and to the events and scholarship of the intervening years. After providing background information about Woody and his study, it will ask in what ways A History of Women's Education in the United States remains useful to scholars today and in what ways it should be supplemented or revised.