Building the New Scholarship of Women’s Higher Educational History, 1965–1985

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.