Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education

Abstract

turies rest upon understanding a series of related changes in both education and the status of women. In my essay I will analyze three major shifts in higher education: (1) Its movement out of the eddies and tributaries of American life into the mainstream of activity, (2) its transformation from the domain of the few to the domain of the many, and (3) the evolution of its organizational from an early monolithic model through a period of diversity to a later monolithic form quite different from the first. Interacting with these were two changes that concerned women: (1) a transition of the canons of womanhood or of the ideal of true womanhood, given in the prescriptive literature of the period, from religious and social ideals to secular and social ones (this submitted women to new, more complex pressures that thwarted their professional ambitions and development); and (2) a dramatic increase in the proportion of women the prescriptive literature affected, or a universalization of social norms.