The Historiography of Education for Girls and Women in the United States

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The historiography of female education in the United States grows out of two major fields, each with its own trajectory and contribution: women’s history, and the history of education. In women’s history, work has developed from a movement for inclusion of female experience in historical narratives, to a sociocultural approach that interrogates the meaning of gender itself. In education, work also has been transformed in the last few decades. As early as 1960, the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote that he hoped to see fewer institutional histories or histories of formal schooling, as they tended to be written as though schooling existed apart from the culture in which it was embedded. He challenged historians to write about education as a process of cultural transmission, in which a particular institution might play a specific role.2 Research on education, including the history of female education, has heeded this call. In this chapter, I provide a brief discussion of trends in women’s history, with examples of how women’s educational history has built on these trends. Most notably, recent historiography on female education includes discussions of class, race, and gender identity, and the roles of education in creating or altering those identities; transnational perspectives; and challenges both to periodization and to the presumed rationales for female education.