This paper explores ways in which gendered approaches have limited women's experience of higher education. Using a historical lens with primary examples from the United States and Britain, it demonstrates how beliefs about women over time led to three expectations about their educational participation: initially, that women were not interested in…

A critique of Barbara Miller Solomon's 1985 book "In the Company of Educated Women" identifies its ground-breaking contributions but shows how it limited women's educational history by overemphasizing access to higher education and neglecting wider influences such as economics, women's occupational choices, and women's status in society.…

In post-World War II United States, women were caught between competing patriotic, economic, cultural, and psychological ideologies dictating their behavior. Differences between these expectations and challenges to behavioral norms provoked tensions in women's education that lasted until the women's movement of the 1960s. (Contains 25 references.)…

This history explores the nature of postwar advocacy for women's higher education, acknowledging its unique relationship to the expectations of the era and recognizing its particular type of adaptive activism. Linda Eisenmann illuminates the impact of this advocacy in the postwar era, identifying a link between women's activism during World War II…

The evolution and role of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, founded to provide year-long, part-time fellowships for women doctorates wishing to pursue independent scholarly or creative projects, are described. The program, which encourages applications from mothers whose intellectual work had been put on hold, is seen as one of the…

This article reflects on three narratives that affected American women's participation in higher education during the first twenty years after World War II. In hindsight, the educators of the 1950s and early 1960s may seem gratuitously meek and self-effacing. In comparison to later efforts, their activism can appear unnecessarily limited and too…

Discusses the historiography of women's education as it relates to the need for marginal groups to becomed involved in networking structures. Offers three frameworks (networking, religion, and money), illustrating ways to make gender more central to educational history. Argues that there is much work to be done in identifying a useful framework…