The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women's Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920

1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn D. Gordon
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Eisenmann

In this article, Linda Eisenmann examines the role and impact of Barbara Solomon's now classic text in women's educational history, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. Eisenmann analyzes how Solomon's book influenced, defined, and in some ways limited the field of women's educational history. She shows how current historical research — such as the study of normal schools and academies — grew out of Solomon's work. She points out where the book is innovative and indispensable and where it disappoints us as teachers and scholars in the 1990s. Eisenmann criticizes Solomon for placing too much emphasis on women's access to higher education, thereby ignoring the importance of wider historical and educational influences such as economics, women's occupational choices, and the treatment of women in society at large. Finally, Eisenmann examines the state of subsequent research in women's higher educational history. She urges researchers to investigate beyond the areas defined by Solomon's work and to assess the impact of these neglected subjects on women's experiences in education.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-93
Author(s):  
Eleanor Naiman

From 1870-1890, American gynecologists positioned themselves at the center of debates about women’s education. Gynecologists manipulated social anxiety about shifting demographics and falling birthrates among white middle class women in order to legitimate their emerging discipline. In doing so, they couched American understandings of infertility in a politics of blame and demonized women for their inability to reproduce. Although doctors’ conversations about “sterility” primarily took place within the pages of journals published by all-male medical associations, many women engaged in this debate and challenged medical authority in the pages of popular magazines and newspapers. Female doctors, teachers, scholars, women’s college administrators, and their male allies employed a wide range of rhetorical strategies in their responses to male doctors’ theories. They reframed the debate over higher education and sterility into a discussion of the failings of patriarchal gender norms and the importance of objective scientific inquiry. They did so as the medical profession’s commitment to anecdotal evidence and individual treatment faced pressure from the emerging fields of quantitative studies, epidemiology, and medical statistics. A debate that began with a few vocal doctors with passionate but largely unsubstantiated claims had grown to incorporate discussions about scientific method, women’s rights, and female autonomy.


1992 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Joyce Avrech Berkman ◽  
Lynn D. Gordon

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Jackson

A new kind of gender equality ideology is rising in popularity in Western societies. While emphasising gender equality for the next generation, this new ideology sees feminism in a pragmatic and simplistic way, as nonthreatening to the status quo, in politics, popular culture, and economy. In the economic sphere, Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” has become well known for aiming to guide women to succeed alongside men in the workplace by changing their behaviours and attitudes. Its recommendations for women have impacted perspectives in the non- rofit and start-up worlds, arts, and more. However, there are some limitations to the kind of feminist thinking exemplified by Lean In. This article critically examines Lean In as a discourse or ideology in relation to higher education within and outside Western societies. I argue first that such ideology employs a deficiency model of gender equality that makes women accountable for sexism by focusing on internal rather than external change. Second, I argue that such discourses essentialize gender. Third, I argue that it is not easy to translate the advice given to women across international contexts, as Lean In reflects cultural conceptions of the workplace.


Author(s):  
Christi M. Smith

Chapter 5 explores the intersection of racial and sexual politics in structuring various forms of higher education for women. A particular private organization—the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), now the American Association of University Women—played an important role in structuring women’s higher education. For the first time, the ACA initiated an evaluative campaign to measure the quality of higher education opportunities. This produced the first systematic efforts to commensurate educational offerings across colleges. Like contemporary rankings, this system exerted discipline on both coeducational and single-sex colleges.


Author(s):  
Matthew Grimley

In the decades after the Second World War, sociology was a vogue subject in British universities, eclipsing more traditional disciplines such as history and political philosophy. New departments sprang up in the expanding universities. Academics in other subjects reacted in different ways, some embracing sociology in the hope that some of its cachet would rub off on them, others denouncing it for not being a real subject. By the 1970s, though, the fortunes of sociology were dramatically reversed, as radical sociologists clashed with their more empirical colleagues, and were blamed by the press for inciting student protest. The radical sociologist became a folk devil, epitomized by Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), and was particularly demonized by the supporters of Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher governments attempted to reduce sociology’s funding in higher education, but they found it harder to reverse its more diffusive influence over other disciplines and popular culture as a whole.


2020 ◽  
pp. 249-279
Author(s):  
Rita Afsar ◽  
Mahabub Hossain

Chapter 8 unlocks the inter-relationship between migration and modernization by analysing attitudinal changes associated with urban living such as attitudes towards gender division of labour, women’s higher education, and participation in the labour market, to generate broader understanding on women’s empowerment. It also assesses whether, how, and to what extent gender and generational relations are redefined and impacted in relation to migration. It does so by analysing gender roles, attitudes, and aspirations regarding major institutions and practices including marriage, divorce, dowry, and inheritance that govern gender relations. It presents the actual situation of the members of these families on each of these accounts to examine whether there is consistency between what they think and what they practice. In this process, it identifies the factors that are conducive towards progressive attitudes and practices, and those which impede progress, the key determinant of qualitative changes and a migrants’ prospects for a better future.


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