Chapter 15: The Education of Women (Rudolph)

"After the Revolution, Enlightenment and reason on the one hand and sheer necessity on the other liberated the American people from many traditional beliefs and practices" (Rudolph, 1962, p.308). Frontier life gave women a sense of equality because men would often be away from home, leaving women as masters of the domain and curators of their children's education and potential political future. Many coeducational colleges succeeded in the West because of this. Also, the coeducational high school system in the west also lent itself more easily to feed into a coeducational university. This also meant higher enrollment and possible revenue. From a fiscal standpoint, to neglect women was to neglect profits.

Early education for women began as seminaries for pious thought and training to be a good wife and mother. In 1860, Matthew Vassar began his women's college patterned after a traditional men's college. This way they would not fall into the same cycle but promote liberated thought. Increased female attendance proved women's skills in the liberal arts. Soon, the men would view such subjects as humanities, languages, and philosophy as feminine, which is why women succeeded. These subjects were once the required basics and purely the realm of the man. Women had broken this barrier; nevertheless, subjects began to be affiliated with gender, perhaps to make men feel like they weren't losing what was once "the intimacy and the friendships of an all-man's college" (p.321). Still today, liberal arts contains a majority of women and the hard sciences contain mostly men. This is not because women aren't smart enough. There is just such a long tradition of males that have monopolized the field which does not lend to de facto equality of access. Some of the same arguments for affirmative action could be used for the promotion of women in traditionally male fields. Could we view a university's actions to promote women in the sciences as a social movement just as Rhoads et al. viewed Affirmative Action as a social movement?