This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report's advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven's social and economic stability. The Yale Report's…

In the history of Japanese education, the "gender characteristics theory" that men and women naturally have different characteristics rejected not only the "gender equality theory" which came from Western Europe in the early Meiji era, but also the traditional "male chauvinism" of East Asia. According to the theory of…

This article concerns the educational philosophy of S. Margery Fry (1874-1958) and its impact upon the design, organisation and functions of university residences for women in the twentieth century. According to Carol Dyhouse, Fry, the only woman on the University Grants Committee from 1919 to 1947, 'exerted considerable influence over the shape…

This paper uses the writings of European teachers and Chinese students at St. Stephen's Girls' College in Hong Kong--published in English periodicals of its school magazine and local English newspapers--to examine how the school tactically positioned itself as an educational site for the "useful women of China" during a period in…

Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere. In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directly or indirectly the vast majority of education institutions in the country. This dominant hegemony was most powerful during the period…

This institutional autoethnography (IAE) explores the political and pedagogical dynamics of WPA and WAC/WID work within an exceedingly small, resolutely single-sex, and assuredly rural liberal arts campus ecology. Working within a theoretical framework informed by WAC/WID's historical commitment to increasing literacy in students from diverse…

The feminized labor of composition studies is usually seen as being in service of, or subservient to, literary studies, ignoring composition's disaffective position against other fields, specifically creative writing. Viewing composition studies' complex labor histories in tandem with the meteoric rise of creative writing allows for a new way of…

Since their creation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, women's colleges in America have undergone many significant changes. In 1960, over 230 women's colleges were in operation; over the next forty years more than 75 percent chose to admit men or shut their doors entirely (Miller-Bernal, 2006a). This chapter will shed light on the…

The history of coeducation in U.S. higher education is explored through an analysis of a database containing information on all institutions offering four-year undergraduate degrees that operated in 1897, 1924, 1934, or 1980, most of which still exist today. These data reveal surprises about the timing of coeducation and the reasons for its…

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women's colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism,…

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S.…