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.…

This article examines the network of women's colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to women's exclusion from the realm of the university and their desire to participate in higher education. These colleges, run largely along denominational lines, were situated in the major cities with the…