Educating the Female Citizen in a Post-war World: Competing ideologies for American women, 1945-1965

Abstract

Women in the post-World War II United States found themselves caught between competing patriotic, economic, cultural, and psychological ideologies dictating their proper behavior. These expectations sometimes recognized but never resolved the contradictions facing women as postwar citizens. Each ideology addressed a particular concern in American culture. But each also concealed within it ways in which postwar women were already challenging behavioral norms. This paper explores these four sets of expectations, suggesting that the confusion surrounding them led to difficulties in planning an appropriate type of higher education for postwar female citizens. It also suggests that the differences between expectations and behavior provoked tensions around the education of American women that lasted until the resurgent women's movement of the late-1960s.