Breaking boundaries: women in higher education

ABSTRACT

Over the last century, higher education has profoundly changed the contours of women’s lives. While securing an academic or professional qualification has significantly opened up opportunities for educated women, the shifting possibilities for work have not been uniformly experienced. Themes of resistance, moral outrage, and bureaucratic invisibility emerge to highlight the continuities and discontinuities women faced irrespective of circumstance of national identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• women academics
• careers
• gendered lives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See here the work of Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995).

² See for example Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England 1780-1835, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

³ Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Tanya Fitzgerald, Outsiders or Equals: Women Professors and the University of New Zealand 1911–1961 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009); Tanya Fitzgerald and Jenny Collins, Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University of New Zealand 1911-1947 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011).

⁴ Kay Morris Matthews, In Their Own Right: Women and Higher Education in New Zealand (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2008); Katharina Rowold, The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2009).

⁵ Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Katie Pickles, “Colonial Counterparts: The First Academic Women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia,” Women’s History Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 273–97; Judith Harford, The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008).

⁶ Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, ed., Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Co-educational Institutions 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press, 1989).

⁷ Ann Mari May, The “Woman Question” and Higher Education (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008); Andrea L. Turpin, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education 1837-1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).

⁸ Judy Bateson, Her Oxford (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008); E. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Storz, Women in Higher Education 1850-1970: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2016); Margaret A. Nash, ed., Women’s Higher Education in the United States: New Historical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

⁹ Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions 1890-1940 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Lynn Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Seymour Eschbach, The Higher Education of Women in England and America 1865-1920 (New York: Garland, 1993); Christine D. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simonetta Polenghi

Simonetta Polenghi is full professor of History of Education in the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on history of university (XIX century); history of childhood (XVIII-XX centuries); history of schooling and pedagogy (XVIII-XX century). Co-editor of two series of History of Education, she has published several works and has edited monograph issues in international peer-reviewed journals. simonetta. [email protected]

Tanya Fitzgerald

Tanya Fitzgerald is Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests span the history of women’s higher education, and higher education policy and leadership.