Description
Product Description
A leading authority in the field here provides the first synthetic and comprehensive history of women in American higher education in over fifty years.
“Essential reading for feminists and educators, appealing to general readers as well, this study joins familiar material with new insights gleaned from fiction, journals and the records of deans and dons.” –
Publishers Weekly
“An absorbing history of women’s higher education in the United States.” –Patricia Meyer Spacks,
The New Republic
“Will be invaluable to social historians or anyone interested in the education of women.” –Sue Beckwith,
New Directions for Women
“An aid and resource for women to continue their struggle for equality, it is a work of both scholarship and inspiration.” –Jurgen Herbst,
Reviews in American History
“[An] excellent history.” –Christine Bolt,
Times Higher Education Supplement
“A major contribution to the exploration of women’s past.” –Joyce Antler,
American Educator
“This marvelous and monumental book will be an enduring classic―a major contribution to our understanding of historical changes in the lives of American women during the past two hundred years. It is a very human book, filled with humor as well as statistics, and it will be enjoyed by a general as well as an academic audience.” –Kathryn Kish Sklar
Review
"A lively account of the struggle for women's education, based on students' letters and diaries and women's achievements over the last 200 years."―Phyllis Coons,
Boston Globe
"A historical approach toward the higher education of women, tracing it from the first academies to the growth of community colleges."―Julia M. Klein, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Barbara Solomon's excellent history of women and higher education in America helps us to determine how opposition to it was eroded, what women made of their new opportunities, and what obstacles still remain. Her study ranges from colonial times to the present, and while building on the work of those who have focused on the institutions and individual educators, it has the great merit of surveying, through an impressive combination of literary and statistical sources, the overall experience of women who went to college. The author considers the motives that impelled them forward, the role of those who helped them, the associations they formed while at college and the routes they took on leaving."—Christine Bolt,
Times Higher Education Supplement
"[An] excellent, comprehensive study of women's education. . . . Demonstrating a firm grasp of the arguments, Solomon emerges as an integrationist, believing that neither women's studying nor the study of women should be done in isolation. This is the most thorough study of women's higher education since Mabel Newcomer's A Century Of Higher Education For American Women. Essential for public and academic libraries."―
Library Journal
"Essential reading for feminists and educators, appealing to general readers as well, this study joins familiar material with new insights gleaned from fiction, journals and the records of deans and dons."―
Publishers Weekly
"The book provides a wealth of factual information about institutions and personalities. It carefully interweaves the facts with analytical themes focusing on the struggle for access to higher education, the impact of education on women's lives and the uneasy connection between women's academic progress and feminism. . . . A skillful synthesis which will undoubtedly become a classic."―Margaret Walsh,
History
"Tables, illustrations, and excerpts from letters, journals, and novels combine with the author's readable, thoughtful, and often amusing text to demonstrate the relationship between education and the possibility for change. . . . (A) major contribution to women's studies and American history."―
Booklist
"A solid, broad-ranging study of female students' changing attitudes and experiences. . . . (An) excellent reflection of the renewed interest in wome