University Coeducation in the Victorian Era chronicles the inclusion of women in state-supported male universities during the nineteenth century. Based on primary sources produced by the administrators, faculty, and students, or other contemporary Victorian writers, this book provides insight from multiple perspectives of an important step in the progress of gender relations in higher education and society at large. By studying twelve institutions in the United States, and another twelve in the United Kingdom, the comparative scope of the work is substantial and brings local, regional, national, and international questions together, while not losing sight of individual university student experiences.

Explores the College Equal Suffrage League’s work to advance the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment The woman suffrage movement is often portrayed as having been led and organized by middle-aged women and mothers in stuffy, formal settings. This dominant account grossly neglects a significant demographic within the movement—college women. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of college women in the United States rose from 21 to 40 percent. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South for female students and numerous coeducational institutions in the West. The widespread extension of academic training for women helped spur a well-organized campaign for female voting rights on college campuses, where suffragists found a new audience and stage to earn respect and support. Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual purpose: not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education. Furthermore, Kelly L. Marino argues that the CESL’s campaigns set trends in youth activism and helped lay the groundwork for later and more well-known college protests against gender inequality. Fascinating and timely, Votes for College Women shows how these brave women solidified the campus and the classroom as arenas for civic and social activism.

This book offers a spatial history of the decades in which women entered the universities as students for the first time. Through focusing on several different types of spaces – such as learning spaces, leisure spaces, and commuting spaces – it argues that the nuances and realities of everyday life for both men and women students during this period can be found in the physical environments in which this education took place, as declaring women eligible for admittance and degrees did not automatically usher in coeducation on equal terms. It posits that the intersection of gender and space played an integral role in shaping the physical and social landscape of higher education in England and Wales in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, whether explicitly – as epitomised by the building of single-sex colleges – or implicitly, through assumed behavioural norms and practices.

This edited collection illustrates the way in which women’s experiences of academe could be both contextually diverse but historically and culturally similar. It looks at both the micro (individual women and universities) and macro-level (comparative analyses among regions and countries) within regional, national, trans-national, and international contexts. The contributors integrally advance knowledge about the university in history by exploring the intersections of the lived experiences of women students and professors, practices of co-education, and intellectual and academic cultures. They also raise important questions about the complementary and multidirectional flow and exchange of academic knowledge and information among gender groups across programmes, disciplines, and universities. Historical inquiry and interpretation serve as efficacious ways with which to understand contemporary events and discourses in higher education, and more broadly in community and society. This book will provide important historical contexts for current debates about the numerical dominance and significance of women in higher education, and the tensions embedded in the gendering of specific academic programs and disciplines, and university policies, missions, and mandates.

Bessie Scott, nearing the end of her first year at university in the spring of 1890, recorded in her diary: “Wore my gown for first time! It didn’t seem at all strange to do so.” Often deemed a cumbersome tradition by men, the cap and gown were dearly prized by women as an outward sign of their hard-won admission to the rank of undergraduates. For the first generations of university women, higher education was an exhilarating and transformative experience, but these opportunities would narrow in the decades that followed. In University Women Sara MacDonald explores the processes of integration and separation that marked women’s contested entrance into higher education. Examining the period between 1870 and 1930, this book is the first to provide a comparative study of women at universities across Canada. MacDonald concludes that women’s higher education cannot be seen as a progressive narrative, a triumphant story of trailblazers and firsts, of doors being thrown open and staying open. The early promise of equal education was not fulfilled in the longer term, as a backlash against the growing presence of women on campuses resulted in separate academic programs, closer moral regulation, and barriers that restricted their admission into the burgeoning fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The modernization of higher education ultimately marginalized women students, researchers, and faculty within the diversified universities of the twentieth century. University Women uncovers the systemic inequalities based on gender, race, and class that have shaped Canadian higher education. It is indispensable reading for those concerned with the underrepresentation of girls and women in STEM and current initiatives to address issues of access and equity within our academic institutions.

The first in-depth look at how women have shaped the history and legacy of Indiana University. Women first enrolled at Indiana University in 1867. In the following years they would leave an indelible mark on this Hoosier institution. However, until now their stories have been underappreciated, both on the IU campus and by historians, who have paid them little attention. Women at Indiana University draws together 15 snapshots of IU women's experiences and contributions to explore essential questions about their lives and impact. What did it mean to write the petition for women's admission or to become the first woman student at an all-male university? To be a woman of color on a predominantly white campus? To balance work, studies, and commuting, entering college as a non-traditional student? How did women contribute to their academic fields and departments? How did they tap opportunities, confront barriers, and forge networks of support to achieve their goals? Women at Indiana University not only opens the door to a more inclusive and accurate understanding of IU's past and future, but also offers greater visibility for Hoosier women in our larger understanding of women in American higher education.

Women in Christianity in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) offers a broad view of the nineteenth century as a time of dramatic change, particularly for women, critiqued in the light of postcolonial theory. This edited volume includes important contributions from academics in the field. Overarching themes include the cult of domesticity, the changing impact of Christianity on views of women’s nature in an age of scientific thinking, conflation of ‘gospel’ and ‘civilization’ in global mission, and the exclusion of women from public spheres of life. We meet powerful saints, campaigners, and thinkers, who bring about genuine transformation in the lives of women, and in society. But we also recognize the long shadow of Empire in the world of the twenty-first century, critiquing Colonialism and Empire, and views that restricted women’s lives. This engaging volume will be of key interest to students and scholars in Religion and Cultural Studies. Exploring the complexities of the nineteenth centur,y it draws on a range of scholarship, including TV documentaries, film, online, and more traditional academic resources.

This book offers an in‐depth historiographical and comparative analysis of prominent theoretical and methodological debates in the field. Across each of the sections, contributors will draw on specific case studies to illustrate the origins, debates and tensions in the field and overview new trends, directions and developments. Each section includes an introduction that provides an overview of the theme and the overall emphasis within the section. In addition, each section has a concluding chapter that offers a critical and comparative analysis of the national case studies presented. As a Handbook, the emphasis is on deeper consideration of key issues rather than a more superficial and broader sweep. The book offers researchers, postgraduate and higher degree students as well as those teaching in this field a definitive text that identifies and debates key historiographical and methodological issues. The intent is to encourage comparative historiographical perspectives of the nominated issues that overview the main theoretical and methodological debates and to propose new directions for the field.

This volume in a series of history of universities contains a mix of chapters and book reviews. The book acts as a tool for the historian of higher education. The volume combines original research and reference material. Topics include teaching and learning in the University of Bologna, religious debates in eighteenth-century University of Oxford, and Richard Bentley's intellectual genesis.

Drawing on examples from Britain, France, and the United States, this book examines how scholars and scholarship found themselves mobilized to solve many problems created by modern warfare in World War I, and the many consequences of this for higher education which have lasted almost a century.