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Perspectives on the History of Women's Education in the United States

THE LIVELY CURRENT DEBATE about developing programs of study which will raise women's consciousness and bring them into American intellectual life on a level of equality with men tends to be ahistorical and to subscribe to many of the unexamined assumptions of American educational history. Among the most revered of these is the interpretation unhesitatingly advanced by historians (1) of education that coeducation automatically was a “liberating experience” for American women and that access to professional education naturally placed women on a level with male professional peers. Advocates of increased participation for women in the creation and transmission of American culture had better examine these assumptions with the skepticism which feminists normally extend to male interpretations of women's experience if they are not to devise a faulty strategy for reform through inability to perceive some of the concealed hazards of the landscape. Although cultural historians have universally concluded that the development of educational institutions in colonial America and in the young republic of the early national period played a decisive role in the creation of an American democratic culture, little effort has been expended in analysing the impact of these institutions on women's social role or on their consciousness of themselves as independent intellects. To understand the dimensions of this impact we must begin, as in all questions of American cultural history, with the colonial period and the Puritan heritage. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay gave as succinct an expression of Puritan attitudes to women with aspirations to learning as it would be possible to find in his diary entry after meeting the emotionally disturbed wife of a friend.