Education of Women in the U.S.

Abstract

Through the colonial years in America, the majority of women were illiterate and formal schooling for them was nonexistent. The first schools for girls were founded in the early 1800s. Many of the early women's academies became the first women's colleges or normal schools for teachers. The second half of the twentieth century brought new opportunities for young women as the baby boom generation flooded higher educational institutions. Fueled by the women's movement of the late 1960s, and backed by legislation, women realized historic educational and economic equity in the late twentieth century. Equity issues of the twenty-first century center on encouraging young women to take full advantage of opportunities, and social scientists continue to study gender differences.

Overview

Although women have traditionally not had the same opportunities for education and employment as men, it is too simplistic to paint them as victims of history. There is a rich legacy of women's education in the United States and it is at once a story of struggle and achievement. From the earliest years of the Republic, many promising opportunities arose for women. The majority of school teachers in America were women, and academies and women's colleges came to the fore through the nineteenth century. The women's rights movement, begun in the same century, began to raise awareness of the status of women and won for them the right to vote.

For decades, women were restricted from getting the education required for entry into the professions, and in teaching, their pay differed significantly. In Maine, for example, in the 1840s, male teachers earned $15.40 a month, while women earned $4.80. The pattern was much the same in Ohio, where men received $15.42 to women's $8.73 (Matthews, 1976, p. 51).

The colonial elite was interested in education for men to meet its needs for the "higher professions" of law, medicine, or religion, and their sons filled the elite eastern schools, but "by the time of the Revolutionary War, people were less homogeneous, and there was a commonly held belief that the democratic representative government would fail unless the state book a real responsibility in educating the children of all people" (Cheek, 2004). The Republic demanded a public education for social, economic, democratic, and national reasons.

From the signing of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in the late eighteenth century, through most of the nineteenth century, the rights of citizens were never intended for women. Most public schools that were established were intended for boys and only a handful of colleges, public or private, were coeducational even by 1900 (Harwarth, Maline, & DeBra, n.d.). The first public high school opened in Boston in 1821 for boys only; a high school for girls did not open until 1857.

Changes in the Nineteenth Century. Early nineteenth-century lives were short, girls married young, and the time allotted for formal education in an agrarian society where families were big was very limited for both sexes. A high school education came to mean two years of post-elementary education for those between the ages of twelve and sixteen. As the nineteenth century progressed, private academies were joined by "common schools" and the public education propagated by education reformer Horace Mann spread. Female academies and seminaries opened, initially in private homes, between 1800 to 1875. "The seminaries in general… devoted themselves to providing religious training, home making skills and a degree of intellectual development for women" (Matthews, 1976, p. 49).

Although they might be criticized for their limited vision of educating women, many of the early seminaries became women's colleges and the normal schools (colleges for teachers) that provided a foundation of states' higher education systems. By 1888, 63 percent of American teachers were women (Matthews, 1976, p. 51). Emma Willard's seminary in Troy, New York, founded in 1822, emphasized preparing girls to become teachers, and her school became a model for teacher's programs ("Emma Hart Willard, 1787-1870," n.d.).

The first women's rights movement was inaugurated in 1848 with the primary objective of suffrage—obtaining the right of women to vote—which did not happen until 1920. Although it had little impact on education, it was symptomatic of cultural change at work and paralleled the impact of industrialization. By the turn of the twentieth century, the concept of the modern high school was forged, and girls were in the majority of the high school population, even though the total number of those enrolled in high school was very low (with only around 8 percent of the population enrolled) and fewer graduating. By the turn of the century, during the 1899–1900 school year, for example, a disproportionate number of the graduates were women (57,000) vs. men (38,000). As the twentieth century progressed, the proportion was less marked and has, since World War II, approximately paralleled the percentage of the general population (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).

Between 1840 and 1890, the public high school had emerged from the shadow of the private academy. While enrollments were still small by today's standards, by the 1870s and 1880s the number of public secondary schools was expanding (Mirel, 2006).

The history of education is inextricably tied to economic history. The decision to pursue education voluntarily involves economic considerations, and the ability for a society to provide education to its young people is an economic one as well. The opportunities for higher education, and even mandatory high school education, is a twentieth-century concept, and a post–World War II one at that.

The Early Twentieth Century. Through the turn of the century into the Depression era, "compulsory schooling requirements and child labor laws were typically weak or poorly enforced, … whether children attended school or worked for wages was a decision that had to be made by individual families" (Tolnay & Bailey, 2006, p. 254). Industrialization in the late nineteenth century drew massive immigration from Europe, and migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, called the Great Migration, changed literacy and educational demands from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Young immigrant women filled the mills and factories. The inventions of electrical machinery, typewriters, sewing machines, etc. created a demand for new kinds of skills, and women were needed to participate in the workforce.

Tolnay and Bailey (2006) studied educational persistence of immigrant populations in 1920. They found that the economic pressures on families were so great "that immigrant children in nearly every group and in every city throughout the United States chose work when it was available over extended schooling prior to the 1930s. Blacks, conversely, appear to have placed a high value on education and sent their children to school at unusually high rates …" (p. 256). Their study also revealed that African American women were disproportionately represented in the school population in 1920, possibly due to the lack of employment opportunities for them.

Educators and industrialists began to advocate for integrating training into the curriculum to suit job demands. In 1918, the National Education Association Curriculum and the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education called for differentiated high school programs with tracks, defined as academic (college preparatory), vocational, commercial (secretarial), and general. Women flocked into the commercial curriculums as new opportunities for secretary or office worker were coming available (Mirel, 2006).

In 1930, an announcement appeared in American School and University stating, "For the first time in the history of the country, the number of boys and girls of high-school age who are in attendance upon our secondary schools has passed the 50-percent mark" ("Celebrating 70 years," p. 10). As the world sank into Depression during the 1930s and there were fewer jobs, particularly for young people, many turned to schooling. Attendance grew rapidly through the decade, until the beginning of United States participation in World War II, when more than seven million students aged 14 to 17 were in school (Mirel, 2006).

World War II & Beyond. By the end of 1941, the United States was embroiled in war. Young men went off to fight as mothers and daughters took their jobs in the factories and mills to keep the economy going and to fuel the war effort. Although most women deferred to the men when they returned and left their wartime jobs, what they did subsequently with their lives was not so predictable. Linda Eisenmann, in her 2002 study of postwar female citizens, found studies from the early 1950s that argued that women continued to constitute an important part of America's workforce. She also points to a national embarrassment during the Cold War when American women compared unfavorably to Soviet women who were very well represented in their ranks of scientists, engineers, and physicians that defies the image of 1950s housebound women (Eisenmann, 2002, p. 135).

Eisenmann's thesis in "Educating the Female Citizen in a Post-War World: Competing Ideologies for American Women, 1945–1965" (2002) is that although it is generally thought that women followed the advice of social and political leaders and abandoned college and labor after the war, the numbers of women who stayed in the workforce and continued with their education grew steadily after the war. "By 1957, college had attracted one in every five U.S. women between ages 18–21" (Eisenmann, 2002, p. 134).

The idealization of domestic life in the 1950s belied the festering social unrest that would soon reveal itself. Eisenmann (2002) believes that it was the tension of expectations versus the reality of the force of women in education and labor force that provoked the women's movement of the late 1960s. "Post-war women were caught between competing patriotic, economic, cultural, and psychological ideologies that sometimes recognized but never resolved the contradictions facing them as female citizens" (p. 134).

The subsequent decades put affordable higher education within reach of all who were capable, and gave rise to the women's movement that demanded new freedoms. The nation anticipated the major population influx in colleges in the 1960s and 1970s, and rushed to meet the expectation that higher education would be there for the huge population bubble of students who moved through the system. Between 1960 and 1970, college enrollment doubled, and by 1980 female enrollment exceeded that of males (NCES, 2005).

The women's movement of the late 1960s into the 1970s helped force the doors open for major equity gains for women. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 had mandated equity for the sexes, and the amendments to it in the early 1970s, including Title IX, applied the law to education and specifically expanded the rights of women to participate in intercollegiate athletics. The Women's Equal Education Act legislated funds that supported efforts to achieve equity.

During this period, feminists and social scientists also began to study gender differences in earnest. A 1975 report on male-female achievement by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicated that, at age nine, males and females perform at about the same level in all subjects but, "by age 13, girls have begun a decline in achievement which continues downward through age 17 and into adulthood" (Bornstein, 1979, p. 337). Bornstein (1979) went on to point out how essential education is to women, particularly as so many end up finding themselves alone and self-supporting. The article, typical of its time period, pointed out how critical education is to every woman's economic survival.

Equity issues are not necessarily resolved in contemporary society, and writers and social scientists continue to analyze opportunities for women and their place in society. Although women now outnumber men in colleges and most graduate programs, there is a continued concern about why they continue to lag behind in entering the sciences, engineering, and computer science. It is thought that this issue is not helped when an esteemed academic such as Harvard president Larry Summers commented that women lack the genetic gifts to achieve in the sciences (Pollitt, 2005). Summers later apologized, but not until after many women cried foul and he was loudly accused of sexism.

Further Insights

Colonial Times & the Early Republic. Colonial women led hard lives. They married as teenagers and bore many children. There was little time for learning. It is estimated that 60 percent of Puritan women could not sign their names, while 11 percent of men were illiterate (p. 48).

In 1667, the Farmington, Connecticut, town council opened a school for children to learn to read and write English. At the next town meeting, they rewrote their provision to state that only boys would attend the school. It was not until the end of the 1790s that girls went to town schools, and only at times when the school was not used for educating boys, and it was not until the early 1800s that they were attending year-round (Matthews, 1976, p. 48).

The Republic: 1820 to 1870. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and founder of Dickinson College, believed that women needed to have a broad utilitarian education because they had to serve as educators of their children, particularly their sons. He did believe, however, that women should learn English, bookkeeping, geography, and natural philosophy and deemphasized the arts and French so as "to embellish the homes and societies of their husbands" (cited in Matthews, 1976, p. 49).

Emma Hart Willard. At the same time, new currents were at work in the country that offered new opportunities for women. Educational groundbreaker Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870) was about to open her female seminary in Troy, New York. Willard had opened the Middle Female Seminary in her home in 1814, from which she demonstrated the ability of her students to "master classical and scientific subjects, areas of study which were at the time largely considered appropriate only for young men" ("Emma Hart Willard," n.d.).

Willard achieved international success and was invited by Governor DeWitt Clinton to start a school in New York. She opened the short-lived Waterford Academy in Waterford, New York, but then moved to Troy, where she opened a girl's preparatory school in 1822 that survives to this day as the Emma Willard School. Women's public high schools in Boston and New York opened five years after Willard opened her school, and Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts opened sixteen years later.

Female academies and seminaries had their heyday from 1800 to 1875; there were nearly 6,000 of them that enrolled 250,000 women by 1850 (Stevenson, 1995). They provided "religious training, homemaking skills, and a degree of intellectual development for women" (Matthews, 1976, p. 49). Catherine Beecher, who founded the Hartford Female Seminary in Connecticut, was one of the most renowned of seminary teachers. Attendees ranged in age from twelve to sixteen and studied a wide variety of subjects. The schools were criticized by some as frivolous, and completion rates were low, but they did produce some teachers and were precursors of the normal schools that sprang up at the end of the century to educate teachers (Matthews, 1976, p. 50).

The Women's Liberation Movement. The sheer numbers of women moving through post–World War II society forced social and educational equality for young women. Likewise, postwar prosperity and the expansion of the middle class also allowed young people the opportunity and freedom to explore and pursue career alternatives and even extend the time before they would have to earn a living. Other factors came into play that also allowed women the freedom to pursue new directions on a par with men. One was the availability of the birth control pill in the late 1950s, that for the first time in history allowed a woman to be in control of her reproductive capabilities. Secondly, women also benefited from the civil rights and resultant women's liberation movement of the late 1960s, which secured for them the freedoms, mandated by legislation and precedents, to seek the education and careers of their choosing and capabilities.

Margaret Sanger was an angry young woman who had watched her mother suffer from the effects of poverty and the burden of mothering eleven children. She founded Planned Parenthood to keep other women from experiencing the same fate. Sanger, with the financial backing of Katherine McCormick, contracted with physician Gregory Pinks' laboratory to develop the first oral contraceptive. "The pill" was approved by the FDA in 1957. With control of their fertility, women could concentrate on other aspects of their lives, and "by 1990, 80 percent of all American women born since 1945 had tried [the pill]" (Leitzell, 2007, par. 8).

The feminist movement of the late 1960s brought issues of gender inequity to the fore. Betty Freidan's book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, helped inaugurate the movement and gave the likes of Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and legions of others the impetus to push for women's rights. The women were vocal and had to share the stage along with those demanding civil rights for blacks and others protesting the Vietnam War, but managed to help open the flood gates for young women of the 1970s and beyond to take advantage of new and potentially equal educational and employment opportunities.

Viewpoints

Current Issues in Women's Education. In 1979, Rita Bornstein called the history of women in America "a sorry record of deprivation and oppression, guised in protection" (Bornstein, 1979, p. 331). She points out that as late as 1945, most medical schools had quotas for women that were set around 5 percent, and although Oberlin was the first college to admit women along with men, the female students had to wash the men's clothes, clean their rooms, and serve them meals. Bornstein observed that, "Those women were not being prepared for careers, but to be more intelligent wives and mothers" (p. 332).

Few twenty-first-century feminists would take as cynical a tone as Bornstein. The lot of most American women today has of course improved, and those who partake of advanced education expect to enjoy equal employment, or at least equal economic opportunity. A study by Dr. Laura Perna of the University of Maryland shows that women reap more benefits from education than their male counterparts. Although men with college degrees average incomes comparable to men who have no postsecondary education, women who attain an associates, bachelor's, or advanced degree "average incomes that are 32, 45, and 81 percentage points higher than women with no secondary education" (cited in Troumpoucis, 2004, par. 8).

It has been pointed out that women have entered law and medicine because they are the most conspicuous routes into high-paying, prestigious careers. Society, however, still struggles with gender equity in other fields. Teaching and nursing, for example, are still predominately female professions. Likewise, attracting women into science fields, computer science, and engineering continues to prove particularly challenging.

Sullivan (2007) quotes a National Science Foundation study that showed that at 16 percent, the number of college women majoring in engineering was down 20 percent from a decade earlier. This was despite the fact that high school girls take as many science courses as boys. While the American Society for Engineering Education reported that 21.4 percent of undergraduates enrolled in engineering programs were women in 2015, showing that their representation in the educational field was increasing once more, their percentage still remained lower (Yoder, 2015).

Sullivan cites research by Donna Ginther and Shulami Kahn, who found that when male scientists marry, they increase their chances of landing a tenure-track position, but when women do the same, their chances decrease. Further, having a child under the age of five lowers the probability further for women scientists by 8 percent (Sullivan, 2007, p. 27). Sullivan also reports on efforts to recruit young people into engineering with a multimedia campaign that will change the stereotypes of engineering "as too nerdy, or that it's too difficult, or for boys only" (p. 27).

Some think the solution for women to overcome sexism and achieve their full potential lies in single-sex education. Baskin (2004) differs with this viewpoint. A graduate of all-female Mount Holyoke College, she says she attended the school for "the brainpower of the students and the caliber of the professors" (p. 34). She goes on to say that the school was "outstanding in spite of … [its] single-sex status.… Claiming otherwise only condescends to [its] highly capable students and reinforces the absurdity that succeeding in a co-ed world first demands steeling oneself in gender isolation.… It's the twenty-first century. I thought women were done sacrificing" (Baskin, 2004, p. 34).

Terms & Concepts

Academies / Seminaries: Single-sex secondary schools were established in the nineteenth century and were called either "academies" or "seminaries." As the word "seminary" implies, religious education was part of the curriculum, typical of schools in the first half of the century.

Baby Boom: Baby boom is the term for the surge in population growth between 1946 and 1964. Baby boomers are children of the post–World War II era who crowded schools and colleges through the 1950s into the 1980s.

Beecher, Catherine, 1800–1878: Catherine Beecher founded the Hartford Female Seminary (Connecticut) and was one of a number of New England female educators who fought to improve education and educational opportunities for young women in the nineteenth century.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 & Title IX: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ensures equal educational opportunity by outlawing segregation in education. Title VII of the act "prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The 1972 amendments to the act included educational institutions. Title IX was significant legislation for women students in that it ensured that they have the same opportunity for men to participate in athletics programs.

Curricular Differentiation: Based on a proposal by the NEA in 1918 that high schools be "comprehensive" and offer different curricula to meet different societal and economic needs, most urban high schools were employing curricular differentiation by 1920 by offering academic, vocational, general and commercial (secretarial) programs (Mirel, 2006).

Lyon, Mary, 1797–1849: Mary Lyon was the founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, later to become Mount Holyoke College. She created a disciplined educational environment, which although unaffiliated, was Christian based, but emphasized the sciences, including chemistry, and other subjects that young women of the time were generally not taught.

Mann, Horace, 1796–1859: Horace Mann is sometimes called the "father of American education," who was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. He promoted "common education" and opened fifty schools as well as establishing a mandatory six-month minimum school year. He later became president of Antioch College in Ohio.

Normal Schools: Normal schools were institutes of advanced learning whose primary objective was to train teachers. Early normal schools sprang from nineteenth-century academies for women and most today are integrated into states' systems of higher education. They were called "normal schools" because their curricular objective was to set teaching standards or norms. Some high schools also had a "normal curriculum," which trained young women to teach in the local elementary schools.

Willard, Emma, 1787–1870: New England educator Emma Willard is credited with opening the first US academy for girls in Troy, New York, in 1822. Originally called the Troy Female Seminary, and later named after her, the Emma Willard School is open to this day.

Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA): Legislation enacted to help fund equity for women's education and support the tenets of Title IX of 1972. The WEEA was part of the Special Projects Act contained in the Education Amendments of 1974. Federal grants were appropriated for equity programs.

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Suggested Reading

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Flexner, E. (1959). Century of struggle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Langdon, E. (2001). Women's colleges then and now: Access then, equity now. Peabody Journal of Education, 76, 5–30. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5877952&site=ehost-live

Mars, M. M., & Hart, J. (2017). Graduate STEM-based agriculture education and women agriculturalists: An agency perspective. Journal of Agricultural Education, 58(3), 256–274. Retrieved February 14, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=127320779&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Moroney, S. (2000). Widows and orphans: Women's education beyond the domestic ideal. Journal of Family History, 25, 26–39.

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