In the Company of Educated Women; A History of Women and Higher Education in America

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. xxi, 298 pages. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Note on Sources. Selected Bibliography. Index. Inscribed on fep. The social, cultural, and economic circumstances that have shaped the development of women's higher education are discussed. After considering colonial America when women were outsiders to liberal arts institutions, the creation of women's and co-educational colleges is traced and the process by which women of different ethnic, racial, religious, and social groups became collegians is described. Four themes are stressed: women's struggles for access to institutions, the dimensions of the collegiate experience, the effects of education upon women's life choices, and the uneasy connection between feminism and women's educational advancement. Consideration is given to specific periods and developments, including: the utility of women's educations, 1800-1860; women and the modernizing of liberal education, 1860-1920; the collegiate education of women and its plural strands, 1920-1940; the expectations of the first modern college women in the 1920s and 1930s; a public debate for college women, 1920-1944; and the developments since 1944, including the effect of the GI Bill, the launching of Sputnik by the Russians, and federal legislation that was intended to recruit a wider spectrum of students, including women. Barbara Miller Solomon, educator and pioneer in women's history, suggests the transformative role that education could play in individual women's lives, a theme that also shaped much of her writing. Her insights about the rich history of educated women helped lay the foundations of modern women's history. Born Barbara Leah Miller in Boston on February 12, 1919. She graduated from Boston Girls' Latin School and then entered Radcliffe College in 1936. Just before her 1940 graduation, she eloped with Peter Herman Solomon, Harvard '40, the son of Harry Solomon, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Maida Herman Solomon, a pioneer in psychiatric social work. Rabbi Stephen Wise married the couple in New York. Under the direction of Oscar Handlin, she earned her doctorate in American history from Harvard in 1953. Her revised dissertation, which was published in 1956 as Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition, examined the attitudes of New England Brahmins toward recent immigrants, including Jews, from the 1850s to the 1920s. Demonstrating how many women combined family life with careers in the 1950s, Barbara Miller Solomon began teaching at Wheelock College in 1957. In 1959, she became head of the Women's Archives at Radcliffe, later the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. In 1963, she was named associate dean of Radcliffe College, and in 1970, she became the first woman dean at Harvard College, an event that received national publicity. Teaching and research were just as important to Solomon as administration. In 1972, she offered the first lecture course on the history of American women at Harvard, laying the groundwork for the formal establishment of women's studies there in 1983. The importance of higher education for women was a central theme in her prize-winning book In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, published in 1985, the year she retired from Harvard. She died of cancer on August 20, 1992.