Abstract
The introduction places women historians from the 1890s until 1960 into the broader context of women’s education and advancement. It traces women’s limited education prior to 1945 and highlights the revolutionary impact of the 1958 National Defense Education Act which provided federal support to women students. Up to 1960, women students came from wealthier families, and attended women’s colleges. Few were graduate students or later taught with men. The introduction briefly captures their subjects’ careers: lacking academic posts, or the few in academia. They were apt to be writers rather than instructors, but wrote popular and incisive studies.
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- 1.
Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 94–101. The first co-educational college to admit women was Oberlin College in Ohio in 1838.
- 2.
Solomon, Company of Women, 62–63. In addition, women students were not from the wealthiest families, or from those with long-term wealth, but tended to be from the professional and commercial middle class who had experienced social mobility themselves. While the average income for Americans ranged from $680 to $830 per year over the second half of the nineteenth century, college family incomes exceeded $2000; even so, 34 percent of women students came from families making less than $1200, and it was a major economic struggle for them to attend college (Solomon, Company of Women, 64–65).
- 3.
Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London: University College, London Press, 1995), 56–84; Anne T. Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century France: Social Values and Corporate Identity at the Normal School Institution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 90–107; Sharif Gemie, Women and Schooling in France, 1815–1914 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), 55–78.
- 4.
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 155–204. African-Americans were, for the most part, excluded from higher education, although there were efforts to establish both private and public institutions to meet the needs of black students. Two white northeastern missionaries established Spelman College in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. They were followed by two additional missionary presidents. However, while emphasizing a religious agenda, these women moved the school to a broader liberal arts curriculum as it evolved into a college from a seminary. Yolanda L. Watson and Shelia T. Gregory, Daring to Educate: The Legacy of the Early Spelman College Presidents (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2005), 1–37; 117–132.
- 5.
American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations, edited by Ina Rae Hark (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 2007, see especially pages 25–47; Andrew C. Miller, “The American Dream Goes to College: The Cinematic Student Athletes of College Football,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 43:6 (2010); Miller contrasts the more middle- and upper-class sports such as tennis as portrayed in films of the 1920s and 1930s with more diverse sports such as football, 1222–23.
- 6.
A Century of Service: Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1890–1990, edited by Ralph D. Christy and Lionel Williamson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 3–29. Women had a small role at these institutions designed to increase those attending college and to focus on practical subjects; they constituted one third of students, and in 1927–28 only 18 percent of faculty were women (mostly in home economics) based heavily on restrictions against hiring married women. Eighty percent of male faculty were married, but only 10 percent of women. Alison Comish Thorne, Visible and Invisible Women in Land-Grant Colleges, 1870–1940 (Logan: Utah State University, 1985) [print version of honors lecture], 5–6.
- 7.
Diverse Histories of American Sociology, edited by Anthony J. Blasi (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2005). This collection looks at sociology as part of a reform movement at the turn of the twentieth century and includes an essay by Jane Addams and a study of Robert E. Park, an early African-American sociologist at Chicago; Introductory materials, xii–xix; 1–2. Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 33–54.
- 8.
Deegan , Addams and Chicago, 1.
- 9.
Hilda L. Smith , “A Prize-Winning Book Revisited; Women Historians and Women’s History: A Conflation of Absence,” The Journal of Women’s History 3:1 (1992), 133–141; Bonnie G. Smith, “Whose Truth, Whose History?” Journal of the History of Ideas, 56:4 (1995), 661–668. These two critical essays confront two works, which claim to represent the essential nature of historical scholarship while essentially omitting women and women’s history.
- 10.
Keith Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1974). Veterans who served in the military for as little as ninety days received tuition and a living subsidy to attend college or vocational school. “By 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of college enrollments.” Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 200–201; Wayne J. Urban, More than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2010). Deondra Rose argues that the NDEA of 1958 and the 1965 Higher Education Act offered loans and fellowships that allowed women to receive college degrees and were the basis for women later receiving more degrees than men. “The Public Policy Roots of Women’s Increasing College Degree Attainment,” Studies in American Political Development, 30 (2016), 62–93.
- 11.
He was a native of Almonte, Ontario; The Daily British Whig, February 3, 1921.
- 12.
Binder of Memorabilia, Munro Papers, Huntington.
- 13.
Typescript outlining his life, Finding Aid, Edwin Francis Gay Papers, Huntington Library; the Rhythm of History was a paper he presented before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard and printed independently by the University in 1923.
- 14.
Biographical outline, Finding Aid, Gay Papers, Huntington Library.
- 15.
Whiting Williams to Gay, concerning South American matters, January 3, 1930; his daughter published in the Economic History Review in 1971 and in Midland History in 1978.
- 16.
Solomon, Company of Women, 172–185.
- 17.
From Avery Craven to Dean Napier Wilt, “‘Informal’ Report on the examination of Mabel Benson,” Department of History Papers, University of Chicago, special collections, Regenstein Library, August 31, 1944.
- 18.
Calculated from “Directory of Dissertations,” The American Historical Association (web publication ongoing). I used recipients’ names to determine sex, and if the name was ambiguous as to gender, I assumed the individual was male.
- 19.
Finding aid to “Early Files of Berkshire Conference of Women Historians,” Schlesinger Library, MC 606.
- 20.
Survey distributed by Helen Allen at Vassar College to Berkshire members on March 3, 1931, Berkshire Papers, Schlesinger Library.
- 21.
Judith P. Zinsser, History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 1; and for a broader discussion of traditional history see Zinsser, History and Feminism, 5–15. That the story of men’s past was so clearly identified with the discipline of history is made clear in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) in which he argues that objectivity was the goal of professional historians until some began to write women’s or black history, or as he termed them “a history of their own” and this led to “Objectivity in crisis.” Men writing about themselves never led to such a crisis (ix, 415–521).
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Smith, H.L. (2018). Introduction: Women’s Scholarship Within and Outside the Academy, 1870–1960. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_1
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