Schwager's Educating Women in America

Educating Women in America

by

Sally Schwager

  • 1974 Jill Conay warns: the trend to coed in coll/univ in past decade was filled with dangers for women students, scholars, and graduates. coed schools had not met women's intellectual needs nor fostered equity.
  • Pat Albjerg Graham says women have trad been linked to gender-linked programs.
  • ed reform for women was one of most dramatic and complex developments of the 19th C.
  • lots of research on higher ed; dearth on dame schools, female academies, seminaries; and scant on k-12
  • who controlled women's ed? Who headed the schools? male or female?
  • With the influx of more female teachers, their authority seemed to decline???
  • Women weren't citizens (no vote) but they were responsible for the educ of their sons. Being a republican Mom.
  • Republican Motherhood.
  • Quakers very concerned with female ed
  • ed for women grounded in domestic responsibilities. this was the paradox for educ women diff from men.
  • However the expansion and concern for women ed is unique to America.

    Female Literacy

  • 1780 literacy based on signature, was 1/2 that of men's.
  • stagnated for 18th C.
  • 1850 women could R&W = to men.
  • literacy served as key to modern world: "no social change in the early Rep affected women more emphat than improvement of schooling."
  • female cult reliant on spoken word, male on written word.

    The Academy experience

  • Academies: after Rev; major advance in W ed; put into practice rep rhetoric of ed for W; provided new job ops; a new cohort of women leaders.
  • egalitarian rhetoric of rev provided vocab for W ed.
  • Young Ladies Academy opened 1787. W taught same subj from same books as boys. the rationale to teaching writing skills was for social status while math was to help husband with books. There was a limited conception of women.
  • The academy nurtured ambitions and skills, a new social role, Girls learned to compete and to be judged and learned to desire rewards, practiced by emulation. This fostered qualities founders never expected: indep, ambition, pub leadership.
  • success scared pop by 1830 as unfit for females, because it encouraged boldness, vanity and selfishness at the expense of humility, devotion to duty.
  • academy experience was a central paradox in W ed. Idea to instill values of domesticity and subservience instead provided skills and the desire to advance and even radical changes.
  • E Willard is at the center of ed advances for women in the 19th C.
  • Important source of feminism and an incubator of a new style of female personality.
  • EW was a woman of her times rooted in social conventions, but she was a woman of the future. Troy was subversive in that it paid attention to the intellectual development of women.
  • The changing state of womens' self-perceptions.
  • It was by training them as teachers that this dissemination occurred.
  • Troy stud were quite diff from rest of pop
  • EW had emphasis on training teachers, org alumni network, curricular was loaded with innovations.
  • EW's reforms were broadcast nationwide.
  • EW's curriculum was far more innovative in pedagogy, in fact most of the innovations in ed were in W sch because they were free to experiment.
  • Many of leading texts in boys sch written by Women.

    Women and the History of Teaching

  • Women teachers outnumber male.
  • 1834-1860 Male goes down
  • 1834-1860 Female teachers goes up 56.35 to 77.8%
  • However, never did employment go above 2% of white women 15- 60 as teacher.
  • 2 things of import on teaching experience (Bernard & Vinovskis)
  • teacher training