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This article is about Fredrika Bremer and her journey on how she helped women receive better education.

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Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining

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Not Even Past maps redlining maps from the 1930s with maps of health dispartities today, showing enduring contours of marked inequality in American cities over the past century.

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This specific packet goes through the entire educational progress of women. It has examples of time lines and charts as well as specific articles from throughout the changes made.

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This website has articles that summarize the drastic impacts women had on the education system.

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The nineteenth century saw major advances in educational opportunities for women and girls, from the common school movement in the early part of the century to multiple opportunities in higher education at the century's close. In the 1800s, women began to play central roles in education - as teachers and as learners, in formal and informal education settings, on the frontier and in the cities. What did these advances mean for the education of women and girls in the twentieth century?

This Symposium looks at developments in the education of women and girls over the course of the twentieth century, including research currently being conducted by and about women who historically have been excluded from mainstream academic discourse.

Our aim in presenting this Symposium is to showcase some of the provocative work being done in the area of the history of women in education. We selected works that we believe push the existing paradigm of historical research, including several articles that reflect the multiplicity of discourses being used in historical inquiry into women in education. Each article in this collection contributes to understanding women's lives in education through traditional and alternative historical analyses. Often the stories of women, marginalized in research and practice in general and in historical research in particular, make use of other disciplinary tools, such as economic, political, and anthropological methods of inquiry, to address the challenges of a paucity of written records and a history of exoticization of non--Western cultures. We hope this Symposium will play a role in furthering such scholarship and will encourage others to pursue research that takes existing scholarship into new territory.

We encouraged our authors to consider one of the following questions: What have been developments in the history of women in education? How has research in this area grown and/or changed? What were the educational experiences of marginalized women, such as linguistic, cultural, racial, and/or ethnic minorities? How have women taught and learned despite tremendous odds and oppression? We encouraged authors to address or incorporate nontraditional historiography, such as oral history. We sought out international pieces to move us toward understanding women's educational experiences in settings beyond our country's borders.

Our open interpretation of historical research for this issue allowed our authors to challenge the existing paradigms of historical research, to suggest other ways to study women in education, and to bring research by and about women of marginalized groups into this issue. The result includes work by both emerging and more established scholars, in traditional and nontraditional methodologies, on women in the United States and beyond.

We open this issue with Kathleen Weiler's "Reflections on Writing a History of Women Teachers." Weiler presents an overview of some current issues in feminist historiography, contemplating the importance of an awareness of the nature of knowledge, subjectivity in historical evidence, and the role that language plays in the social construction of gender. Through a reanalysis of data from her book Country Schoolwomen, Weiler offers a succinct synthesis of key issues in feminist historiography and a thoughtful examination of historical documents.

Asgedet Stefanos's "Women and Education in Eritrea: A Historical and Contemporary Analysis" offers a view of the diverse ways in which women attained formal and informal education before, during, and after the recent revolution that resulted in an independent Eritrea. Through the voices of Eritrean women interviewed by Stefanos in the course of her research, she describes Eritrea's transition from a premodern to an industrialized economy, as well as the accompanying changes in women's roles in that society. Stefanos relates how sexist practices of colonialists and missionaries sometimes inadvertently provided educational opportunities for women, while the Marxist revolutionary agenda that embraced women's issues in its effort to gain support for an independent nation created roles for women in the public sphere. This tended to create new problems for women who, following the revolution, attempted to assert their independence and autonomy in a post--revolutionary context in which efforts to improve women's status weakened.

Linda Eisenmann synthesizes the research on women in the history of higher education in "Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon." Eisenmann looks into how Solomon's comprehensive history, In the Company of Educated Women, both expanded and constrained historical research on women in higher education She explains that Solomon's text was unique in that she was the first scholar to attempt to be inclusive of women of color, immigrant women, and women of lower socioeconomic classes. Using Solomon's text as a springboard, Eisenmann considers the latest research done in the field of the history of higher education, as well as new directions this research could take, such as expanding the range of institutions and populations studied.

Linda Perkins's article, "The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880-1960," represents just such an expansion of the field. Perkins reveals the painful experiences of young Black women who persevered despite their ostracism and marginalization within these elite institutions. She exposes the way the Seven Sister colleges reflected society's attitudes toward Black women by continuing racism and oppression on their campuses. Her study also demonstrates, however, that despite the racist climate on these campuses, the African American women who attended were highly successful. Most of the women Perkins interviewed valued the opportunity to attain a degree at such an institution and the connections and status it brought.

In "The Hidden Half: A History of Native American Women's Education," Deirdre Almeida argues that Native American women have historically resisted educational policies that sought to assimilate them, using their education to advocate for indigenous rights and the power to tell their own stories. Almeida describes the Native American culture's long tradition of female leadership, and how their strength has helped generations of women survive the off--reservation boarding schools, outing system, and public education to reaffirm Native American experience, values, and knowledge.

In "Conflicted Progress: Coeducation and Gender Equity in Twentieth--Century French School Reforms," Marilyn Mavrinac analyzes the advances made in girls' education in France during two reform movements in the twentieth century. In addition, she touches on the status of women in teaching and school administrative positions during these two waves of reform. These two waves, one from 1920 to 1930 and the other from 1960 to 1980, both aimed to upset the nation's focus on educating a select White male elite. Mavrinac notes the irony that gender equity was often a byproduct of school reform, rather than a component of any reform movement. She suggests that the patriarchal structure of the French republic is largely to blame for the slow and conflicted progress made by women in education.

By publishing this Symposium, we hope to highlight the potential of such research to inform feminist pedagogy and educational policy now and in the future. While this collection highlights an array of women's educational experiences, the lives of women in the history of education leave much to be researched about the ways that diverse groups of women during different time periods have taught, learned, written, and led. We commend the authors in our Symposium for their contributions to the field of the history of education. We thank Sally Schwager and Eileen de los Reyes for contributing a Foreword and an Afterword. We also wish to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the Harvard Educational Review Editorial Board, in particular Mildred Carstensen, Holly Gelfond, José Antonio Segarra, and John Yun, who served on the Symposium committee with us.

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The History of Women in Education - HEPG

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The nineteenth century saw major advances in educational opportunities for women and girls, from the common school movement in the early part of the century to multiple opportunities in higher education at the century's close. In the 1800s, women began to play central roles in education - as teachers and as learners, in formal and informal education settings, on the frontier and in the cities.

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*girls went from being illiterate to outperforming males
*coeducation
*rude assaults from males

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This was the struggle for female education in the U.S.

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From false claims that algebra damages their ovaries, to outperforming boys, it's been a long journey for girls to achieve education equality.

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This article is about the access to higher education for anyone in America today. It helps us understand the impact of the past on todays education system.

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Higher education policy has taken center stage in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, with candidates proposing big ideas including free college and student debt cancellation. Candidates' focus on this issue stems from a very real change in the experience of paying for college. One in five U.S. households was burdened by student loan debt, as of 2012, compared to one in 10 in 1989. In a generation, outstanding student debt levels have reached $1.6 trillion.

Amidst the primary debate chatter, you have probably heard arguments that the student debt crisis is undermining the higher education system's ability to fuel economic mobility. But this Women's History Month, it's worth noting that the debt crisis is also undermining one of the most historically unique elements of American higher education: its role as a force for gender equity.

Religiously-motivated abolitionists, who were committed to equality for black Americans and women, opened the first coeducational colleges in the United States as early as 1835. Nevertheless, when women gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848, formally launching the suffrage movement for white women (no black women were in attendance), most higher-education institutions were still closed to women. The women at Seneca Falls issued the Declaration of Sentiments, which decried the fact that women had been denied not only their "inalienable right to the elective franchise," but also "the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her."

In the coming decades higher education dramatically opened up to women. In 1862, the federal government made its first major investment in higher education through the first Morrill Act, which granted federal land to each state for the explicit purpose of funding the creation of public colleges. As these public institutions opened, especially in the new western states, the majority accepted women from the start. Of the 34 new public institutions founded between 1861 and 1880, 71% accepted women.

The decision to accept women at new public institutions was driven by a range of practical concerns. For one thing, sparsely settled western states found it more cost-effective to found co-ed schools than sex-segregated institutions. For another, the spread of public primary and secondary schools across the country required an army of teachers, and the nation had turned to women to fill that role. These women, in turn, needed to be trained to teach high school. Regardless of the reasons, by 1880 one-third of all American students enrolled in higher education were women, "a percentage "without parallel elsewhere in the world," according to one historian.

The accessibility of higher-education institutions for women not only helped train teachers, but also helped seed a revolution in gender roles and the Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Early female college graduates did not have many career paths open to them; indeed, the majority went on to become homemakers, but their time in college fostered a commitment to public life that encouraged them to take up voluntary activism in their communities. These new graduates invented new public roles for themselves. Young, college-educated women founded settlement houses that offered educational services in urban immigrant communities and early public-health projects such as Lillian Wald's Visiting Nurses Association.
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In the years following the Civil War, the desire to educate women to be teachers also created new opportunities for black women. Spelman College was founded in Atlanta in 1881 to train African-American women to be teachers in their communities. Black women who graduated from college were much more likely to hold paying jobs than their white counterparts. Where white women privileged enough to attend college in these years were likely to ultimately marry men who could support them in the home, black women were more likely to have to contribute to their families' income because of the economic discrimination their husbands faced. Even with these extra demands on their time, they too went on to found and foster movements for equality. For example, Mary Church Terrell, who graduated from Oberlin in 1884, helped found the NAACP.

American women continue to benefit from trailblazing female college graduates. Today, for myriad reasons, American women are more likely to enroll in and complete college than men. In 2015, 72.5% of female recent high school graduates were enrolled, compared to 65.8% of recent male graduates. In 2017, women made up about 56% of students on college campuses. In every ethnic and racial group in the country, by age 31 women are more likely than men to have received a college degree.

But women also hold a disproportionate amount of student debt: they now hold almost two-thirds of the $1.6 trillion student debt load. There are many reasons for this. From the start, women rely on loans to finance higher education more than men. One 2017 study found that families with girls were significantly less likely to save for their children's college education than families with boys.

Even when men and women finish college with the same amount of debt, it generally takes women longer to pay off their loans. According to an AAUW study, one year after graduation, "women college graduates working full-time are paid 18% less than their male peers." In the following years that gap only widens. This problem is even more daunting for Black women, who typically make 61 cents for every $1 dollar a white man makes. With less income to turn to, it naturally takes women longer to pay down their loans. As long as the job market remains discriminatory, women and students of color who take on the same amount of debt as white men will end up paying more in the long term as the interest on their loans compounds.

Women thus have a particular interest in recent proposals to make college free and address existing student debt levels. In addition to the sweeping proposals on the table, smaller tweaks - for example making sure childcare is included in student cost-of-living calculations - would make a big difference to women. (Women are significantly more likely to enroll in college with young children than men are.)

The history of American women and higher education demonstrates how higher education can be an engine not just of individual opportunity but also of social innovation. Early public investments in higher education made higher education accessible to women. That investment not only helped fill an intended social need by training thousands of teachers, but also helped foster social change in unanticipated ways. Today, at best, debt levels constrain students' options after graduating; too often, cost deters students from completing a degree at all. As a result, both the public and individual benefits of higher education are reduced.

Proposals like free college suggest Americans may be ready for a major public reinvestment in higher education. Women stand to particularly benefit from such a reinvestment - but, if history is any indication, what they do with that change will benefit America too.
Historians' perspectives on how the past informs the present Suzanne Kahn is the deputy director of the Great Democracy Initiative and Education Program at the Roosevelt Institute

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Women With Access to Higher Education Changed America-But Now They're Bearing the Brunt of the Student Debt Crisis

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The history of higher education for American women shows how education can be an engine of individual opportunity and social innovation.