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Preserving and Strengthening Together: Collective Strategies of U.S. Women's College Presidents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Auden D. Thomas
Auden D. Thomas*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University—Harrisburg
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Extract

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S. women's colleges in new ways as they sought to preserve and strengthen their individual institutions and to secure a future for women's colleges as an institutional type.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2008 , pp. 565 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 History of Education Society 

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References

1 The primary sources of evidence for this study include archival documents about the operations of the Women's College Coalition; reports published by the Coalition; newspaper articles about the Coalition; an interview with Sharp, Marcia K., executive director of the Coalition for its first two decades, from 1973 to 1993; and an interview with Jill Ker Conway, former Smith College president and a member of the Coalition's executive board from 1976 to 1985.Google Scholar

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