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A History of Women's Education in the United States: Thomas Woody's Classic—Sixty Years Later

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Maxine Schwartz Seller
Maxine Schwartz Seller*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Organization, Administration and Policy, State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

Although sixty years have passed since its original publication in 1929, Thomas Woody's monumental two-volume treatise A History of Women's Education in the United States remains the authoritative, indeed the only, comprehensive survey of the history of women's education in the United States. Women's lives have changed greatly since the appearance of this now-classic study. Moreover, recent decades have seen an explosion of scholarship in women's history and the history of education, inspired by the social ferment of the 1960s, including feminism, and the methodologies and interests of the new social history. This essay will reappraise Woody's treatise in relation both to its own times, the 1920s, and to the events and scholarship of the intervening years. After providing background information about Woody and his study, it will ask in what ways A History of Women's Education in the United States remains useful to scholars today and in what ways it should be supplemented or revised.

Type
Retrospective
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 95 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Woody, Thomas, A History of Women's Education in the United States 2 vols. (New York, 1929).Google Scholar

2 Historian Gerda Lerner has documented the rapid growth of women's history. Before 1960 there were only thirteen scholarly works on the history of American women. The fifteen-year period between 1960 and 1975 produced twenty-one new titles, the five years between 1975 and 1980 produced thirty-six, and the next six years produced at least forty. Gerda Lerner, “Priorities and Challenges in Women's History Research,” Perspectives (Newsletter of the American Historical Association), Apr. 1988, 17–18.Google Scholar

3 Woody, Thomas, New Minds, New Men? The Emergence of the Soviet Citizen (New York, 1932).Google Scholar

4 Woody, , History of Women's Education, 1: vii.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 2: 473.Google Scholar

6 Ibid.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 1: vii.Google Scholar

8 The depth of Woody's scholarship is suggested by the fact that he left a multidisciplinary personal library of over five thousand volumes, including twenty bilingual dictionaries, a hundred multivolume reference works, and a collection of one thousand slides to the University of Pennsylvania after his death. White, Joyce L., “Background of the Woody History of Education Seminar Collection,“ in The Thomas Woody Collection of the Penniman Library of Education, University of Pennsylvania, ed. Brickman, William W. and White, Joyce (Norwood, Pa., 1974), 25–28.Google Scholar

9 Woody, , History of Women's Education, 1: 353.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 2: 130.Google Scholar

11 Franklin Jameson, John, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, N.J., 1926).Google Scholar

12 See Woody, Thomas, Early Quaker Education in Pennsylvania (New York, 1920). See also Jensen, Joan M., “Not Only Ours but Others: The Quaker Teaching Daughters of the Mid-Atlantic, 1790–1850,“ History of Education Quarterly 24 (Spring 1984): 3–19.Google Scholar

13 Woody's only reference to nineteenth-century Catholic education for girls was in a negative context, when he noted that the existence of convent schools on the frontier stimulated Catharine Beecher to send Protestant teachers to the West.Google Scholar

14 Woody, , History of Women's Education, 1: 132.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 2: 460.Google Scholar

16 See Chafe, William, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York, 1972); and Fuchs Epstein, Cynthia, Women's Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers (Berkeley, 1971).Google Scholar

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18 See, for example, Degler, Carl, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980); Finkelstein, Barbara, ed., Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York, 1979); and Wells, Robert V., Revolutions in Americans’ Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, Conn., 1982).Google Scholar

19 See, for example, Kerber, Linda, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980); Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood,“ American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–75; Scott Smith, Daniel, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Hartman, Mary S. and Banner, Lois W. (New York, 1974): 119–36; and Kerber, Linda, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39.Google Scholar

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23 Much of this scholarship deals with contemporary schools. See Stacey, Judith, Bereaud, Susan, and Daniels, Joan, And Jill Came Tumbling After: Sexism in American Education (New York, 1974); and Frazier, Nancy and Sadker, Myra, Sexism in School and Society (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

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25 On these and related issues, see Roth Walsh, Mary, Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven, Conn., 1977).Google Scholar

26 Solomon, , In the Company of Educated Women; Blair, Karen J., “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman's Building in Seattle, 1908–1921,“ Frontiers 8 (1984): 45–52; Gordon, Lynn D., “Co-education on Two Campuses: Berkeley and Chicago: 1890–1912,” in Women's Being, Women's Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History, ed. Kelley, Mary (Boston, 1979); and Antler, Joyce, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven, Conn., 1987).Google Scholar