I want to tell a story about American higher education. Like many historical accounts, this story has a contrapuntal quality. As we know, historians frequently find themselves trying to weave discordant themes into complex patterns in the hope of making harmony. The reason for this is that simple themes are hard to find in the account of any complex social institution, especially one like education, which is composed of a motley accumulation of historical residues and social functions. We often come across one point about education that makes sense and then find a counterpoint that also makes sense. If we cannot eliminate one in favor of the other, then we try to put them together in a way that does not violate the rules of harmony and historical logic. In the effort to do so we, therefore, find ourselves in the business of writing fugues.

In the late 1820s, African Americans’ access to primary and religious instruction expanded significantly throughout the urban Northeast, yet barriers to their higher education remained firm. Segregated in public “African” schools, blacks were also barred from most private academies. Collegiate education similarly remained out of reach. In response, an alliance of black and white abolitionists launched a campaign to build a separate “African” college in 1831. Two ministers, one black, Peter Williams from New York, the other white, Simeon Jocelyn from New Haven, led the endeavor. After much consideration, they selected New Haven, Connecticut to house the new institution, believing that in “no place in the Union” is the “situation [of blacks] more comfortable, or the prejudices of a community weaker against them.” On September 5, 1831, Williams and Jocelyn announced their intentions. Their timing could not have been worse.

Before sunrise one spring morning in 1815, twenty-four-year-old Susan Davis Nye left her family's farm in Amenia, New York. “After a most affecting parting from my beloved brothers, sisters and friends, I kissed my little sleeping babes and before the sun shone upon my dear native hills, bade them farewell, perhaps forever!” Thus begins the first entry in her journal dated April 22nd, the day she undertook the initial leg of a long voyage south to teach in North Carolina.

A host of scholars have illuminated the ways in which schools and other institutions have created and then sustained a vast gender gap in the scientific professions. Many of these studies have focused on overt discrimination: deliberate efforts by men to prevent the entry of women into scientific pursuits. Others have identified subtle and culturally mediated processes that have often led girls away from scientific courses and careers. This article examines rhetorically lofty, but qualified, efforts to encourage women's interest in science, and it demonstrates how even these attempts may have contributed to the gender gap in the scientific professions. Specifically, it focuses on the portrayal of women scientists in a high school science magazine, Science World, and analyzes its ambiguous messages to high school girls about the possibility of careers in science. This essay employs ideas about curricular self-selection and the formulation of career aspirations in interpreting the depiction of female scientists in issues from the time of the magazine's founding in 1957 to 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and the symbolic dawn of the liberal feminist movement. During these years, the United States government funded numerous educational initiatives in response to the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik to attract more students to the scientific professions. In addition, professional scientists revised high school curricula in physics and biology to foster public rationality, critical thinking, and greater appreciation of scientific inquiry. The late postwar era also marked the beginning of greater female participation in the sciences.