This book draws on recent deconstructions around the idea of ‘femininity’ as a social, racial and class construct and explores the diversity of spaces that may be defined as educational that range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. It explores how notions of femininity change across time and place, and within individual lives. Such changes take place at the interface of external forces and individual agency. The application of the notion of ‘femininity’ that assumes a consistent definition of the term is interrogated by the authors, leading to a discussion of the rich possibilities for new directions in research into women’s lives across time, place, and individual life histories.
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
This book examines the education of working-class and middle-class girls between 1800-1914. It argues that an influential middle-class ideology advocated that all women should confine their activities to the home, as housewives and mothers. It held that women from the lower classes should be given instruction only in knowledge that was domestically useful, and that middle-class women should be allowed to develop accomplishments that would allow them to attract socially desirable suitors.
This edited collection illustrates the way in which women’s experiences of academe could be both contextually diverse but historically and culturally similar. It looks at both the micro (individual women and universities) and macro-level (comparative analyses among regions and countries) within regional, national, trans-national, and international contexts. The contributors integrally advance knowledge about the university in history by exploring the intersections of the lived experiences of women students and professors, practices of co-education, and intellectual and academic cultures. They also raise important questions about the complementary and multidirectional flow and exchange of academic knowledge and information among gender groups across programmes, disciplines, and universities. Historical inquiry and interpretation serve as efficacious ways with which to understand contemporary events and discourses in higher education, and more broadly in community and society. This book will provide important historical contexts for current debates about the numerical dominance and significance of women in higher education, and the tensions embedded in the gendering of specific academic programs and disciplines, and university policies, missions, and mandates.
This book is centered on the history of the girl from the medieval period through to the early twenty-first century. Authored by an international team of scholars, the volume explores the transition from adolescent girlhood to young womanhood, the formation and education of girls in the home and in school, and paid work undertaken by girls in different parts of the world and at different times. It highlights the value of a comparative approach to the history of the girl, as the contributors point to shared attitudes to girlhood and the similarity of the experiences of girls in workplaces across the world. Contributions to the volume also emphasise the central role of girls in the global economy, from their participation in the textile industry in the eighteenth century, through to the migration of girls to urban centres in twentieth-century Africa and China.
As a leading historian of women, Linda K. Kerber has played an instrumental role in the radical rethinking of American history over the past two decades. The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this remarkable collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume is gathered some of Kerber's finest work. Ten essays address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, she starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's sophisticated contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with an eloquent and personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a vital field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its leading scholars.
Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.
