Womens History in Education

1
Womens History in Education
2
Colonial Times

• Women were restricted to learning domestic skills
• Women were bystanders to the education of boys
• The home was the Womans Classroom (Private
  Sphere)
• In the 1700s women were lucky to receive of few
  years education in a dame school
• By the late 1700s new ideas started to brew
• Girls being taught during off hours of the day
• 6 - 730 a.m. and 4 - 630 p.m.

3
Revolutionary Ideas

• Becomes a womans duty to nurture her childrens
  intellectual development/be her childs teacher
• but how would a woman teach without an
  education?
• The Young Ladies Academy (1790)
• Women were taught to become more efficient and
  innovative domestic workers, as well as more
  virtuous wives and mothers
• Some Schools began to open the doors to girls
• Since some communities could not afford to
  construct a separate building for womens
  studies, the would build one school and divide it
  between the sexes.

4
Seminaries

• These were protected educational environments for
  high school girls
• They would teach women
• To become fit companions for their husbands
• How to be the first teachers of their children
• To become the moral and spiritual cornerstone
  of the family
• The curriculum is not much different then any
  other education at the time. Except the spiritual
  and moral development of their students was
  supreme.
• Seminaries took on teacher education, creating
  effective teacher training programs.
• With the arrival of public schools, seminaries
  became a necessity.

5
Women in College

• Oberlin was the first college to admit men and
  women
• This was progress, but problems arise
• Regardless of the inequalities, women achieved
  high academic success. Women now wanted to enter
  the larger state supported colleges.
• Three woman apply to the University of Michigan
  but after review and opposition from other
  University presidents the women were denied. But
  the Civil War would make Michigan reverse this
  decision
• Admitting woman did not mean they were accepted
• Education for ransom University of Rochester
  would admit females if they could raise 100,000
  dollars to pay for additional classrooms and
  instructors.
• Harvards Annex better known as Radcliffe.
• This was a separate building down the black for
  females

6
Women Establish Their Own Colleges

• Frustrated with the struggle to receive equal
  education at existing universities, some women
  and men envisioned creating their own.
• To build and endow a college for young women
  which shall be to them what Yale and Harvard are
  to young men.
• Vassar College
• Smith College
• Bryn Mawr
• Wellesley College
• Barnard College
• Mount Holyoke College

7
Reasons women should avoid higher education

• As more women were being admitted to prestigious
  colleges and advancing in education, opponents
  needed ammunition.
• Below the skin and under the skull lurked the
  reasons women did not belong in higher education
• Craniology
• -The size of the brain determines your
  intelligence
• Reproduction
• -prolonged coeducation was physically dangerous
  to reproductive health of females

8
An Era of New Hope

• Congress passed the Title IX in 1972
• federal law that made sex discrimination
  illegal
• Congress passed the Woman's Educational Equity
  Act
• Funds research, materials, and training to help
  eliminate sex bias
• By 1980, the National Institute of Education was
  providing limited funding to investigate the
  nature of sex bias in schools.