One of the most poignant expressions of longing for education I have ever read was written by Anna Julia Cooper. Born into slavery shortly before the Civil War, Cooper managed to accomplish the unthinkable: not only did she earn a college degree (from Oberlin College) and go on to become a teacher and later a principal, she also earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, composing her dissertation in French. Writing about her desire for education, Cooper said, “The chance of the seedling…is all I ask, the chance for growth and self-development, the permission to be true to the aspirations of my soul.”1 I have been a little in love with Cooper ever since I first read those words, over twenty years ago. She epitomizes to me the passion for learning – not to do something, but to be something. Learning an occupation, she wrote, should not be dissociated from a person’s “first right and highest prerogative – to live.”2 That passion for learning, and that determination to live true to one’s own aspirations, has motivated many of the women whose stories are told in this volume…and probably a good many of the authors, as well.
Although women have been devotedly – and sometimes intermittently or lackadaisically – pursuing higher education for a very long time, and women now make up more than half of the undergraduates in the United States, there is much about the history of women’s education that we still do not know. Historians Mabel Newcomer and later Barbara Solomon published the first extensive accounts, A Century of Higher Education for American Women in 1959 and In the Company of Educated Women in 1985.3 Much excellent work has been done since then, in focused articles and monographs. Historians before, after, and including Solomon have asked questions regarding women’s access to education. Scholars have expanded our knowledge of who was educated and how the curriculum has changed over time. In addition, scholars have moved the field beyond looking at the elite private and public institutions, and have broadened the range of institutions to include academies, seminaries, normal schools, and junior colleges.4
Newer research poses different questions: Who was excluded from education and why? What can those exclusions tell us about constructions of race and gender, and about the social meaning of education? What did students themselves have to say about their education? What roles did faculty and administrators play in perpetuating or expanding particular views of gender, race, or the link of education to citizenship? How did women’s inclusion transform both the institutions and our understanding of the purposes of higher education? These are questions pursued by scholars in this anthology.
These types of questions spring from particular theoretical perspectives. In this Introduction, I suggest some perspectives that might help situate the chapters in this volume, and that might lead to additional research questions. Following the discussion of theory, I will introduce readers to the terrific chapters that comprise this collection.
Thinking Theoretically
Historians tend not to engage too readily in theory, or at least not to foreground the theory we use.5 In recent decades there has been an increasing call for historians to grapple more with theory, or to use it more explicitly. A special issue of History of Education Quarterly recently debated the question of whether and how to use theory.6 In the field of the history of women’s education specifically, Linda Eisenmann, in a stellar review of the field, also mentioned the lack of theory.7 Eisenmann wrote that “historians have not yet succeeded in connecting the numerous ‘detailed empirical investigations’ to theoretical approaches,” and therefore we have no comprehensive account of the education of girls and women. Most accounts, she notes, have focused on access.
Eisenmann suggested four interpretive frameworks for thinking about women’s education, with a focus on institution building: the effort to make structural change, either by expanding existing institutions to include women, or by creating separate institutions. The other frames she suggested were networking, religion, and funding. These are all important interpretive lenses, and we will learn much as scholars pursue these ideas. In fact, some of the chapters in this volume address these frameworks. Linda Perkins, for instance, highlights the networking of Black women faculty at Howard University. Religion figures prominently in Jennifer Talerico-Brown’s chapter on American Indian women at Redlands University, Kim Tolley’s chapter on Catholic colleges adapting to lay faculty, and Victoria-Maria MacDonald and Alice Cook’s chapter on Latinas pursuing higher education in the Southwest. Institution-building is visible in Kelly Sartorius’ chapter on the work of deans of women and the search for financing is clear in Mary Ann Dzuback’s chapter on research at small women’s colleges.
Agreeing with Eisenmann that we have not yet applied a sufficiently theoretical approach to the history of women’s education, I want to explore what it might mean to apply the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to the field of women’s educational history. I am not suggesting that Foucault is the only or even the best theorist for our purposes, and the chapters in this volume do not explicitly use a Foucauldian approach, although many of them do implicitly. I believe Foucault’s theory of power, and the evocatively named theory of moral orthopedics, would yield fruitful analyses. I provide brief summaries of each, followed by suggestions of where these theories might lead our research. I will conclude this section on theory by addressing Eisenmann’s goal for the field of creating a comprehensive account of women’s education, a goal that I both share and am wary of. But first I want to briefly discuss the general direction of the field, and why poststructuralist approaches might be useful.
The field of the history of higher education generally posits a progressive trajectory of increasingly democratized access. Women have largely been an “add-in” to this narrative. We learn in much of the literature that elite white men had access to higher education in the colonial era, with a few men of the poorer classes thrown in for ministerial training, and some women got educated in informal ways. After the American Revolution, higher education became more democratized with the growth of denominational colleges, and new academies and seminaries opened up for women. After the Civil War, democratization increased even further with the growth of land grant colleges, and these generally were open to women as well as men. And so on. The addition of women did not change the existing narrative of democratic expansion. In part, this may be because historians have taken a structuralist approach, and kept men and male institutions as the norm, into which women were either accepted or not.
A poststructuralist approach could de-center and de-stabilize that norm, and ask us to look not at the center but at the margins. This approach would shift our focus of attention. Who was not admitted and why? Kabria Baumgartner, for instance, in Chapter 3 of this volume focuses on antebellum African American women who were denied entrance into white female seminaries. Studying the seminaries is important, but if we only look at who was in the institutions and not also at who was not, we miss a bigger picture of the use of educational institutions in forming relations of power based on race, class, and gender. A poststructuralist approach also might question the presumption that access to education was always a good thing. Marxist historians have examined the ways that formal schooling was a tool of exploitation of the working class. For instance, Michael Katz has argued that early public schools were designed, in part, to transform “a peasantry into an industrial and urban proletariat.”8 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis similarly argued that, far from public schools being designed to make equal opportunity possible, schools were designed to prepare poor children for menial and low-status jobs, and to prepare middle-class and wealthy children for higher-status work.9 Poststructuralist historians might ask how education was used to bolster and challenge power relations among specific groups of people in particular communities. With this in mind, I turn to Foucault.
Foucault and the Sinews of Power
Michel Foucault may seem an odd choice of a theorist to use to discuss women’s educational history. His writing contains an “almost total neglect” of gender and of women’s issues, and feminists have criticized him for androcentrism.10 Nor did he consider himself a poststructuralist, although many poststructuralists have claimed him as one of their own. But scholars have created feminist poststructuralist lenses by building on Foucault’s critiques of meta-narratives, his rejection of dualisms and binaries, and his theories of power. Judith Butler, for example, uses Foucault to deconstruct gender. Butler argues against the reification of sex and gender, and makes visible the ways in which gender is something that is performed.11 Among historians, Joan Scott used Foucault to argue for gender as an important category of historical analysis, noting that “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.”12 Rather than seeing gender as fixed, feminist historians see changing definitions of gender over time, and see the ways that those changes also reflect changes in power structures. According to Scott, “gender becomes implicated in the conception and construction of power itself,” as varying beliefs in sex differences are used to legitimize social relations.13 These views of both gender and power might be more fully integrated into the history of women’s education.
The existing historiography on women’s education, for instance Barbara Solomon’s landmark work, implicitly sees power as something held by someone else, and something that women are scrabbling hard to take for themselves. The question of access to higher education, in this view, assumes that those with access to higher education have power, that those with access were men, that men kept women from gaining access to education, and that when women either forced institutions to accept them or created their own spaces, they were rightfully claiming their piece of the knowledge pie. In this view, power is something that exists and that can be seized, held, or withheld.
For Foucault, power is not an entity that can be appropriated. Power is everywhere, diffused, and always relational; it is in constant flux and negotiation.14 Power is not just – or even primarily – in the structures and laws that are in place, but in the practices that enact those laws. As Stephen J. Ball puts it, in “the minutiae of everyday life” we can see “the ways in which the sinews of power are embedded in mundane practices and in social relationships and the haphazard and contingent nature of practices.”15 A Foucauldian lens might set out to reveal, as social theorist Roger Deacon writes, “the actual processes, techniques, and effects which come into play.… What kinds of power relations govern the process, what bodies of knowledge are called into being,” and what forms “the interactions take, and what effects…they have.”16 A wonderful example of seeing this view of power historically is work by Laura Edwards, who examined court records in the Carolinas from 1787 to 1840 and found that “struggles for power and influence in the courtroom often involved the entire community,” including enslaved women and men, free white and black women and girls. “Even in the antebellum South,” this important work reveals, “white patriarchs’ authority was contingent, contextual, and dispersed.”17 Rather than power being exclusively in the hands of the white planter class (although obviously a lot of power was indeed situated there), entire communities, including those who have been seen as utterly without power, were involved ...