|
|
|
“Citizenship for the College Girl”: Challenges and Opportunities in Higher Education for Women in the United States in the 1930s by Margaret A. Nash & Lisa S. Romero - 2012Background/Context: Little research has been done on higher education for women during the 1930s, even though scholars have pointed to this period as a turning point because the proportion of female students declined during this decade. The decline was only relative, however, as men’s enrollments skyrocketed while women’s increased more slowly. This article seeks to understand women’s continually increasing numbers, rather than the relative decline in enrollment.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question: During a time of economic hardship, what justifications were used to encourage women to attend college? What purposes or rationales were part of the national discourse that made it possible for ever-increasing numbers of young women to attend and graduate from college?
Research Design: Our research consists of historical analysis of printed archival material from 1929-1940. Primary material was drawn from original print editions of the Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature and the electronic version of Reader’s Guide Retro. We divided journals into popular magazines and academic journals, and coded all articles indexed under the terms “College, students, women,” “Education of women,” and “College women.” We analyzed 128 articles from popular magazines and 85 articles from academic journals. This provided a rich source of magazine and journal articles considered significant during the period studied. After coding and choosing the themes for our focus, we looked for related articles from newspapers; we used electronically archived materials from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. To avoid an east/west coast urban bias, and in an effort to include an African-American perspective, we supplemented this with material from smaller Midwestern and African-American presses including the Daily Illini, The Chicago Defender, Columbia Missourian, Hannibal Courier, and the Urbana Daily Courier.
Conclusions: Two primary discourses were evident in newspapers, periodicals, and academic journals that encouraged women to attend college in the 1930s. The first was that of eugenics. Previous scholarship on eugenics tends to emphasize how eugenics was used to discourage women from advanced schooling, as postponing childbearing meant a reduction in the birthrate. We argue that while this argument was indeed present in national literature, eugenic arguments were used as well to encourage women’s college attendance. In this view, educated women produced healthier future generations and therefore served eugenic interests. The second primary discourse was that of the need for education for citizenship. The periodical literature reveals an emphasis on colleges teaching women about the responsibilities of voting, volunteerism, and promoting peace and social unity. To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
|
|
- So Much to Do: Guides for Historical Research on Women in Higher Education
- A Century of Higher Education for American Women
- Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century
- United States: Higher Education of Women
- You've Come A Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture
- Higher Education in America
- Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media, and the Nation
- The Graduate Advisor Handbook: A Student-Centered Approach
- How College Works
- Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? New and Young Women Professors of Educational Leadership
- The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools
- Those Good Gertrudes: A Social History of Women Teachers in America
- Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Social Transformation
- Women's Colleges and Universities in a Global Context
- Perceptions and Resilience in Underrepresented Students’ Pathways to College
- Breaking into the Lab: Engineering Progress for Women in Science
- Alma Mater, Historia Crudelis: Writing Institutional History Without Losing Your Mind or Your Soul
- The Duality of Women Scholars of Color: Transforming and Being Transformed in the Academy
- Women Interrupting, Disrupting, and Revolutionizing Education Policy and Practice
- Research in Global Citizenship Education
- Women and Leadership Around the World
- “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College
- “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation
- Intersectionality & Higher Education: Theory, Research, & Praxis
- Engaging Higher Education: Purpose, Platforms, and Programs for Community Engagement
- The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice
- Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College
- Student Affairs Leadership: Defining the Role Through an Ecological Framework
- The Power of Integrated Learning: Higher Education for Success in Life, Work, and Society
- A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education
- What Universities Can Be: A New Model for Preparing Students for Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership
- Wholehearted Teaching of Gifted Young Women: Cultivating Courage, Connection, and Self-Care in Schools
|
|
- Margaret Nash
University of California, Riverside
E-mail Author
MARGARET A. NASH is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on the history of education in the United States, especially the role education plays in the historical construction of identity. She is the author of “Contested Identities: Nationalism, Regionalism, and Patriotism in Early American Textbooks,” in History of Education Quarterly (Fall 2009), and Women’s Education in the United States, 1780-1840 (Palgrave Press, 2005). Currently, she is researching campus life at a junior college during the 1930s.
- Lisa Romero
University of California, Riverside
E-mail Author
LISA S. ROMERO recently received her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “Student Trust: Impacting High School Outcomes,” examined the effect of trust on student achievement and educational outcomes. She is the co-author of “The Politics and Practice of Alternative Certification,” in Educational Administration Quarterly (August 2010).
|
|
|
|
|
Executive Summary
Full Text in PDF Format
Email this article
Print this article
Post a Comment
