The Past in the Present: Women's Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South
The history of higher education in the 20th-century South, like the history of the region, both mirrors and diverges from the national pattern. Not surprisingly the region's demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics have accounted for many of the variations between the education of southern women and women in the rest of the nation.\ Southern students, McCandless finds, have generally been more Protestant, more rural, more conservative, and less affluent than...
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The history of higher education in the 20th-century South, like the history of the region, both mirrors and diverges from the national pattern. Not surprisingly the region's demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics have accounted for many of the variations between the education of southern women and women in the rest of the nation.Southern students, McCandless finds, have generally been more Protestant, more rural, more conservative, and less affluent than their northern and western counterparts. Southern institutions have been slower to raise matriculation and graduation standards and to revise the classical curriculum. Southern administrators and legislators have opposed coeducation and integration longer and harder than college officials elsewhere. Certain types of institutions, such as all-black colleges, public women's colleges, and separate agricultural colleges, have been more prevalent in the South. Although many of these differences are not gender-specific, all have contributed to the distinctive educational experience of women in this region.Much has been written on the distinctiveness of this region, but virtually nothing has been published on the education of women in the South. By focusing on both black and white women at a wide variety of institutions and drawing on oral interviews and campus publications as well as traditional histories, McCandless is able to construct a more detailed picture of women's collegiate experiences in the 20th-century South than those provided by general studies that rely primarily on materials from the North and Midwest.
PrefaceIntroduction: The Past in the Present11The Forgotten Woman: The Higher Education of Southern Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century182A Lady, a Scholar, and a Citizen: The Impact of Nineteenth-Century Plantation Ideology on the Curricula of Twentieth-Century Southern Colleges513Maintaining the Spirit and Tone of Robust Manliness: The Opposition to Coeducation at Southern Public Universities834Peerless Standards of Unsullied Honor: Women's Social Life on the Southern College Campus1215Tomorrow and Yesterday: College Women, Economic Depression, and World War1776The Voices of the Future: Social Protest on the Southern Campus2137A Double Focus: A Century of Women's Higher Education in the South257Notes283Selected Bibliography347Index373
\ From the Publisher“McCandless places the history of women’s higher education in the South in the context of a broad understanding of the region’s distinctive past. She demonstrates the ways that, as gender bent the educational opportunities open to women, race and class intertwined to construct a complex system challenged by changing economic, social, political, and cultural forces. This informative study offers needed perspective to graduates of southern schools and helps fill a large void on an important topic.” – Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Smith College\ \ \
