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  • University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom by Christine D. Myers
  • Ruth Watts (bio)
University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom, by Christine D. Myers ; pp. 283. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £60.00, $95.00.

This is a very interesting addition to gender and educational scholarship on the victorian period. Christine D. Myers is to be congratulated on a rare comparative study on higher education in the United Kingdom and the United states. She has achieved what must have been a mammoth task by focusing strictly on one topic: the integration of women into male universities and the response of society to this integration. Thus universities or colleges which were established as coeducational or specifically for women only are omitted. Nevertheless, Myers examines how far coeducation was gained in twenty-four different institutions which fit her criteria, covering England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Ohio valley, and Midwestern and southern United States. She has made extensive use of archival and unpublished sources in her research and weaves these together admirably, addressing her various themes in a very readable manner. This is supported by a small but well-chosen number of illustrations.

There are three major themes: the evolution of perceptions of women and their relationship to higher education; the expectations of the future roles of female graduates; and the effects on the admission of women caused by shifts in the practical control of universities and changing values in society. These themes are treated separately and together. Myers shows that across the Atlantic arguments raged about woman’s societal role and the presumed threat to her morality and femininity and to traditional roles and ways of life if women were educated equally with men. Such fears are shown to have persisted even while the growing need for good quality teachers and the perceived need for the moral and social improvement of society prompted women’s increasing admittance to universities. Medical disputes over women’s university participation which are now well known form an interesting part of the discussion here, although only men’s, not women’s, counterarguments feature. Constant reference to the separate spheres argument ignores Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes (1987) and the subsequent revision of some of their arguments, but, nevertheless, a comprehensive understanding of the issues is usually displayed, backed by apposite evidence from the many institutions studied.

In looking for similarities across institutions and national boundaries, Myers also reveals differences. Time and again the importance of individuals is evident, but Myers reiterates that, on the one hand, not all women students wanted to revolutionize gender roles and, on the other, administrators (usually leading male academics) and the structure of institutions were significant both in supporting the admittance of women and guiding them into traditional female roles. Myers shows curriculum shifts to be important, but sees the help of progressive faculty members, backed by public [End Page 518] support, as more crucial. That support, in turn, was stimulated both by associations established to advance women’s opportunities in higher education and by national and state legislation such as the 1862 Morrill Act in the United states. Of course that legislation was contested and variously interpreted. Religious and cultural fears, as in Ireland and the southern United States, also inhibited the taking up of women’s higher education. Finance was often a crucial factor, although women became increasingly welcome as a source of extra funding.

Myers refreshingly explores both the academic and the extracurricular lives of the students, realizing—as did Carol Dyhouse in No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (1995)—that restrictions in the latter belied equality of provision or the free interaction of the sexes. Her discussion of the wide-ranging responses to the curriculum, the timing of lectures, seating of students, location of facilities or halls for women, and access to resources and awards, form a fascinating read and prove Myers’s command of her multifarious sources. Those sources provide illustrative nuggets. That Latin was deemed an easier option than science for women in Wisconsin, for instance, while the...

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