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Preface
- Vanderbilt University Press
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ix Preface More than a quarter-century ago, the last great wave of coeducation swept through American higher education. Although the numbers of students and institutions involved were comparatively small, the transition redefined educational norms and expanded women’s access to men’s colleges and universities. Since many of the institutions were among the nation’s elite, their adoption of coeducation ended the association of male-only status with academic prestige. The courts determined that state universities could no longer retain all-male colleges, and in Catholic higher education, where gender segregation had been a distinctive characteristic, male-only colleges disappeared altogether. Yet coeducation did not necessarily bring educational equity for men and women. Physical access to an institution did not mean that the women were represented in positions of power, that policies were changed to reflect a more diverse constituency , or even that they were nominally accepted as equals. The aim of this book is to explore this most recent wave of coeducation and some of the consequences for women. It will review why various institutions admitted women, how they prepared for coeducation, and some of women’s experiences in the newly coeducational institutions. It builds on earlier scholarship in several commendable academic studies of the history of coeducation.1 Education is much more than the absorption and synthesis of knowledge; it is a formative part of an individual’s socialization. The college experience often takes place as a student is forming a political and social identity that sometimes departs from the family culture in which he or she has been raised. In higher education, where many students reside on campus, the college becomes an archetype of the larger world. In and out of the classroom, students absorb, adapt, and shape the messages about the meaning and organization of life. Much of this social organization is subconscious. In campus buildings, rooms, and meeting areas, students acquire a cultural knowledge of who belongs there and what constitute legitimate activities. When women first arrived on formerly male campuses, they faced a culture that had no established place for them, which had no process of acculturation for women, and few mentors and role models. Women in formerly male colleges faced the challenge of redefining those subtle, quiet norms, in the minds of others as well as in their own. In a sense, women struggled with otherness. The representative student CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 9 5/26/04 4:53:10 PM x Going Coed in these institutions was male, with a supportive history and culture. Women were the outsiders seeking a comfortable place within. Otherness is reflected in the very word “coeducation.” “Co-” is defined as “with, together, joint, or jointly,” which theoretically implies that either men or women could be “coeds.” Yet “coed” is defined as “a young woman being educated at the same institution with young men.” She is the “co-” to the education of men. Ironically, a woman student at a formerly women’s college would be a coed at that institution as well. Coed is also unique for perpetuating the concept of relational otherness. The American system of higher education has in the past been segregated by race and to some extent by religion as well. Yet the words for these segments are descriptive, such as black, Native American, or Catholic, and not relational as the word “coed” implies. The etymology of coed reflects the varying status of women as students. When the word first appeared around the time of the Civil War it had derogatory connotations. In later years coed was often used with sexual connotations. There are six sections to this book. In Section I we provide a brief history of coeducation so that the recent trend can be placed in historical context. A chapter on historically black and Catholic higher education reveals two traditions that are nearly opposite in gender organization. Most historically black colleges and universities have been coeducational from their beginnings, in part due to their greater willingness to mix men and women. Also, with few resources and daunting racial oppression, black educators were often more concerned with “race uplift” than with the intricacies of sex segregation. American Catholics, in contrast, developed a network of colleges and universities with a strict and enduring practice of sexual segregation. Partly because of ideology and partly because the religious communities that established most Catholic institutions were themselves all male or female, Catholic higher education was single-sex until the early twentieth...