Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the Higher Education of Women

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf vividly contrasts the university milieu of Oxbridge (i.e., Oxford and Cambridge) men and women in the 1920s. The men's colleges are splendid—the rooms are elegant and spacious and the grounds are beautifully landscaped; students enjoy fine food and drink; expansive and comfortably furnished common rooms encourage camaraderie and conversation. The women's accommodations, on the other hand, are cramped and shabby; their gardens, unkempt. The food is plain and sparse, and water, not wine, is served at meals. Why, Woolf wonders, was there such a discrepancy? Men endowed libraries and educational institutions to educate and edify their sons, giving them a strong foundation for worldly success. Women, on the other hand, were confined to motherhood and domesticity, and consequently had neither the energy nor means to engage in intellectual pursuits. Until women have "money and a room of [their] own" (the same resources as their brothers), Woolf argues that they will never be able to succeed.¹

The histories of higher education by Jennifer O'Connor Duffy, Stephanie Y. Evans, Judith Harford, Joan Marie Johnson, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, and Susan Rumsey Strong focus on women from different backgrounds and historical eras and on universities in different regions. The authors approach their topics from the perspectives and methodologies of historians (Johnson and Radke-Moss), African American and women's studies specialists (Evans), reference librarians (Strong), and higher education administrators and education specialists (Duffy and Harford). Yet the stories of university women they relate are remarkably similar. All depict the momentous efforts required to create rooms for women in the educational edifices of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The history of the first universities is the story of elite, European males preparing for professions in the church, law, and medicine. While women were not totally absent from this tale, their presence as students and faculty was seen as an anomaly well into the nineteenth century. As social status in the western world increasingly became defined by level of education, admission to the academy opened the way to economic and political success. Educational philosophy and practice consequently could not be separated from the wider societal context of gender, race, region, religion, and class.

Enlightenment discussions of natural rights led both Europeans and Americans to question inherited statuses and privileges, including those of the patriarchy. In her study of European Feminisms, the historian Karen Offen contends that "the debate on the woman question became a central feature of the Enlightenment exploration of human society."² Writer after writer contemplated the origin and nature of gender distinctions, critiqued the societal consequences of women's education and institutionalized marriage, and considered gender-specific contributions to the progress of civilization. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft began her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, with "a profound conviction that the neglected...