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In 1955 Esther Lloyd-Jones, professor of education at Columbia University and founding chair of the Commission on the Education of Women, worked hard to craft an enthusiastic fundraising appeal for this fledgling project of the American Council on Education (ACE). She wrote to the Phillips Foundation, a family philanthropy that had provided the initial $50,000 gift to create the commission. Lloyd-Jones began with flattery, noting how significant the commission’s work had become as it grew from Kathryn Phillips’ original idea. “The Commission on the Education of Women has a bear by the tail,” she explained to Phillips and her son, Ellis. “The American Council on Education identified the animal as a bear when it accepted the generous gift made two and one half years ago by the Phillips Foundation to get the study under way. It is doubtful whether the Council or the Commission—or even Mrs. Ellis Phillips, whose vision sparked the whole project—realized what a big, fierce, thrashing bear this one would turn out to be.”1 In her letter, Lloyd-Jones was optimistic and upbeat. However, the Phillips family declined to offer further support, arguing that it was time for other foundations to take a role in launching this important effort on behalf of women. Unfortunately, Lloyd-Jones and her colleagues had already spent two years approaching numerous other sources, receiving at best expressions of interest but with no money attached. Notwithstanding such rejections, Lloyd-Jones was accurate in her metaphoric description of the commission’s work. The bear she described was certainly “big”: it represented the complicated question of how higher education could best serve Research The American Council on Education’s Commission on the Education of Women c h a p t e r t h r e e 88 h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n f o r w o m e n i n p o s t w a r a m e r i c a America’s female postwar citizens as they responded to patriotic, economic, cultural , and psychological expectations. And clearly it was “thrashing”: in an era marked by the preeminence of family, educators differed over the relationship between women’s likely futures and the type of education they should receive. However, the bear seemed more “fierce” to commission members than to their audience of funders and higher education administrators. The commission spent ten years between 1953 and 1962 trying to clarify issues, encourage research, and generate funds, but few philanthropies committed to the project, and most collegiate leaders expressed only mild interest. Created at a time when women were receiving mixed messages about their responsibilities to family and nation, the Commission on the Education of Women (CEW) accepted the task of translating these expectations into educational programming for women. They turned to the new tool of social science research, often finding psychological explanations for women’s educational choices the most convincing. Generally, such postwar research suggested that women’s decisions were explained by gender-based differences in their aptitudes, attitudes, and motivation. Given these differences, only the exceptional female pursued graduate education or professional status. Over time, however, researchers perceived structural and cultural explanations for women’s under-investment in education. Some argued that women’s frequent choice to forego advanced schooling in favor of marriage and family made sense, given continuous societal messages about the benefits of education and the cost of professional pursuits. Such analyses began to suggest a collective rather than a merely individual explanation for women’s lack of advancement. However, the limited analytical tools of the era, the power of cultural expectations, and the variety of choices facing women left advocacy groups like the Commission on the Education of Women reliant on the notion of “womanpower” to advocate for them: each individual woman must decide for herself how to respond to her family, civic, and personal responsibilities. Ultimately, lack of agreement about the needs of postwar women’s education , a weak research base on women, female leaders’ lack of influence, and the indifference of foundation and higher education executives hampered the commission’s efforts. Compared to its initial hopes for directing a million-dollar research agenda on women, the devolution into a research clearinghouse was a pale realization of early potential. After ten years, a new ACE president closed the commission in 1962. However, the ACE Commission on the Education of Women became the most...

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