Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (review)

Much of the scholarship on the history of women's higher education is focused on its origins. Concentrating primarily on the 19th century, scholars have examined women's first entrance into higher education, their first enrollment in graduate schools and entry to the professions, and the first women's colleges. In another body of literature, women's accomplishments are barely represented in the history of activism, with the exception of some mention of the most recent incarnation of the women's movement.

Thus, Linda Eisenmann's Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 fills two important gaps. She provides a fully detailed portrait of women's educational issues and opportunities during an understudied 20-year period, and she nuances the extant definition of activism and demonstrates how significant advocacy for women prior to the post-1960s era set the stage for more radical activities.

Conceptually, Eisenmann makes two critical contributions. First, she distinguishes between the women's activity of the post-war era and contemporary feminism. Briefly, modern feminist analysis exposes the elements of American culture as patriarchal (and therefore biased against women) and seeks fundamental, systemic change. Women of the post-war era sought to fit into the existing structure. Because the "women should change to fit the world" attitude is now viewed as naive at best (and perhaps cowardly at worst), the late 1940s and '50s are often described as a time of quiescence in the women's movement. Eisenmann argues persuasively that such a disparaging dismissal is neither accurate nor fair. Instead, while acknowledging the absence of modern analysis, she illustrates how various groups, institutions, and individuals made higher education more palatable for women of the era.

Eisenmann's second conceptual contribution challenges readers to broaden our definition of "activism." Much like her argument to view post-war feminism in its own context, she makes a compelling case that what was done for women in this era might better be described as advocacy; such actions were a form of activism and should not be dismissed. In some ways, this approach is similar to recent work on African Americans in higher education who use resistance as a type of activism, although it takes a different form than the more obvious protests, marches, and sit-ins.

Another engaging element of the book is the vast array of sources consulted. The author looks at everything from ladies' magazines to official reports from a presidential commission to national labor and higher education enrollment statistics. Such data are put to good use. For example, early in the book, she demonstrates that widely held beliefs about women's labor force participation after World War II are not based in fact. The book, written from an institutional perspective, uses official archival data, as well as oral histories from central actors still among us. Official papers and policy reports are given as reflections of the era's "national narrative," but the occasional biographical tidbit from women of the time personalizes how the larger story played out in individual lives.

The book is divided into three parts: Ideologies, Explorations, and Responses. In Part 1, the author examines how four ideological forces affected women and shaped societal expectations of appropriate gender behavior: patriotic duty, economic participation, cultural role, and psychological needs. Chapter 1 explores these four ideologies from myriad perspectives outside of higher education and Chapter 2 examines how higher education pondered and responded to women's participation.

Eisenmann demonstrates how the four ideologies saturated American culture, especially for the White middle class. Although the ideas here are not especially new, Eisenmann's categorization of them and her illustration of their ubiquity is interesting. What she does not explicitly state, perhaps because readers already know it, is the irony that it was predominantly men who dictated these ideologies, deciding what should constrain women's lives. She then shows how educators, even women's advocates, were inhibited by the pervasiveness and...