Author: Irene Harwarth
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788143247
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
Women's colleges have had a long and prestigious role in the education of American women. This volume offers insights into the continuing significant role of women's colleges in higher education. It provides a brief history of women's colleges in the U.S. in the context of social and legislative issues that have affected the country, examines how women's colleges have managed to survive in an era of coeducational institutions and equal opportunities in education, and identifies the unique features of women's colleges that make them attractive to young women. Charts and tables. Extensive bibliography.
Women's Colleges in the United States
Author: Irene Harwarth
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788143247
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
Women's colleges have had a long and prestigious role in the education of American women. This volume offers insights into the continuing significant role of women's colleges in higher education. It provides a brief history of women's colleges in the U.S. in the context of social and legislative issues that have affected the country, examines how women's colleges have managed to survive in an era of coeducational institutions and equal opportunities in education, and identifies the unique features of women's colleges that make them attractive to young women. Charts and tables. Extensive bibliography.
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788143247
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
Women's colleges have had a long and prestigious role in the education of American women. This volume offers insights into the continuing significant role of women's colleges in higher education. It provides a brief history of women's colleges in the U.S. in the context of social and legislative issues that have affected the country, examines how women's colleges have managed to survive in an era of coeducational institutions and equal opportunities in education, and identifies the unique features of women's colleges that make them attractive to young women. Charts and tables. Extensive bibliography.
Challenged by Coeducation
Author: Susan L. Poulson
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826515438
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 438
Book Description
Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to the most recent wave of Women's colleges originated in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to women's exclusion from higher education. Women's academic successes and their persistent struggles to enter men's colleges resulted in coeducation rapidly becoming the norm, however. Still, many prestigious institutions remained single-sex, notably most of the Ivy League and all of the Seven Sisters colleges. In the mid-twentieth century colleges' concerns about finances and enrollments, as well as ideological pressures to integrate formerly separate social groups, led men's colleges, and some women's colleges, to become coeducational. The admission of women to practically all men's colleges created a serious challenge for women's colleges. Most people no longer believed women's colleges were necessary since women had virtually unlimited access to higher education. Even though research spawned by the women's movement indicated the benefits to women of a "room of their own," few young women remained interested in applying to women's colleges. Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to this latest wave of coeducation. Case studies written expressly for this volume include many types of women's colleges-Catholic and secular; Seven Sisters and less prestigious; private and state; liberal arts and more applied; northern, southern, and western; urban and rural; independent and coordinated with a coeducational institution. They demonstrate the principal ways women's colleges have adapted to the new coeducational era: some have been taken over or closed, but most have changed by admitting men and thereby becoming coeducational, or by offering new programs to different populations. Some women's colleges, mostly those that are in cities, connected to other colleges, and prestigious with a high endowment, still enjoy success. Despite their dramatic drop in numbers, from 250 to fewer than 60 today, women's colleges are still important, editors Miller-Bernal and Poulson argue. With their commitment to enhancing women's lives, women's colleges and formerly women's colleges can serve as models of egalitarian coeducation.
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826515438
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 438
Book Description
Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to the most recent wave of Women's colleges originated in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to women's exclusion from higher education. Women's academic successes and their persistent struggles to enter men's colleges resulted in coeducation rapidly becoming the norm, however. Still, many prestigious institutions remained single-sex, notably most of the Ivy League and all of the Seven Sisters colleges. In the mid-twentieth century colleges' concerns about finances and enrollments, as well as ideological pressures to integrate formerly separate social groups, led men's colleges, and some women's colleges, to become coeducational. The admission of women to practically all men's colleges created a serious challenge for women's colleges. Most people no longer believed women's colleges were necessary since women had virtually unlimited access to higher education. Even though research spawned by the women's movement indicated the benefits to women of a "room of their own," few young women remained interested in applying to women's colleges. Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to this latest wave of coeducation. Case studies written expressly for this volume include many types of women's colleges-Catholic and secular; Seven Sisters and less prestigious; private and state; liberal arts and more applied; northern, southern, and western; urban and rural; independent and coordinated with a coeducational institution. They demonstrate the principal ways women's colleges have adapted to the new coeducational era: some have been taken over or closed, but most have changed by admitting men and thereby becoming coeducational, or by offering new programs to different populations. Some women's colleges, mostly those that are in cities, connected to other colleges, and prestigious with a high endowment, still enjoy success. Despite their dramatic drop in numbers, from 250 to fewer than 60 today, women's colleges are still important, editors Miller-Bernal and Poulson argue. With their commitment to enhancing women's lives, women's colleges and formerly women's colleges can serve as models of egalitarian coeducation.
Catholic Women's Colleges in America
Author: Tracy Schier
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801877660
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
More than 150 colleges in the United States were founded by nuns, and over time they have served many constituencies, setting some educational trends while reflecting others. In Catholic Women's Colleges in America, Tracy Schier, Cynthia Russett, and their coauthors provide a comprehensive history of these institutions and how they met the challenges of broader educational change. The authors explore how and for whom the colleges were founded and the role of Catholic nuns in their founding and development. They examine the roots of the founders' spirituality and education; they discuss curricula, administration, and student life. And they describe the changes prompted by both the church and society beginning in the 1960s, when decreasing enrollments led some colleges to opt for coeducation, while others restructured their curricula, partnered with other Catholic colleges, developed specialized programs, or sought to broaden their base of funding. Contributors: Dorothy M. Brown, Georgetown University; David R. Contosta, Chestnut Hill College; Jill Ker Conway, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carol Hurd Green, Boston College; Monika K. Hellwig, Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities; Karen Kennelly, president emerita of Mount Saint Mary's College, Los Angeles; Jeanne Knoerle, president emerita of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College; Thomas M. Landy, College of the Holy Cross; Kathleen A. Mahoney, Humanitas Foundation; Melanie M. Morey, Leadership and Legacy Associates, Boston; Mary J. Oates, Regis College; Jane C. Redmont, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; Cynthia Russett, Yale University; Tracy Schier, Boston College.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801877660
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
More than 150 colleges in the United States were founded by nuns, and over time they have served many constituencies, setting some educational trends while reflecting others. In Catholic Women's Colleges in America, Tracy Schier, Cynthia Russett, and their coauthors provide a comprehensive history of these institutions and how they met the challenges of broader educational change. The authors explore how and for whom the colleges were founded and the role of Catholic nuns in their founding and development. They examine the roots of the founders' spirituality and education; they discuss curricula, administration, and student life. And they describe the changes prompted by both the church and society beginning in the 1960s, when decreasing enrollments led some colleges to opt for coeducation, while others restructured their curricula, partnered with other Catholic colleges, developed specialized programs, or sought to broaden their base of funding. Contributors: Dorothy M. Brown, Georgetown University; David R. Contosta, Chestnut Hill College; Jill Ker Conway, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carol Hurd Green, Boston College; Monika K. Hellwig, Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities; Karen Kennelly, president emerita of Mount Saint Mary's College, Los Angeles; Jeanne Knoerle, president emerita of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College; Thomas M. Landy, College of the Holy Cross; Kathleen A. Mahoney, Humanitas Foundation; Melanie M. Morey, Leadership and Legacy Associates, Boston; Mary J. Oates, Regis College; Jane C. Redmont, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; Cynthia Russett, Yale University; Tracy Schier, Boston College.
Alma Mater
Author: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
Going Coed
Author: Leslie Miller-Bernal
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826514493
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
More than a quarter-century ago, the last great wave of coeducation in the United States resulted in the admission of women to almost all of the remaining men's colleges and universities. In thirteen original essays, Going Coed investigates the reasons behind this important phenomenon, describes how institutions have dealt with the changes, and captures the experiences of women who attended these schools.
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826514493
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
More than a quarter-century ago, the last great wave of coeducation in the United States resulted in the admission of women to almost all of the remaining men's colleges and universities. In thirteen original essays, Going Coed investigates the reasons behind this important phenomenon, describes how institutions have dealt with the changes, and captures the experiences of women who attended these schools.
Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges
Author: Joan Marie Johnson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations--in the North, at some of the country's best schools--influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South. Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women's clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the ideals of the Confederacy. Johnson explores why students sought a classical liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women's decisions about marriage, work, children, and other life-altering concerns. In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights the important part they played in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations--in the North, at some of the country's best schools--influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South. Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women's clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the ideals of the Confederacy. Johnson explores why students sought a classical liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women's decisions about marriage, work, children, and other life-altering concerns. In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights the important part they played in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage.
"Keep the Damned Women Out"
Author: Nancy Weiss Malkiel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069118111X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Book Description
A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men. In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male. Drawing on unprecedented archival research, “Keep the Damned Women Out” is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069118111X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Book Description
A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men. In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male. Drawing on unprecedented archival research, “Keep the Damned Women Out” is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject.
Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954
Author: Stephanie Y. Evans
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators--despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies--contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Among those Evans profiles are Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This first complete educational and intellectual history of black women carefully traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development. Evans reveals historic perspectives, patterns, and philosophies in academia that will be an important reference for scholars of gender, race, and education.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators--despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies--contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Among those Evans profiles are Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This first complete educational and intellectual history of black women carefully traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development. Evans reveals historic perspectives, patterns, and philosophies in academia that will be an important reference for scholars of gender, race, and education.
The Rise of Women
Author: Thomas A. DiPrete
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448006
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448006
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
Educating the New Southern Woman
Author: David Gold
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809332868
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college. With a collective enrollment and impact rivaling that of the Seven Sisters, the schools examined in this study—Mississippi State College for Women (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), North Carolina College for Women (1891), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), Alabama College for Women (1896), Texas State College for Women (1901), Florida State College for Women (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908)—served as important centers of women’s education in their states, together educating over a hundred thousand students before World War II and contributing to an emerging professional class of women in the South. After tracing the establishment and evolution of these institutions, Gold and Hobbs explore education in speech arts and public speaking at the colleges and discuss writing instruction, setting faculty and departmental goals and methods against larger institutional, professional, and cultural contexts. In addition to covering the various ways the public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations, the authors also consider how women’s education in rhetoric and writing affected their career choices, the role of race at these schools, and the legacy of public women’s colleges in relation to the history of women’s education and contemporary challenges in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. The experiences of students and educators at these institutions speak to important conversations among scholars in rhetoric, education, women’s studies, and history. By examining these previously unexplored but important institutional sites, Educating the New Southern Woman provides a richer and more complex history of women’s rhetorical education and experiences.
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809332868
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college. With a collective enrollment and impact rivaling that of the Seven Sisters, the schools examined in this study—Mississippi State College for Women (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), North Carolina College for Women (1891), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), Alabama College for Women (1896), Texas State College for Women (1901), Florida State College for Women (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908)—served as important centers of women’s education in their states, together educating over a hundred thousand students before World War II and contributing to an emerging professional class of women in the South. After tracing the establishment and evolution of these institutions, Gold and Hobbs explore education in speech arts and public speaking at the colleges and discuss writing instruction, setting faculty and departmental goals and methods against larger institutional, professional, and cultural contexts. In addition to covering the various ways the public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations, the authors also consider how women’s education in rhetoric and writing affected their career choices, the role of race at these schools, and the legacy of public women’s colleges in relation to the history of women’s education and contemporary challenges in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. The experiences of students and educators at these institutions speak to important conversations among scholars in rhetoric, education, women’s studies, and history. By examining these previously unexplored but important institutional sites, Educating the New Southern Woman provides a richer and more complex history of women’s rhetorical education and experiences.