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The nineteenth century saw major advances in educational opportunities for women and girls, from the common school movement in the early part of the century to multiple opportunities in higher education at the century's close. In the 1800s, women began to play central roles in education - as teachers and as learners, in formal and informal education settings, on the frontier and in the cities. What did these advances mean for the education of women and girls in the twentieth century?
This Symposium looks at developments in the education of women and girls over the course of the twentieth century, including research currently being conducted by and about women who historically have been excluded from mainstream academic discourse.
Our aim in presenting this Symposium is to showcase some of the provocative work being done in the area of the history of women in education. We selected works that we believe push the existing paradigm of historical research, including several articles that reflect the multiplicity of discourses being used in historical inquiry into women in education. Each article in this collection contributes to understanding women's lives in education through traditional and alternative historical analyses. Often the stories of women, marginalized in research and practice in general and in historical research in particular, make use of other disciplinary tools, such as economic, political, and anthropological methods of inquiry, to address the challenges of a paucity of written records and a history of exoticization of non-Western cultures. We hope this Symposium will play a role in furthering such scholarship and will encourage others to pursue research that takes existing scholarship into new territory.
We encouraged our authors to consider one of the following questions: What have been developments in the history of women in education? How has research in this area grown and/or changed? What were the educational experiences of marginalized women, such as linguistic,...