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University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom, by Christine D. Myers; pp. 283. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £60.00, $95.00.
This is a very interesting addition to gender and educational scholarship on the Victorian period. Christine D. Myers is to be congratulated on a rare comparative study on higher education in the United Kingdom and the United States. She has achieved what must have been a mammoth task by focusing strictly on one topic: the integration of women into male universities and the response of society to this integration. Thus universities or colleges which were established as coeducational or specifically for women only are omitted. Nevertheless, Myers examines how far coeducation was gained in twenty-four different institutions which fit her criteria, covering England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Ohio Valley, and midwestern and southern United States. She has made extensive use of archival and unpublished sources in her research and weaves these together admirably, addressing her various themes in a very readable manner. This is supported by a small but well-chosen number of illustrations.
There are three major themes: the evolution of perceptions of women and their relationship to higher education; the expectations of the future roles of female graduates; and the effects on the admission of women caused by shifts in the practical control of universities and changing values in society. These themes are treated separately and together. Myers shows that across the Atlantic arguments raged about woman's societal role and the presumed threat...