The impact of historical expectations on women's higher education

This paper explores ways in which gendered approaches have limited women's experience of higher education. Using a historical lens with primary examples from the United States and Britain, it demonstrates how beliefs about women over time led to three expectations about their educational participation: initially, that women were not interested in schooling; later, that they were not capable of advanced education; and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, that they were best educated in segregated settings with separate curricula. The power of these beliefs has led to three continuing misinterpretations of women's historical behavior: first, that they "feminized" certain fields, driving men out; second, that they have been minor and unsuccessful participants in science; and third, that in the early post-World War II era their educational participation was merely incidental. In many ways, when women's performance defied expectation, people tended to see what they expected rather than analyzing what the behavior actually meant, and women's momentum in higher education remains inhibited by these earlier beliefs.