Women's Education in the United States, 1780-1840

The Origins of Women's Higher Education in America examines female education in the United States from the early national period through the formation of the institutions that are widely recognized as the forerunners of the women's college movement. Margaret A. Nash argues that in this period education was not as strongly gendered as other historians have posited. The rising rhetoric of human rights, Enlightenment thought, and evangelical Christianity, in an age of dynamic economic change, helped build a broad ideological base for the spread of female education. Education was key to the project of class formation, and therefore, Nash contends, class and race were more salient than gender in the construction of educational institutions.