At the turn of the century, St. Louis' Negro females faced an education desert. Opportunities for informal instruction were scarce, particularly for those in lower socio-economic brackets (Anderson 1988). The 1911 opening of the St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley-YWCA (PW-YWCA) became a beacon of hope and a center of educational respite for those young…

Student fraternities emerged in the late 1700s as an extension of literary societies and debate clubs. A century after their formation, in 1891, national interfraternal associations, or fraternity/sorority councils, also took root. These interfraternal associations would shape the Greek community on college campuses across the country. Decades…

December 1, 2015, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955. This incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the mid-20th century civil rights movement. A century before Parks' act of resistance, African American schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was…

Reformers during the antebellum period of American history frequently expressed contradictory ideas on the topic of female education. These contradictions illustrate the challenge historians face in pinning down the female educational vision held by antebellum-era reformers. That the classics comprised the core of colonial and revolutionary era…

Histories of education in America often discuss how concerns over women's health influenced public opinion on women's participation in higher education in the late nineteenth century. However, these histories almost exclusively focus on literature produced by the medical community--literature claiming that rigorous academic study was detrimental…

This article will begin to synthesize and extend the historical literature involving women's political culture and women teachers. Through the lens of a select group of women in Chicago, the author argues that, while higher education provided the skills women needed to enter political spaces, teaching led them to act in those political spaces.…

On the eve of her birthday, August 14, 1904, the young Jewell Legett recorded in her diary that she had "been feeling so strange today … 20 years old! What an age it is! Just the time to be a girl and learn to live" (Legett 1904). Her summer vacation from the 1903-1904 term at Baylor University was spent with her parents and brothers in…

Given the difficult of defining and comprehending progressive education (and in view of recent scholars' belief that the movement should be understood in context), this article seeks to shed light on progressive education through a historical case study. The subject is Alice Moyer (1898- 1980), a member of an under-researched group in the study of…

Progressive education is often examined through the lens of curricular theorists, educational historians, and the experience of practitioners. One perspective, infrequently found in the debate, has been the experiences of students educated under the progressive philosophy. The Southern author, Flannery O'Connor, who attended progressive schools on…

In "The Female Frontier" (1988), Glenda Riley notes that the typical historical account of life on the frontier puts men at the center of the experience. In contrast to a male frontier thesis, Riley posits that women played highly significant, though largely domestic, roles in the settling and development of the frontier, and that…