ABSTRACT

While the history of higher education for American women reflects, despite many disappointments, relatively steady, if slow progress in the Northeast and Midwest, the story of women's higher education in the American South reveals a drama that fitfully unfolds against a background laden with the tragedy of war and reconstruction, poverty, and at times a pervasive hostility to the ideal of higher education. Due to the distinct cultural patterns of the American South, patterns that demarcate this region from the rest of the country, it is beneficial to separately examine women's education in the South in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.