ABSTRACT
There was a time, not so very long ago, when historians blithely assumed that women’s access to education, especially education alongside males, was a trusty measure of women’s progress and their access to wider social opportunities. Since the early 1970s, however, that comfortable assumption has been shaken by educators and historians who began to take a more critical look at women’s educational history. Led by Jill K. Conway, Patricia Albjerg Graham, and others, scholars in the 1970s asked what now sounds like an obvious question. If education alongside men gives women equal opportunities, and American women have had access to such education for over 100 years, then why are American women still beating on all the legal, political, and economic doors that education supposedly opens? 1
