ABSTRACT
Written with the support of a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education as the Inaugural Lecture of the Project on the Study of Gender and Education, and first presented at Kent State University, November 18,1988, “The Contradiction and the Challenge of the Educated Woman” led an active pre-publication life. It served as the basis for “Women’s Education for the 21st Century,” a brief talk I gave in March 1989 at the conference, Restructuring Reality, sponsored by Radcliffe College. I then made it my contribution—in absentia, as it turned out—to the Research Workshop on Knowledge, Gender, Education and Work held at the University of Calgary. This paper was next given in March 1990 as part of a Harvard Graduate School of Education lecture series on Women, Girls, and Education. Then in October of that year I presented it at the International Symposium, “The Construction of Sex/Gender—What is a Feminist Perspective?” sponsored by the Swedish Research Council Focusing on six themes, that Stockholm meeting brought together women with a wide range of interests from an even wider range of disciplines. As it happened, one of those was the Norwegian sociologist Hildur Ve whose work is referred to, albeit indirectly, in this paper. At the Stockholm conference’s conclusion, she and I and the other members of its Education Workshop had the good fortune to travel with our enterprising convenor Inga Elgqvist-Saltzman, herself a leading Swedish scholar, to the University of Umeå for a day long conference on Gender and Education, sponsored by the Departments of Education and History at the University of Umeå. There I read “The Contradiction and the Challenge of the Educated Woman” to an audience of educational researchers and practitioners and later met with a group of Inga Elgqvist-Saltzman’s students who shared with me their ongoing research on women and education.
