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March 2007 EOP Newsletter
- YOUR BEST FOOT
- PEER TUTORING SERVICES
- EOP AND FAMLY: STUDENT PERSPECTIVES
- EDUCATION FOR WOMEN IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
- STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
- WHILE I’M AWAY BY: ANTHONY LAVAUGHN ORPHE
- FINANCIAL AID NEWS
EDUCATION FOR WOMEN IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
As history chronicles, education for American women did not transpire easily. Taking root during the Colonial Era, women were expected to occupy a domestic role; thus, their formal learning was considered unnecessary. For centuries women were regarded as intellectually inferior to men. But as American society grew, and industrialization followed, the nation could no longer rely exclusively on men to sustain the work force. By the 1900s women represented half of the population, and their claims to education, economic independence, and eventually, the right to vote, characterized female expansion in the Progressive Era.
Historians note that the Progressive Era was a period of great transformation in women's lives. When compared to earlier times, increasing numbers of women entered high school and college, and rather than only studying to become teachers, women trained for and sought out newly available clerical jobs. But even with this progress, many feared that women trained to enter the labor force would displace men as main wage earners, gain suffrage, unsex women, and endanger the wellbeing of the traditional family unit. Progressive education's response to these intersecting issues of female suffrage, career and family was significant.
Historians note that instead of supporting women’s equality in education and work, the public turned to the ideal of domesticity as a desired goal. While men were educated to assume numerous jobs, home economics or vocational training answered the education question for women. In the Progressive Era, the work place remained largely gender segregated. Women were welcomed into some female-accepted occupations —- teaching or secretarial work for example —- but they were barred from higher paying, white-collar, male dominated fields —- and the American educational system did little to correct this discriminatory pattern. The growing popularity of vocational education translated into training women as housewives rather than white-collar workers. Even the growing availability of clerical work for women was regarded as a threat to marriage and family.
Sex education was another instrument of reform distinct to the Progressive Era. Schools were not only seen as vehicles designed to domesticate women and bolster family life —- schools became a means to help wipe out rising social problems such as venereal diseases. Absorbed into courses like health, biology, or physical education sex education entered the Progressive curriculum and expanded the role of school to include issues of male and female morality. Coeducation in the high school taught girls separately from boys —- and in fact —- the school was noted to reinforce gender stereotypes steering girls into female vocations and boys into male vocations. The view of girls as the keepers of the home, and the preservers of sexual correctness, dominated Progressive ideology.
Clearly, American life at the turn of the century offered women many new choices. High school and college provided women with new career avenues. And commercial education as a part of the vocational training movement allowed women access to clerical jobs once only available to men. But Progressive education positioned the school as a means for social restructuring —-as a result —- women’s educational causes were not completely advanced. Similar to earlier times, the role of women in American society was defined by wife and mother. While women gained educational access, the school reinforced gender stereotypes, steering men into white-collar professions and women into the female sphere of domestic science. In the end, the Progressive education movement offered women educational access, but its gender-based curricula placed many restrictions on the extent of women’s educational growth.
