Article 6: Is Liberal Arts Education For Women Liberating?: From Cold War Debate to Modern Gender Gaps

Biographies and autobiographies of early generations of college women resonate with a sense of the exhilarating, liberating power of education in their lives, but women’s life stories also capture the deep cultural ambivalence and questioning that have persistently surrounded women’s educational advances and the curriculum women have pursued. If many early female college-goers were similarly enthralled by what M. Carey Thomas, reflecting on her own youthful aspirations, described as a “passionate desire” to embrace the life of the mind, they were also, like Thomas, plagued by the “awful doubt” of naysayers who questioned women’s fitness for study in the arts and sciences (Thomas 1908, 45).