Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965

Linda Eisenmann explores efforts to promote women's roles in higher education in the two decades after World War II. Women off that era received mixed messages: to stay home and to relieve shortages in the labor force. Caught between domestic ideals and expanded economic options, married women often took jobs (almost one-third worked). Higher education contributed to the mixed messages that women received. Women's advocates in academic life pushed forward only cautiously, tentatively, and equivocally. Most off the efforts that Eisenmann assesses were marginal to the educational process—to classes, curricula, or students—and several floundered. The American Council on Education's Commission on the Education off Women, which sought from 1953 to 1962 to draw attention to women's issues, voiced platitudes. The American Association off University Women lacked focus but succeeded at fund raising and thereby insured its own survival. The National Association off Deans off Women, in contrast, issued contradictory pronouncements, found no permanent niche, and eventually faded. John F. Kennedy's President's Commission on the Status off Women in the early 1960s had more clout: It expressed public policy concerns, spurred the creation off state-level commissions on the status off women, and touted the role off education in women's lives

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