THE LIVELY CURRENT DEBATE about developing programs of study which will raise women's consciousness and bring them into American intellectual life on a level of equality with men tends to be ahistorical and to subscribe to many of the unexamined assumptions of American educational history. Among the most revered of these is the interpretation unhesitatingly advanced by historians (1) of education that coeducation automatically was a “liberating experience” for American women and that access to professional education naturally placed women on a level with male professional peers. Advocates of increased participation for women in the creation and transmission of American culture had better examine these assumptions with the skepticism which feminists normally extend to male interpretations of women's experience if they are not to devise a faulty strategy for reform through inability to perceive some of the concealed hazards of the landscape. Although cultural historians have universally concluded that the development of educational institutions in colonial America and in the young republic of the early national period played a decisive role in the creation of an American democratic culture, little effort has been expended in analysing the impact of these institutions on women's social role or on their consciousness of themselves as independent intellects. To understand the dimensions of this impact we must begin, as in all questions of American cultural history, with the colonial period and the Puritan heritage. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay gave as succinct an expression of Puritan attitudes to women with aspirations to learning as it would be possible to find in his diary entry after meeting the emotionally disturbed wife of a friend.

A SEXUAL IDEOLOGY with profoundly antifeminist implications developed in the northern United States during the forty years after 1830. This middle class ideal of sentimental womanhood, defining women as spiritual, emotional, and dependent, has received less attention than the ideology of the small minority of feminists and reformers who rejected a passive stereotype of women in their search for autonomy. Yet the antifeminist system of belief dominated the perception of women in the nineteenth century. It provided women with supreme domestic powers through religious influence and the education of children, though it exacted a price of powerlessness beyond these spheres. How was it that this sentimental ideal had such pervasive influence? The most common answer is that it was the result of economic change.

THE FEMALE COLLEGE was a new phenomenon which developed after the Civil War. Those who planned these infant colleges were aware of their institutional antecedents—academies and seminaries which generally steeped females in the domestic arts along with cultural and moral refinements. In antebellum America, female education and domesticity were inexorably related as educators sought to insure the endurance of the domestic occupation for women by elevating it from drudgery to a noble profession. The pious homemaker would uplift American civilization by providing order, stability, and self-restraint in an otherwise chaotic society. After the Civil War, however, molders of female colleges struggled with these traditions as they tried to determine whether such colleges would continue to protect domestic values from decay or whether higher education for women would represent a break from the perpetuation in educational institutions of feminine passivity and dependence.

PERHAPS as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American woman. First was Mary Baker Eddy. (1) Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols of fame, may well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a church, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family. (2) Mrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family.

WHEN Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established their home in the Hull mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889, they knew only that they wanted to connect up to the life of their time by living within the neighborhood of the immigrant poor. Their residence grew gradually into Hull-House, a pioneer social settlement, which served as a model to others seeking solutions to the social question at the turn of the century. What is often lost sight of is that Hull-House developed in Chicago as a response, in part, to its specific local currents. Restored to its setting, the Hull-House experience takes on a new and clearer meaning.

THE RECENT REVIVAL of interest in the history of education has inspired studies of the relationship of educational policy to social change, the social composition of elite educational institutions, and the function of instruction as an instrument of social control. (1) These issues, however, have scarcely been developed with reference to female education, and consequently historians have not seen that the debate over the education of girls is a key to understanding social conflict. The purpose of this essay is to confront these issues by studying girls' education in sociopolitical context, focusing on the most significant theoretical and institutional achievements of the seventeenth century in the domestic education of French girls: Fénelon's Treatise on the Education of Girls (1687) and the Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon in 1686.