As women fought to claim higher education—from the early republic to today—race and gender determined who was allowed in, and each gain sparked a backlash aimed at restoring the status quo.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The war against “radical gender ideology” has been staggering.
The ascent of President Trump brought calls for the elimination of women’s and LGBTQ centers, rollbacks on Title IX protections, the exclusion of trans women from college sports and the purging of gender and sexuality studies from college curricula throughout U.S. institutions and higher education. These actions signal a massive backlash against the decades-long fight for gender equality and are inseparable from the administration’s wider assault on Civil Rights-era protections for people of color.
However, this moment is nothing new. It echoes an earlier race- and gender-based backlash in U.S. history over a century ago, when white middle-class American women began to attend colleges in large numbers. Against the backdrop of Black emancipation, the mass migration of racial “undesirables” and the immense success of the feminist movement, white women’s enrollment was seen as a threat, not just to white patriarchy but to the very future of the white race.
Today’s backlash is the most recent attempt to restore the status quo—to distinguish between who is and is not entitled to higher education on the basis of race and gender and to safeguard the future of a white nation.
From its earliest days, Americans looked to education to stabilize the fledgling republic.
In his 1778 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Thomas Jefferson made this connection explicit, writing, “the most effectual means of preventing [tyranny] would be, to illuminate … the minds of the people at large.”
Revolutionary Benjamin Rush took it a step further, arguing in 1786 that women, too, “should be instructed in the principles of liberty and government, and the obligations of patriotism should be inculcated upon them.”
In this manner, Rush articulated the 18th-century doctrine of republican motherhood, according to which American women were responsible for inculcating democratic values in their children and thus preparing future generations of citizens.
By the mid-19th century, a college degree had also become a hallmark of middle-class respectability among American women, particularly those yearning to pursue the many professional opportunities increasingly open to them.
By the turn of the century, greater access to colleges and universities would constitute one of the feminist movement’s foremost demands—a movement led in large part by college-educated women.
But such opportunities were mostly open to elite and middle-class white women who could mobilize the norms and ideals of white femininity to demonstrate their deservingness of a college education. By contrast, Native women and African American women would have to cut a very different path to higher education, obstructed as they were by the longer history of settler colonialism, genocide and enslavement that mar the foundations of the republic.
The earliest American colleges, including Harvard (founded in 1636 in Massachusetts), William and Mary (founded in 1692 in Virginia) and Yale (founded in 1701 in Connecticut), were founded upon stolen land acquired through deceit, predation and wanton violence trained on Native communities. Although Harvard, the College of William and Mary and Dartmouth founded so-called Indian Colleges in early efforts to educate a select few young Native men, they aimed only to create an intermediary class who would serve as translators and ambassadors and thus contribute to the larger project of imperial expansion.
Ultimately, those experiments were short-lived. Ongoing violent clashes between European settlers and Indigenous communities during the colonial period suggested to college leaders that Natives were not yet ready to be “civilized.” Early collegiate institutions, then, were quite explicitly reserved for white Anglo Christian men who would go on to serve as colonial officials, ministers, lawyers, doctors and other governing elites in the expanding British colonies.
Higher educational institutions in the United States also have deep ties to the institution of slavery—nurturing it, maintaining it and manufacturing knowledge to sustain it. In that sense, educational deprivation was just one more indignity suffered by Black Americans in this country.
As early as 1740, white enslavers passed laws forbidding enslaved African and African-descended people from learning how to read lest education inflame the desire for freedom and fan the flames of revolt. Consequently, few universities were willing to admit Black Americans before the Civil War.
Even fewer admitted Black women. Those institutions that did could be found exclusively in non-slave states, including Ohio, where Oberlin (1833), Antioch (1853) and Wilberforce (1856) were all established.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the gendered norms and expectations of middle-class respectability and white femininity allowed better-off white women to pry open the doors of higher education. Their college-going even spurred on the establishment of women’s only colleges in the latter decades of the 1800s. Not so for Native and African American women. Though the exact flavor of exclusion differed according to each community’s specific historical experiences in the United States, both groups faced steep obstacles when it came to accessing an education, let alone obtaining a college degree.
Though they had much in common with other people of color in the U.S., the historical situation of Native communities—a dispossessed, colonized and bereaved people—was in many ways unique.
The violent expansion of the American frontier as well as increasingly successful federal efforts to relocate and confine Native individuals to reservations hampered educational efforts. When Indigenous youth did eventually enter the U.S. schooling system, it was accomplished through their violent abduction, removal and isolation in boarding schools throughout the country.
In response, Native groups were less interested in attending predominantly white institutions than beating back federal control over all facets of Native life, including education.
For African American women, the history of enslavement posed nearly insurmountable obstacles to educational access. After emancipation, many African Americans, women included, hungered for higher learning. A handful were even accepted at some predominantly white women’s colleges in the Northeast and the Midwest. Some found recourse in HBCUs, or historically Black colleges and universities, 90 of which were established between 1861 and 1900. Black women’s colleges also emerged during this period, the earliest of which included Bennet College in North Carolina (founded in 1873), Hartshorn Memorial College in Virginia (founded in 1883) and Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in Georgia (founded in 1881, later renamed Spelman College).
It should be said, though, that Black women’s college-going remained extremely uncommon in the immediate postbellum period. According to a 1910 study by W. E. B. Du Bois entitled The College Negro, out of over 2,500 Black college graduates in 1900, just 10 percent were Black women. To put an even finer point on it: According to scholar Stephanie Evans, between 1882 and 1898, “for every five Black women who had graduated with a college degree by the turn of the twentieth century, one Black woman had been lynched.”
Though the nineteenth century saw the growth of college access for upper- and middle-class white women and a very limited number of better-off Black men and women, that progress came to a dead halt in the late 1800s as a combination of factors fed a widespread crisis of white American masculinity. One such factor involved Black emancipation, which elicited widespread fears among white Americans of their diminished authority, especially in the South. In response to their defeat in the Civil War and the liberation of Black Americans, many white Southerners terrorized newly freed communities.
The last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth also witnessed the mass migration of racial “undesirables” from China and Eastern Europe, a phenomenon that, to many in white Anglo-Saxon America, threatened the future of the white race and led the U.S. to curtail migration from so-called racially unsound areas of the world. Perhaps most distressingly, in their constant demands for ever more rights and opportunities, women suffragists chipped away at the last remaining bastion of privilege for white men—patriarchy.
During this era, a national backlash to women’s education materialized. Against the background of the medicalization of women’s bodies and the wider eugenics movement, national anxieties initially fixated on the deleterious effects of higher education on white women’s minds and bodies and thus the threat to the reproductive future of the white race. As early as 1875, Harvard Medical School professor and physician Edward H. Clarke articulated these anxieties in Sex and Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls. While he conceded that women could and should be given educational opportunities, he noted, “But it is not true that she can do all this, and retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other derangements of the nervous system.”
Whereas an educated white woman in the eighteenth century was considered well-suited to raise future citizens, by the late nineteenth century, she was considered a threat to the future of the white race. Fears over the fate of white America pushed educators and other officials to exclude large numbers of women out of higher education and to denounce “co-education.” Then as now, racism and misogyny mutually constituted and reinforced one another in ways that limited educational opportunity for all. Not until the Civil Rights era would women advance forward in the fight for college access, when the Black Campus Movement forced white supremacy, systemic racism and other varieties of oppression onto the institutional agenda.
In the post-Civil Rights era, gender-based exclusion in higher education appeared to be a thing of the past. Since the 1980s, more women than men attend college, though women of color attend college at lower rates than white women. They are also less likely to graduate within four years—a stark reminder of how race must be accounted for in these gendered experiences.
Nonetheless, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, women now account for over half of the nation’s college-educated labor force, making significant inroads into the highest-paying male-dominated occupations, including medicine and law. Though the gender pay gap remains, it’s narrowing in part thanks to women’s educational attainment and the struggle for gender equality that made college-going possible.
In the late 1800s, a resurgence of virulent xenophobia, nativism and anti-Blackness revealed how the educational fates of all women were hopelessly intertwined. As the Trump administration works doggedly to reverse the gains of the past few decades, we would do well to remember that lesson. We must also consider the ways that white patriarchal backlash on college campuses erodes at the very foundations of our democracy, which, as our early founders first argued, requires a liberal education for all.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
