More than two decades of interest in the history of American women as college students have recently culminated in a trio of notable books. Barbara Miller Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and Lynn D. Gordon's Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era all use a rich variety of sources to bring to life the experiences of generations of women undergraduate students, mainly at prestigious colleges and large state universities. While the authors have different emphases, they share a commitment to making sense of college experiences through alumnae memoirs, letters, yearbooks, and works of fiction, as well as more conventional sources. Their inquiries intersect in their analyses of life for women on coeducational campuses during the Progressive Era and earlier years. Together, Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon present a cohesive picture of “coeds” whose lives were entirely controlled by the Victorian notion of separate gender spheres. The “outsiders” of the first generation espoused traditional values, studied hard, and remained on the sidelines during extracurricular activities. Beginning in the 1890s, women of the second generation proclaimed that, like men, they could devote themselves to “college” life; adhering to a separate spheres ideology, they created student government, clubs, and activity groups for women only. Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon portray a form of education in which male and female students stayed entirely apart—education that did not warrant the prefix “co.”

In 1900 John Dewey delivered the presidential address to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging his colleagues to adopt scientific methods as the foundation for their work. Psychology, he offered, would “afford [them] insight into the conditions which control the formation and execution of aims, and thus enable human effort to expend itself sanely, rationally, and with assurance.” His address proved an apt greeting to the new century, for it portended the acceptance of social scientific knowledge as the foundation for social reform. But Dewey also alluded to the limitations of the social science professions and the role of experts in the years ahead, warning that “psychology will never tell us just what to do ethically, nor just how to do it.” The question, then, of who would determine the ethical uses of social scientific knowledge and its formulation into public policy in a democratic and bureaucratic society plagued Dewey as the century unfolded. This essay explores Dewey's concerns about the potential threat to democratic community posed by dependence upon experts as policymakers.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the white elites who controlled public education in the South stood at a racial crossroads. Facing increasingly insistent demands for equality and access from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), political and educational leaders had to choose between accommodation and resistance. Pressure from the NAACP and the courts did bring important accommodations, but in significant, and still unexamined, ways the white South chose to resist. The most durable resistance to the challenges posed by the NAACP's legal campaign came not in the courts or in politics but within educational institutions. While the South's legal and political defense of racial discrimination and segregation ultimately collapsed, resistance inside schools endured. Beginning in the 1940s, shrewd southern elites institutionalized new, more legally defensible forms of discrimination and inequality that continue to define educational arrangements in the region today.