'HARVARD WOMEN': A HISTORY OF THE FOUNDING OF RADCLIFFE COLLEGE (BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS)

This historical study documents the efforts on the part of women to gain access to Harvard University from 1890 to 1900 and the responses of the University to exclude women from its educational privileges and academic degrees. The establishment of Radcliffe College in 1894 was the result of the interplay of these two movements; and it is the conclusion of this thesis that the compromise of a coordinate institution for women was an adequate solution to the problem of inequality of educational opportunity of women and men students at Harvard during the nineteenth century. In tracing this early history of women's efforts at Harvard, this study looks at the activities of a network of Boston and Cambridge women who worked through a number of different agencies on behalf of improved education for women and girls in their community. These were the nineteenth-century "Harvard women": they were the sisters, daughters, and wives of Harvard College men who responded to their exclusion from Harvard College by founding a number of educational programs for women including the Woman's Education Association (1872), the Society to Encourage Studies at Home (1873), and the "Harvard Annex" (1879)--the immediate predecessor of Radcliffe College. In looking at their efforts, this study highlights an aspect of the Eliot era--a period generally acknowledged to be one of unprecedented reform and one which was critical in the shaping of American higher education--from a vantage which brings into question the extent of reform-mindedness at Harvard. It points to the differences between men's and women's expereinces as college students in coeducational and coordinate settings, and it demonstrates the differential impact of society's norms on the purposes of college women and college men during the nineteenth century.;The founders of Radcliffe and the women educational reformers who created complementary and compensatory programs for women prior to the founding of Radcliffe--Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Anna Eliot Ticknor, Katharine P. Loring, and other women of their pre-collegiate generation and Brahmin social position--reflected the social attitudes and prevailing Victorian standards regarding woman's special sphere and domestic role. All of their reform efforts, including their efforts to gain access to Harvard, were conditioned by a fundamental and enduring belief in the special nature and special responsibilities of women as wives, mothers, and, in some cases, as teachers. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI.