Academic Women

Women have played important roles in the development of learning from the time of the Greeks to our own: Socrates is said to have learned rhetoric from a woman, Aspasia; the abbesses of medieval convents figured prominently in the fields of scholarship and artistic production and were respected by both popes and emperors; and in Renaissance Italy women lectured at all of the major academies. In American higher education, women such as Maria Sanford, Alice Freeman Palmer, Carey Thomas, Vida Scudder, and Ruth Benedict, to name only a few, have shown themselves to be outstanding teachers, scholars, and administrators.

This book is an intensive full-length study of the sociology of academic women. After briefly surveying the history of women in the American academic world, the author, balancing systematic data with personal biographical materials, analyzes the motivations, backgrounds, and career patterns of academic women and evaluates their contributions as teachers and professors and as scholars and scientists, placing special emphasis on their productivity and creativity. She then turns her attention to the roles of academic women as faculty colleagues and as spinsters, wives, and mothers and offers some prediction for the future of American women in academic life.

Written with perception and sympathy and displaying a disciplined use of the tools of sociology, this book sheds new light on America's academic women and the world they inhabit.