Women Universities And Change

This volume analyzes how higher education responses to sociopolitical and economic influences affect gender equality at the nation-state and university levels in the European Union and the United States.

First published in 1999, this volume centres on a case study which looks at the experiences of non-traditional adult women students in universities, from the perspective of the actors. The interaction of structure and agency and the significance of macro and micro levels in shaping the behaviour, attitudes and experiences of women adult students are examined by drawing on three perspectives: feminism, Marxism and interactionism. An underlying question is to what extent did studying change the way participants perceived themselves as women? It relates life histories to their student career as individuals and collectively as subcultural groups. It also breaks new ground by including a sample of male adult students in order to compare and clarify gender issues. It also uses macro and micro sociological theories as a tool for understanding the experiences of women at university and the relationship between their public and private lives. The book concludes that studying for a degree represented an active decision to take greater control, to break free from gender and class restraints, and to transform individual lives. The study aims to clarify and reassert the radical individual traditions within sociology, feminism and adult education.

University and College Women’s and Gender Equity Centers examines the new institutional contexts surrounding women’s centers. It looks at the possibilities for, as well as the challenges to, advocating for gender equity in higher education, and the ways in which women’s and gender equity centers contribute to and lead that work. The book first describes the landscape of women’s centers in higher education and explores the structures within which the centers are situated. In doing so, the book shows the ways in which many women’s centers have expanded their work to include working with athletics, Greek life, men, transgender students, international students, student parents, veterans, etc. Contributions then delve into the profession of women’s center work itself, and ask how women’s center work has become "professionalized?" Threats and challenges to women’s and gender equity centers are also explored, as contributions look at how their expansion has helped or complicated the role of centers? The collection concludes by highlighting current successes and forward-thinking approaches in women’s centers and asking how gender equity centers can best prepare for the future? Through narratives, case studies, and by offering strategies and best practice, University and College Women’s and Gender Equity Centers will engage emerging and existing equity centre professionals and women’s and gender studies faculty and students and help them to move the work of gender equity forward in the next decade.

This book sets out to examine the changing role of women in higher education with an emphasis on academic and leadership issues. The scope of the book is international, with a wide range of contributors, whose expertise spans sociology, social science, economics, politics, public policy and linguistic studies, all of whom have a major interest in global education. The volume examines the ways in which the leadership role and academic roles of women in higher education are changing in the twenty first century, offering an up-to-date policy discussion of this area. It is in some sense a sequel to the earlier volume by the same Editor, Women as Leaders and Managers in Higher Education, but with very different emphases. The pressures now are to respond to the demands of the technological age and to those of the global economy. Today there are more highly qualified and experienced female academics, and more expectation of their gaining the highest posts. Challenges still remain, particularly in terms of the top posts, and in equal pay. The discussion of global policy issues affecting the role of women in higher education is combined with country case studies, several of which are comparative. Together they examine and unpack the particular situations of women in a wide range of higher education systems, from Brazil to the US to Europe to Africa and the Far East, noting the shift towards more flexibility, more personal choice and a greater acceptance by society of their abilities. This volume is a useful and influential addition to published work in this area, and is aimed at the intelligent general reader as well as the scholar interested in this topic.

The story of the American university in the past half century is about the rise of women in participation as students, faculty members, college athletes, and in subsequently changing the overall university culture for the better. Now almost sixty percent of the overall college student population in America is female, and still growing. By the year 2000, women surpassed men worldwide in attendance at higher education institutions. At the same time, after years of a disproportionate dominant male professoriate, female faculty members are now becoming the majority of university professors. While top university presidents are still largely male, women have achieved real gains in the overall administrative ranks and trustee positions. In all areas of the university disparities still exist in terms of compensation and balance in key areas of the academy, but the overall positive trend is clear. Few to this date have recognized and chronicled this extraordinary change in college education—one of society’s fundamental and influential institutions. For universities the test for the future is to make the changes needed in broad areas within higher education from financial aid to curriculum, student activities, and overall campus culture in order to better foster a newly empowered majority of women students.

This book is a pioneering venture. It is the first effort to provide an international inventory of women’s universities and colleges. Apart from providing such inventory the book intends to raise questions and suggest new ways of improving the education of women worldwide.

This study analyzes how Jill Ker Conway, first woman president of Smith College, implemented programmatic initiatives and changes to Smith's institutional culture that fit with her vision for higher education.

In Women's Activism and Social Change, Nancy A. Hewitt challenges the popular belief that the lives of antebellum women focused on their role in the private sphere of the family. Examining intense and well-documented reform movements in nineteenth-century Rochester, New York, Hewitt distinguishes three networks of women's activism: women from the wealthiest Rochester families who sought to ameliorate the lives of the poor; those from upwardly mobile families who, influenced by evangelical revivalism, campaigned to eradicate such social ills as slavery, vice, and intemperance; and those who combined limited economic resources with an agrarian Quaker tradition of communialism and religious democracy to advocate full racial and sexual equality.