Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era by Lynn D. GordonReview by: Dorothy M. BrownThe American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 5 (Dec., 1991), p. 1630Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2165458 .

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1630 Reviews of Books

fear and bigotry the Klan represented is still to be done.

HERBERT SHAPIRO

University of Cincinnati

LYNN D. GORDON. Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990. Pp. xiii, 258. $29.95.

Beginning her reflections on college women, higher education, and social activism as an undergraduate at Barnard in the turbulent 1960s, Lynn D. Gordon here examines the intersections of educated women, their institutions, and American reform in the com- plex, transitional years 1890-1920. She explores the experience, community, and divergence of two gen- erations of women at five highly varied institutions: the University of California at Berkeley, the Univer- sity of Chicago, Vassar College, Agnes Scott College, and Sophie Newcomb College. (Refreshingly, there are no New England case studies.)

Generational divisions are always somewhat prob- lematic. Gordon's two generations include the tradi- tional pioneers, the pre-1890 graduates, and an elon- gated second generation born after 1880 and distinguished by the "linking of gender consciousness to campus life and to post graduate plans for social activism, a growing commitment to egalitarian rather than separatist feminism, and a simultaneous interest in marriage" (p. 5). Essentially, her pioneers are faculty and deans; her second generation encom- passes the students, united by their continuity of experience in the Progressive era.

Gordon details the successful strategies of separate social and equal curricular and intellectual spheres promoted by the pioneer generation at coeducational Berkeley and Chicago for their successors. First- generation leaders such as Lucy Sprague and Jessica Peixotto at Berkeley and Marion Talbot at Chicago worked with women philanthropists for dormitories and connections for their students. When the Univer- sity of Chicago, worried about effeminization, moved to establish a gender-segregated curriculum, off-cam- pus networks unleashed a national barrage in oppo- sition. This campus linkage with women's organiza- tions and reform causes forged by the pioneer generation was even more visible at Vassar.

Whereas Gordon establishes that the most impor- tant determinant of the undergraduate experience, at least for the first generation of college-educated women, was the choice between a single sex or coed- ucational institution, she also demonstrates the im- portance of region and the long shadow of the southern lady in the founding and later development of Agnes Scott College and Sophie Newcomb College. Although generational distinctions used by Gordon are least effective here, the second generation, as at Berkeley, Chicago, and Vassar, found opportunities

for service and reform that gradually eased the gender separatism on campus and beyond.

Gordon ably shows, at each of the institutions, the early importance of community and women's culture and the hopes of the pioneers for lives of broadened potential for their talents. Creatively employing stu- dent writings, she demonstrates the two generations moving apart. Short stories in the Vassar Miscellany featured talented women losing their men; indeed, at all of the campuses "usually the female protagonist lost the man or job" (p. 39). During the 1910s, Gordon argues, the students and recent graduates stressed equality more than separation, showing a greater emphasis on heterosociality and finally mar- riage.

The strength of Gordon's study is in the dialogue she is able to frame between the generations, using the correspondence and biographical studies of pio- neers and tracing the changing aspirations of the second generation in their letters and articles in newspapers and literary and alumnae magazines. Gordon's study is richly peopled and fully alive; it is a fine addition to the burgeoning field of the history of women in higher education.

DOROTHY M. BROWN

Georgetown University

NANCY F. GABIN. Feminzsm in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975. Ith- aca: Cornell University Press. 1990. Pp. xi, 257. Cloth $31.95, paper $12.95.

In the historiography of postwar America, and even more so in textbooks and classrooms, the labor move- ment and the women's movement have been treated as separate stories. The builders of industrial union- ism are assumed to be men, while the feminist strug- gle is explained as the product of middle-class wom- en's rejection of suburban housewifery or oppression by male civil rights workers and antiwar activists. Nancy F. Gabin's study makes it impossible to con- tinue to tell two separate stories. She convincingly shows that working women played a crucial role in industrial unionism and demonstrated a long-term commitment to feminist ideals that predated, and differed from, the more middle-class feminism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gabin organizes her book chronologically. She be- gins in the 1930s, arguing that although the United Auto Workers (UAW) succeeded in recruiting women workers in auto plants by appealing to their class interests, the union shared management's com- mitment to gender hierarchy in the workplace. Im- bued with a traditional idealization of the family wage earned by the male head of the household, union- ists-including many women-did little to challenge sex discrimination in job classifications, pay scales, seniority lists, and union leadership. Then World War II brought thousands more women into automo-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1991

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