A New Moral Vision : : Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 / / Andrea L. Turpin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Turpin, Andrea L.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: American Institutions and Society
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled. In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men’s, women’s, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond. Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men’s, women’s, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Engendering Ethical Education -- Chapter 1. Reorienting Righteousness: Toward a New Narrative of Gender and Religion in American Higher Education -- Part 1. Women Enter Higher Education, 1837–1875 -- Chapter 2. Ideological Origins of the Women’s College: Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon, and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary -- Chapter 3. Ideological Origins of Collegiate Coeducation: Oberlin College as a Sending City on a Hill -- Chapter 4. Separate or “Joint Education of the Sexes”? Religion, Science, and Class in National Debates -- Part 2. The Rise of Gendered Moral Visions, 1868–1917 -- Chapter 5. The Chief End of Man and of Woman: Princeton and Evelyn -- Chapter 6. A House Divided? Harvard and Radcliffe -- Chapter 7. “Not to Be Ministered unto, but to Minister”: Wellesley College -- Chapter 8. “I Delight in the Truth”: Bryn Mawr College -- Chapter 9. “Almost without Money and without Price to Every Young Man and Every Young Woman”: The University of Michigan -- Chapter 10. “Even an Atheist Does Not Desire His Boy to Be Trained a Materialist”: The University of California -- Part 3. Student Voluntary Religion and Service, 1868–1917 -- Chapter 11. Serving the College and the Nation: YMCAs and YWCAs on Campus -- Conclusion: Trajectories and Trade-offs -- Notes -- Index