“the ratio of male-to-female under- graduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930.
I found an interesting fact while reading Jonathan Last’s new book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster. It seems that women pursuing college in earlier times was equal to that of men attending:
Although the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female under- graduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and later as GIs returned from World War II. A highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. But starting then and continuing until the present in an almost unbroken trend, female college enrollments have increased relative to male enrollments.
We always hear from feminists and others that women were short-changed forever in the US in terms of education, but apparently, they were attending college in equal numbers to men earlier in our history. However, you rarely hear this mentioned.
Yeah, but prior to 1930, I’m betting you would find that most men were attending to prepare themselves for professional careers, whereas most women were attending liberal arts or women’s colleges to prepare themselves to be trophy wives. They weren’t really getting the same education.
Many of those women were training for professional careers as teachers or did enter the labor force according to the study I linked:
More difficult to understand is why women, whose later labor force participation
rates when married were low, went to college at rates almost equal to those of men.
One answer is that a substantial fraction of the women who graduated in these early
classes never married and did enter the labor force. Those who did marry were far
more likely to marry a college-educated man.
Preparing for a career was part of it, and I know from my Grandmother’s experience growing up the daughter of a veteran (my Great Grandfather was an ambulance driver in France from 1917-1918, and later a doctor), and marrying an NROTC man, she expected to have to contribute to the family income by teaching.
I was raised by several generations of Steel Magnolias. Well educated and sophisticated. They viewed what used to be called Home Economics as serious business. And they were correct. The home and family are the central economic unit in the world. It garners income, has expenses, creates growth (generational growth), attempts to gather wealth for hard times etc.
Grandmothers manages food supplies, from field to table, in a couple of cases were prime movers in investment money as well as household money management, and, most importantly were the Human Resources Executive, education, manners, interpersonal relationships (sibs), nutrition, health care, good values, charity and oh yes, God.
College did them well, and they created good product. The brand name is the same as the family name, and all of us (4 in my family and 28 first cousins all around) were ‘sold’ to the world market in good stead.
Who has filled the void as women have left the field? Public schools (ha), MTV, gangsta rap, video games ?
I believe this should mean all boys must be drafted and serve their nation for 2 years. This will make them all equal by at least having THE FATHER figure in their lives to give them the focus they need after the two years to have dreams that serve their nation
I guess I don’t find the 1900-1930 numbers surprising, for a few reasons.
1. Some professions (teaching, nursing, missionary work, some office-work) were hard-coded for females.
2. Post-Victorian bourgeois culture placed responsibility for the cultural development of children with the female (a stay at home wife). This is regarded as sexist nonsense today, this business of creating a structured, culturally rich and productive home for children, so it is ignored by the Left. (Otherwise they have to explain why the children are getting what they need in daycare and government schools, since mom and dad are so busy self-actualizing themselves in the workplace.)
3. The early feminists and suffragettes meant business, unlike the grievance-industry ‘feminists’ of today. They walked their talk. My maternal grandmother grew up on a farm with no electricity or indoor plumbing but she made darn sure she got her two-year teaching certificate. She married, he died, they lost everything in the depression. There was, still, never any doubt that my mother would be sent off to the state university. There were no cultural or financial barriers, and there was absolutely zero question but that my mother would be university-educated.
4. Post-Victorian bourgeois culture presumed an active partnership between men and women, as a bulwark in support of marital monogamy, community and church-related stability. Families had to function better and stick together. There was no nanny state. Men and women who can talk to each other stay married longer.
5. Men didn’t necessarily attend college in order to be white collar. As Chas. Murray notes this week, *everyone* is an apprentice at some point, and that includes college graduates. While my paternal grandfather did not go to college, he served in WWI, before he worked his way up in a bank for 60 years. My paternal grandmother attended a four-year school and graduated, before coming home to help my great-grandfather run his creamery and cannery operation. My grandparents married late, she stopped working outside the home. It is this latter fact that putative feminists today regard as a crime against civilization. But she in no way felt she was marrying down because she married a rural bank’s cashier who had not attended college.
6. A much higher percentage of men of all backgrounds served in the military. There was no GI Bill, there was no food stamp program, there was no social support for sitting on mom and dad’s couch. So one got a job, and one could get a professional job without a receipt from XYZ College, for tuition fees paid. (Harry Truman: high school graduate.)
7. There was no income tax until 1913. If one belonged to a wealthy family, one retained one’s dough more easily, and one might educate oneself separately from an industrial degree factory. Women were regarded as more vulnerable, and were less likely to be packed off to Europe alone, hence the social structure and protection of colleges and universities (I know, another crime against humanity).
In general, when women on the Left tell people to shut up because those people are concerned about their boys’ treatment in schools, they’re not talking about balancing school experiences between the sexes. They’re not talking about, even, a kind of twisted haute-bourgeois reparations exercise for imagined historical crimes. They’re just correctly sizing up a situation in which academia and the media actively support the idea of an educational matriarchy. It’s somewhat entertaining when one confronts a Leftist genially and notes the matriarchal impulse that controls education policy today. They usually just laugh and say something to the effect of “Deal with it, troglodyte mofo!” — their first response, in my experience, is revealing, happy laughter. Then of course they say “Shut up.”
Conservatives really screwed up, ceding the academy to matriarchal Leftists over the past 40 years.
Charles Murray has an extensive discussion about the different rates of great accomplishment between men and women in the arts and sciences. Men accomplished more. Feminists hate this. Now, part of the reason for this greater level of accomplishment was discrimination. No doubt about it. But that doesn’t explain everything. Because if it did, then when women became liberated, we would have seen an explosion of women join the ranks of the “significant figures” in the arts and sciences. Just as we saw when discrimination against Jews was lessened. So, discrimination doesn’t explain everything. (Sorry, feminists).
Once we factor in differences in ability, drive, motivation, life plans, etc. the true constellation of reasons for the differences emerges. This does not fit into the grievance-hustling narrative, so it’s not mentioned.
Per my above comment, women’s accomplishments in past years is apparent by its absence from the modern world. Stable, self sufficient families producing productive well adjusted next generation.
In the day a mid forties woman was able to point to her families success and rightfully claim full credit… not any different than the working professional man being proud of his advancement.
Feminism destroyed all of that and sent women on a downward spiral of self doubt, sexual degradation and downright unhappiness.
But they were soooo progressive dont ya know
I forgot to mention, the above is from his data-heavy book Human Accomplishment.
My grandmother earned a master’s degree in the 1920s. She became an English teacher. And let me tell you, she was strict. I would spend a day playing at her house, and she would have me write a letter telling her what I did. She corrected it in red, then mailed it back to me. That was when I was 5.
My mother never attended an hour of college in her life. She took a couple of real estate courses, got her license and never looked back. She made so much money that she bought the company. Today, lawyers, those would be guys who went to law school, call her to ask for advice on real estate law. Excuse me, didn’t you go to law school? My mother read a book. I remember seeing her read it on the couch. But she knows more about real estate law than you do, what with your law degree and all?
It’s ridiculous, the whole thing. Women have always gone to college. Other women have not and yet become successful. Go figure.
Another lesser-known fact is that the number of male to female undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and they soared directly following the end of World War II. A highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1.
From then on female college enrollments began to catch up, especially in the 1970s. Gender equality was again reached around 1980 and subsequently women overtook men in college enrollments and graduation rates.
The narrowing of the gender gap in enrollments to 1980 was a return or a “homecoming,” although the levels of college going were almost six times higher in 1980 than in the 1920s for both men and women.
THE HOMECOMING OF AMERICAN COLLEGE WOMEN:
THE REVERSAL OF THE COLLEGE GENDER GAP
Claudia Goldin
Lawrence F. Katz
Ilyana Kuziemko
“And what happened to this agonistic educational culture? After over two thousand years as the central element in education, public verbal contest died out almost completely in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of the oral, argument-based, male-dominated education of the pre-1870 period, education post-1870 was much more interiorized, irenic, negotiative, explanatory. The older methods of academic defense and attack died out with startling rapidity, says Ong, because of the entrance of women into higher education. Contestive, combative educational methods that had worked satisfactorily for all-male schooling now came to seem violent, vulgar, silly. A man could attack another man verbally, and was expected to do so, but to attack a woman, either physically or intellectually, was thought ignoble. As more women entered colleges, their influence both tacit and explicit caused the abandonment of the agonistic tradition and the evolution of less overtly contestive educational methods. Thus the educational structure we inherit, an amalgam of newer irenic values and half-understood survivals from a more agonistic time in education.”
http://unmaskingfeminism.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-feminization-of-rhetoric/