Gender, Religion, and Moral Vision in the American Academy, 1837-1917

This study explores how the entrance of women into American higher education in the nineteenth century affected the concurrent religious liberalization and ultimate secularization of the American academy. The advent of women's higher education helped shape a new understanding of student moral formation for a more secular age.Evangelical goals motivated the creation in the 1830s of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and Oberlin Collegiate Institute, the models for the leading women's colleges and coeducational universities that arose in the second half of the century. These two institutions extended higher education to women in order to maximize the number of people well equipped to spread the gospel. However, the subsequent large-scale entrance of women into higher education provided a means for other institutions to liberalize or shed their religious identities. After mid-century, top colleges desiring to attract donors and students had to argue for their broad appeal and national significance. The advent of competing men's, women's, and coeducational institutions provided a new type of identity marker that could replace a school's evangelical or denominational one: institutions instead emphasized the sex(es) they served.

Doing so enabled colleges to articulate a specific moral purpose for education not grounded in a doctrinal tradition now perceived to be narrow or backward. Schools no longer used doctrinal instruction to shape students' moral imaginations. Instead, institutions transmitted moral visions whose particulars were grounded in a conception of the sex-specific types of future service students could render their communities. Colleges and universities that educated boys often claimed to equip them for types of service reserved for powerful men: wisely directing the nation from prominent positions of influence in government, business, and the professions. Likewise, those that educated girls argued that college best prepared them for types of service considered feminine; for most, these were teaching, homemaking, and, increasingly, social service.

The traditional secularization narrative is therefore incomplete. Colleges and universities did not merely reframe their evangelical Protestant heritage into a broader liberal Protestantism considered more intellectually viable and socially respectable; they also re-envisioned the moral purpose of higher education in sex-specific terms.