The ideological atmosphere has been highly charged recently in the study of American educational history. Hot debates center on the altruistic or self-serving motives of public school reformers, the liberating or oppressive effects of schools, and the relationship of educational history to present policy. Historians of American education are often most readily identified by ideological labels like “radical” or “Whig”. Thus it seems incongruous to me that members of this subfield have paid so little systematic attention to the ideology of the people we write about, and in particular, to the ideology of school reformers. This inattention to the concept of ideology and to the substance of particular ideologies is true of American social historians in general, with some important exceptions. Most often, one encounters the term in a casual reference, where the writer has apparently taken for granted the meaning of the term and the constituency of the ideology mentioned. Nancy Cott refers variously to “early nineteenth-century ideology”, to “ideology in reawakened Protestantism,” and to “nineteenth-century sexual ideology.” Linda Kerber refers to “republican ideology” without defining either term, and Stephen Thernstrom refers not only to the “ideology of mobility” on which he focused, but to a “total reigning ideology,” of which it was a part.

Of American secular faiths, perhaps none has been more resilient than the belief in higher education as a means to a more fulfilling life. The land-grant college movement, initiated by the Morrill Act of 1862, has stood historically as one very tangible article of this faith. Rightly recognized as a revolutionary influence upon American education, this public college movement gave profoundly important impetus to tendencies that were apparent within the nation. A revolt against classical schooling was already under way. Belief in the efficacy of the sciences was gaining momentum. There were simultaneous demands for more “practical” learning that would emphasize agricultural and mechanical arts instruction. And pervading each of these tendencies was the growing insistence upon the democratization of educational opportunity.

Although the lofty rhetoric accompanying the founding of the major American graduate schools seemed to indicate that they would be open to both sexes, the first women applicants quickly learned that this access was often not available. Their eventual admission and first degrees, which came as early as the 1870s at Boston University and as late as the 1960s at Princeton University, was the result of a series of skirmishes at several European as well as American universities, at least two major strategies, a large cast of participants, and the active support (financial and otherwise) of a few women's groups, especially the young Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA).