This exploration of American women's post-World War II higher education begins with three stories. These narratives reflect issues women faced when, as educators, they tried to plan curricula and programs for female students, and when, as professionals, they tried to manage their own careers in an era that frequently sent mixed messages about women's roles and opportunities. They also reveal a quiet type of activism practiced by postwar women educators, an approach which often pales in comparison to the firmer efforts of postsuffrage and World War II activists, or to the lively and boisterous work of late-1960s feminists. However, I will argue that this more muted style, when combined with the era's predilection for individualized solutions to women's concerns, marks a particular postwar approach to advocacy that may be different from other eras but that suited the contextually complicated postwar period.

William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. His scientific peers knew him as a geologist and natural philosopher, director of the first geological survey of Virginia, author of over one hundred publications in science, and promoter of professionalization. His colleagues in higher education, meanwhile, thought of him as the reform-minded professor at the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, who later left the South and established one of America's first technological institutes. Comparatively little has been written about either of these areas of Rogers's life and career. We know much more about the scientific and educational thought of such figures as Louis Agassiz at Harvard, Benjamin Silliman at Yale, Joseph Henry at Princeton, and Alexander Dallas Bache at the helm of the Coast Survey. The literature on Rogers, by comparison, has offered little insight into his life and even less about his relationship to broader developments in nineteenth-century science and higher learning.

At the beginning of the twentieth century about one in twenty American teenagers graduated from high school; by mid century over half of them did so; and today six of seven do. Along with this expansion in graduation, the experiences of high schooling became more significant. Though diversity existed at the school level, by the interwar period most high schools offered courses in “higher” academic subjects (literature, mathematics, and ancient and foreign languages), while they gave large numbers of students a chance to practice music, drama, and other fine arts. Business leaders and educators developed programs in technical-skill training. Courses in household economics, personal hygiene, and sex and reproduction appeared as well. A few schools operated with two shifts: day and night Many maximized their capacity by rotating students between newly constructed gymnasiums, stadiums, fields, swimming pools, showers, cafeterias, laundries, machine shops, laboratories, performance halls, and libraries. Some provided up-to-date diagnostic and preventative medical and psychological services. Others developed vocational guidance. Nearly all established relationships with juvenile justice and youth custody agencies. More than any other institution, the increasingly comprehensive high schools of the twentieth-century redefined the social lives of American youths through teams, clubs, bands, and groups engaged in a long list of contests, games, performances, and other events. Early in the century extracurricular activities began to rival formal class work as the primary focus of secondary schooling. Today there is a joke told from Ohio to Texas, funny for its sad truth. Q: How do you pass a school levy? A: Put football on the chopping-block.

Angelo Petraglia, born in 1876 in the Salerno Province of Italy, the first child of Nicola and Carmela Petraglia, spent his first five years in Piaggine, a small mountain village, and in 1881 sailed to New York City with his mother, his uncle, and a younger sister. His father had preceded them to America to find work and a place to live. The family name was changed to Patri, perhaps by immigration authorities. The sister died shortly after their arrival in America, but three other sisters were born soon after.