In 1828, as the movement to improve educational opportunities for American women was gaining in prominence, Catharine Beecher approached first Mary Lyon, and a year later Lyon's associate Zilpah Grant, to join her as instructor at Hartford Female Seminary. Consonant with the era of optimistic reform in which she lived, Beecher believed Hartford could change the world, so she wanted the most well-known female educators on board. The key to Hartford's influence was to be the type of students it attracted. Beecher wrote to Grant that a “woman of piety and active benevolence, with wealth which enables her to take the lead in society, can do more good than another of equally exalted character without it.” Lyon and Grant both declined.

In the fall semester of 1894, Ida Mae Godfrey entered Iowa Wesleyan College (IWC), a small predominantly white coeducational institution in the southeast Iowa town of Mount Pleasant Godfrey, like dozens of whites and eight blacks before her, had graduated from Mount Pleasant High School and was soon faced with a decision concerning the next steps in her life. She could, as did many young black and white women, marry, settle, and raise a family, but her personal and professional aspirations likely convinced her that a college education was the best choice. Although enrolled at IWC, Godfrey most likely lived at home while she attended school. This allowed her parents and extended family to shield her from some of the racial prejudices and possible sexual abuses she may have experienced had she gone away to college and worked as a domestic in a white home to pay for school. In temporarily exerting control over their daughter's life, Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey helped to preserve Ida's mental and physical energies so that she might advance through school and enter one of the most respectable occupations open to black women in the late nineteenth century—teaching.

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those of the eight public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908: Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) (1891), Alabama College for Women (ACW) (1893), Texas State College for Women (TSCW) (1901), Florida State College for Women (FSCW) (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908). Little studied today, these schools served as important centers of women's education in their states, collectively educating approximately 100,000 women before World War II and with combined enrollments exceeding that of the Seven Sisters schools for many years.

Within a large city… it would be most unwise to attempt to say what is the correct curriculum or organization of all the high schools under the management of the city school board… I am convinced American secondary education can be made satisfactory without any radical changes in the basic pattern. This can only be done, however, if the citizens in many localities display sufficient interest in their schools and are willing to support them. The improvement must come school by school and be made with due regard for the nature of the community (Dr. James Conant, The American High School Today, 1959).

Educational opportunity must be equal for all young people, regardless of the neighborhood they live in and the school they attend (Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre, Principal, William Penn High School for Girls, 1961).