Women's Education in the United States, 1780-1840 » (1st Edition)

Margaret A. Nash is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Riverside. She teaches courses on the history of education, history of curriculum, and gender and education. Her research has appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the History of Higher Education Annual.

Archival research yields new insights on higher education for women in early America. Nash (curriculum and instruction, U. of California, Riverside) argues that in this period, education was less strongly gendered than some historians have posited, and that the rising rhetoric of human rights, Enlightenment thought, and evangelical Christianity in an age of dynamic economic change helped build a broad ideological base for the teaching of women. Education was key to class formation, and Nash believes that class and race were more salient than gender in the construction of educational institutions. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR