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Carol K. Coburn, Andrea L. Turpin. A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1616–1617, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1616
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Analyzing the nexus and interface of religion, gender, and higher education is a daunting task for any historical time period. Historian Andrea L. Turpin takes on the challenge of unpacking the nuances in both the antebellum and postbellum eras in the United States, looking for connections and patterns that influenced the transitions within higher education, particularly for American women, who constituted almost half the college population by 1920. In A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917, Turpin uses ten colleges as case studies to unwrap this “significant aspect” of these transitions, stating that “the arrival of female students to the academy was a key factor in the creation of a new ideal of student moral and religious formation—for both men and women” (4). The author argues that “evangelical pragmatists” (24) led the initial push for women in higher education prior to the Civil War, but in the postbellum environment, “liberal educators” used women’s presence to create a more gendered ideal than had earlier “evangelical educators” (94) by drawing stricter parameters around gender roles of character and service—which created a duality of both expanding and restricting women’s role in society.
