Keywords

Introduction

Edith Morley (1875–1964) was the first woman professor in England appointed by the University of Reading in 1908. Mary Beard highlights themes in Morley’s Reminiscences of a Working Life that occur throughout studies of women’s entry into academic professions. Morley was “awkward,” “difficult,” and “determined,” and “Quite simply, she took on the establishment, as feminists have done ever since” (Morley 2016, p. 1). The key tension in the historiography of women’s progress as academics lies in its position within women’s and feminist history and the history of education. Research either extends our knowledge of the past for its own sake or seeks answers to ongoing inequality today. While these two aspirations may result in similar approaches and interpretations, in the attempt to find an overarching interpretation of chronological developments, the details, subtleties, and individuals who do not fit that pattern are overlooked. Linda Eisenmann recognized that early work by Barbara Solomon (1985), focusing mainly on women’s access to institutions provided building blocks for future research, overlooked nuances of time periods and racial and ethnic experiences. Eisenmann’s Historical Dictionary (1998) identified a number of diverse women whose experience could contribute to research into minorities. She identified themes that form the structure of the following chapter, drawing together some international perspectives on the development of women as academics and deans (Eisenmann 2001). Themes of institutions, networking, money, and religion provide four hubs from which to reflect on existing work and recognize potential new directions for improving either our understanding of the past or the problems of the present. A fifth section discusses the possibility of “border crossings” as an additional lens through which to view the field. As new research builds on the detailed work of early scholars such as Geraldine Joncich Clifford (1989), new directions develop ways of thinking about the role of women in academia. They also respond to the public call that historical research has to matter, to make a difference to how we understand the world’s past and present (Spencer 2017a). The scope of the chapter is restricted to material published in English and existing lacunae in terms of race, disability, and sexuality are recognized but inevitably repeated. Most examples are taken from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Britain, and it is hoped that the themes identified will generate research with a wider geographical scope.

The narrative of women’s success in achieving gender equality in academia is by no means complete. Female students are still in the minority in STEM subjects, reflected by the number of women academics in these fields (Eggins 2017; May 2008). Recent rises in the number of hourly paid or adjunct faculty, due largely to economic factors, have impacted heavily on women’s representation in the academic hierarchy. Women professors remain in the minority especially in large research universities although, as Alice Kessler-Harris has observed, the glass reflecting women’s participation in the workforce may be half empty, but we should measure it against “the one that had almost no liquid in it at all less than a generation ago” (Kessler-Harris in May 2008, p. xvi). Research into the history of women academics, unsurprisingly, attempts to locate the origins of inequality as well as celebrating pioneers and progress. This is not just about numbers; it is about who controls the interpretation of new knowledge. Exploring the development of women’s employment within universities “helps us understand the near universal difficulties that women and other marginalised groups encounter as they seek to participate fully in the process of knowledge production” (May 2008, p. 3). Researching women as academics is more complex than simply charting their access and presence; it is also about recognizing their impact on university life and curricula (Harford and Rush 2009). Two case studies highlight themes of history for the past or present. The first focuses on the role of the British and International Federation of University Women, identifying how women worked together to expand career opportunities. The second considers how campaigns for academic equality draw on historical explanations for the origins of the problem.

Institutions

Research on institutions can focus on the role individual women played in establishing new institutions and their negotiation of space in existing institutions. Tanya Fitzgerald suggests that the Department of Home Science at Otago, University of New Zealand, provided a safe marginalized space where women could develop their professional expertise. However, at the same time as it enabled women to take up positions of authority, it also created a competitive environment between women who remained outsiders to other departments and colleges in the university (Fitzgerald 2009).

As university education for women in the USA and England expanded, graduates could aspire to work within all-female colleges of, for example, the Seven Sisters in the USA: Mount Holyoke, 1837; Vassar, 1865; Wellesley, 1875; Smith, 1875; Radcliffe, 1879; Bryn Mawr, 1885; and Barnard, 1889. In England women’s higher education (most colleges / universities were men single sex) was offered at the Cambridge colleges of Girton, 1869; Newnham, 1871; and Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall in 1878 and Somerville Hall in 1879, alongside London University Colleges of Bedford in 1849, Royal Holloway in 1879 and Westfield in 1882. Contemporary medical discourses on the detrimental effect of education on young women’s health by Herbert Spencer and Edward H. Clarke undermined women’s potential professional development. Women undergraduates were gradually accepted, but there was less enthusiasm for career progression, expectations of marriage, and motherhood outweighed “selfish” aspirations to an academic life (Lefkowitz Horowitz 2008). Katharina Rowold suggests that the health and motherhood debates provided stumbling blocks to women’s access to higher education in Britain, Germany, and Spain although the very different nature of the university in these countries means that other factors should be considered. While concerns that higher education would compromise women’s femininity (and fecundity), in Germany, the institution itself was the epitome of masculinity and Bildung for academic citizenship in which women students could not participate. Rowold’s research demonstrates the necessity of understanding common themes (such as health discourses) against different social/cultural backgrounds that created different trajectories for change (Rowold 2010).

As the nature of “the university” evolves, the use of an institutional framework incorporates flexibility for analyzing change over time. Susan Rumsey Strong’s history of Alfred University highlights the significance of the antebellum academies in supporting women’s rights and equal roles. Her institutional history “explains a remarkably liberal environment by focusing on the individuals who created it and socio-cultural factors contributing to it” (Rumsey Strong 2008, p. 9). Starting in 1836 as a school based in the rural Seventh Day Baptist village of Alfred, New York, by the 1840s, it trained teachers and was recognized as a university in 1857 “for the purpose of promoting education by cultivating art, literature and science” (Rumsey Strong 2008, p. 73). Rumsey Strong argues that the assumptions of gender equality in the surrounding district were built into the institution from its inception, enabling women such as Abigail Maxson to drive change as insiders. Maxson was an early suffragist, setting the tone for the institution’s reputation for women speaking in public (Rumsey Strong 2008, p. 123). In the twentieth century in England, the changing status of teacher education also affected the number of women designated as holding “university” positions. Women might find a lecturing position in the training colleges offering 2-year certificates situated firmly outside the university. Following legislation for teaching as a degree level qualification from the 1960s, more women lecturers were recorded within the academy, yet this did not affect their progress within the hard sciences (Dyhouse 1995a).

Feminist historians have employed a range of sources to explore the uneven progress of women’s academic employment. In doing so they have responded to both Gary McCulloch and Harold Silver’s criticism of institutional histories as “top down” or “parochial” (McCulloch 2008; Silver 2006). Oral histories, either as part of a project or increasingly as part of an established archive, offer insights into the experience of women’s marginalization or acceptance onto university faculties and senior management (Horne 2014; Spencer et al. 2015). This changes the parameters of methodological and theoretical possibilities, recognizing the significance of individuals behind rather gloomy comparative statistics. Julia Horne challenges critics of oral history in her discussion of rethinking university history in Australia. She explores the university as a social institution using oral histories and surveys of women academics. Universities and their attitudes to women’s professional employment both reflect and act upon their surroundings. Horne argues that, in terms of productivity of research outputs and career progression, external responsibilities still result in gendered career patterns which affect long-term gender equity.

Money

Money acts as “a lever which has been used at times to keep women out of educational opportunities,” but it has also provided opportunities (Eisenmann 2001, p. 457). When additional finance was needed by institutions, female students increased student numbers. Philanthropy by big organizations, such as Carnegie, funded research that, although rarely awarded to women as principal investigators, did increase the number of research posts available to women (Dzuback 2008, p. 54).

Early women academics needed family backgrounds with sufficient wealth to support their studies. Tanya Fitzgerald expands this requirement for economic capital into a framework that utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social and cultural capital, highlighting the strategies employed by professors at Otago Department of Home Science. She argues that “professional biographies of these four women expose the inextricable connection between gender, status, reward, power and prestige in the Academy” (Fitzgerald 2009, p. 8). Combined with the use of a metaphor of outsiders and insiders, Fitzgerald examines how Winifred Boys-Smith (1865–1939), Helen Rawson (1886–1964), and Ann Gilchrist Strong (1875–1957) negotiated their way into acceptance into the institution of higher education in New Zealand. As young women succeeded in gaining degrees or equivalent qualifications, so professional opportunities for a life in academia widened. Societal and legislative expectations that women graduates would give up employment on marriage, together with a powerful male hold on academic tenure, slowed down women’s academic careers. The coeducation debates came to a head in the 1960s against a political background of change that included the women’s liberation movement. Nancy Weiss Malkiel argues that in addition to demands for equality in the 1960s, the issues of falling enrolments stimulated the move to coeducation at the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges in the USA and Oxford and Cambridge in the UK (Malkiel 2016). She concludes that these decisions toward coeducation were made by men, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe. Malkiel’s detailed research including quotes from contemporary interviews, letters, and surveys highlights the ambiguity of this change as a positive move for women faculty. The description of the appointment of Halcy Bohen as first Dean of Women Students at Princeton is telling; the job description demanded “a very capable woman to coordinate the integration of women undergraduates in the whole range of activities, services, etc. at Princeton.” Bohen was a graduate of Smith with an MA in teaching from Radcliffe but seems to have been employed principally because she was married with three small daughters and “conventional enough not to rock the boat” (Malkiel 2016, p. 215). The merger of Harvard and Radcliffe did not reflect Harvard’s willingness to employ women professors. In the first semester of 1964, and the advent of women students to Harvard, only 1 of the 400 tenured faculty was female. In the end although all the men’s Ivy League colleges went coed, only Vassar and Radcliffe women’s colleges did so. In Britain the situation was similar. Carol Dyhouse notes little change in the proportion of women academics between 1930 and 1970, remaining at around 13%. There was also little change in the number who reached any level of seniority. Dyhouse highlights the problems that Edith Morley faced at Reading being accepted as a professor in the light of male competition, with similar observations on the effect that the demise of single-sex colleges had on the advancement of women faculty (Dyhouse 1995a, p. 139).

Networks

Tanya Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Smyth emphasize how networks of professional women become visible through individual biographies of educators who individually and collectively challenged the status quo. They observe that “framing these women as agents emphasises their individual consciousness and ability to act in and shape the historical context in which they lived through the positions they occupied” (Fitzgerald and Smyth 2014, p. 3). Additionally, Fitzgerald and Smyth draw attention to our own role and positioning as historians. They argue that our scholarly networks “are deeply embedded in histories of women educators and their efforts to ensure that women academics voice is heard and valued by the outside world” (Fitzgerald and Smyth 2014, p. 14). Deirdre Raftery discusses the nature of the increasing complexity that marks research into women educators’ lives and networks. By increasing knowledge of women educators and placing women into the narrative, implications of gender as a signifier of power (acknowledging Scott 1985) emerge. This partly explains why women have found it so difficult to access academia as professors and deans. The process of quantifying numbers, and identifying how networks functioned across institutions, gives added weight to women’s role as change makers and activists in a range of geographical locations (Raftery 2014).

One approach to researching women’s academic lives is to focus on a range of “pioneers.” However, these women were often the “lone woman” in a department and were fully occupied maintaining their own status in a predominantly male environment (Fitzgerald and Collins 2011, p. 126). Finding allies with whom to build networks was in itself problematic and was one of the reasons for the founding of the British Federation of University Women in 1907. In New Zealand in addition to the Home Science Department at Otago discussed above, women were appointed in subjects ranging from maths to modern languages, English literature, and biology; although, as Kay Morris Matthews points out, it took until 1965 for a woman, Professor Janaki, to be appointed in New Zealand outside the Otago Department of Home Science (Morris Matthews 2008, p. 171). A quantitative analysis reveals that women academics were distributed across science and humanities faculties. This can be read in two ways; one as a positive example that women were accepted within traditional “male” subjects. Conversely, Fitzgerald and Collins (2011) and Morris Matthews (2008) note that they were usually employed well down the academic hierarchy, underlining, rather than challenging, male tutors’ supremacy. Institutional networks of women’s colleges were significant in the campaigns for women’s entry into academic professions, for example, the networks of women’s colleges that emerged in Ireland offered women access to an academic curriculum and its accompanying prestige (Harford 2007, 2015).

The role of dean is one that adds a further dimension to our understanding of women as active agents for change and is linked to the coeducation debate in the USA. It provides an insight into the way that university women contributed to wider changes in women’s campaign for equal citizenship. As young women were accepted into higher education institutions, concerns over their welfare resulted in the employment of deans of women, initially acting as tutors and then increasingly in counselling and student welfare. Eisenmann highlights the significance of the networks that connected deans of women giving them a louder voice within changes in higher education. However, the histories of the predominantly white American Association of University Women (AAUW) and National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) also reflect the racial tensions within the growing women’s movement itself. The existence of a separate network from 1935 of the Association of Deans of Women and Advisers to Girls in Negro Schools can be read as indicative of the effectiveness of wider networking among women and as a warning against overlooking differences among the networks themselves. After the war more institutions employed deans of students without specifying gender and “when jobs shrank or disappeared the women holding them – usually experienced, trained, and older professionals – were often dismissed” (Eisenmann 2006, p. 132).

In her biography of Dean Emily Taylor of Kansas University, Ruth Sartorius also cites the role that networking played in women’s organizations outside the academy including the Women’s Bureau at the US Department of Labor, the Women’s Equity Action League, the National Association of Commissions for Women, and the National Organization for Women. These networks indicate how deans of women, with their interest in promoting women’s equal citizenship, educated young women into expectations of career and family in the postwar world. Sartorius argues that Taylor’s life history “provides a window into the trajectory of feminism within American twentieth century higher education…, and even women’s entry into the presidencies of co-educational institutions” (Sartorius 2014, p. 14). Sartorius also sounds a useful caveat; in a series of oral history interviews, Taylor admitted that she left little in the way of documentary records to protect some of her students. She only disclosed some of her more radical activities toward the end of her life, undermining the stereotypical image of the rather conservative, disciplinarian dean of women students.

Religion

Eisenmann notes that women’s role as teachers developed from a religious perspective that perceived woman as natural moral guardians, offering an opportunity to examine women’s motivation for leadership. Judith Harford and Elizabeth Smyth explored the role that Catholicism played in opening higher education as a vocation for women. This dimension reflects the blurred boundaries and relationship noted earlier between “universities” and “higher education.” Harford (2008) argues that a detailed and systematic examination of the early colleges of education in Ireland for women provides one of the building blocks identified by Eisenmann from which to build new directions in understanding the significance of the history of women as academics. Harford emphasizes the “extraordinary control over the political and social trajectory of Irish Society” that has been held by the Catholic Church (Harford 2015, p. 58). The strength of assumptions that woman’s role was domestic excluded women from Irish universities, but it enabled the establishment of the protestant women’s colleges such as Alexandra College (Dublin, 1866). By the 1880s, Dominican, Loreto, and Ursuline orders promoted education for middle-class catholic women (Harford 2008, p. 5). Harford concludes that these colleges “were established with the purpose of targeting the more prestigious and valued domains of knowledge, which resulted in participating women students having access to a range of high prestige cultural and social capital” (Harford 2008, p. 5).

In the same way that Fitzgerald uses a biographical study at Otago to illustrate individuals’ agency and significance in promoting wider change, Harford concludes that women’s access to higher education “was down to the courage, vision and commitment of a number of key women, both lay and religious who recognised the importance of education to the social, political and economic advancement of women in Irish society” (Harford 2015, p. 74). She offers the example of Margaret Byers in the debate over the accession of women in Ireland to coeducational universities, “Byers strongly believed in the importance of women taught by women…and [this] was one of her key motivations in arguing for single-sex education and the work of Victoria College.” Byers feared that women would be “crushed out of the higher appointments as teachers” should the single-sex colleges be dismantled. Harford concludes that the demise of the women’s colleges following the admission of women students to university in the Universities Act of 1908 may have had unintended consequences, “The irony in all of this was that while co-education was regarded as a victory in feminist circles, women students and academics would experience marginalisation and disempowerment within the male dominated university power structure” (Harford 2008, p. 161). Harford’s research demonstrates the complex negotiations that Catholic women religious had to navigate; “They worked cleverly, often invisibly behind the scenes, cultivating the support of an ambivalent hierarchy, entering into ‘patriarchal bargains’ in order to safeguard the entitlement of Catholic women to university provision and secure for themselves greater status and influence within the emerging higher education framework” (Harford 2015, p. 64). The hostile environment of the male-dominated university led one of the early Junior Fellows of English, Mary Hayden, in 1895 at the Royal University of Ireland to focus on teaching in the women’s colleges that incorporated secondary schools. Hayden was finally appointed onto the Senate of the National University of Ireland, on the Governing body of University College Dublin, and to the Chair of Modern Irish History in 1911.

New Directions: Border Crossings

An additional category of analysis that is emerging might be termed “border crossings.” As noted earlier, this chapter has focused mainly on the Anglophone world. Even using limited examples demonstrates how crossing borders, whether physically or intellectually, strengthened women’s demand for access to the academy and also brought unexpected difficulties. There is a danger that in focusing on aspirations of equality for women employed at different levels in terms of numbers, in the past and the present, we may miss the contribution that women made to the changing nature of the academic institution itself. Giroux’s observations on schooling in America are useful here. In 1993 he observed “Harvard…appeals to the life of the mind, the good life, and so forth…But if we look at higher education in general I argue that the instrumentalist ideology prevails” (Giroux 1992, p. 11). Reading women’s entry into the academic profession through Giroux’s critique raises some awkward contradictions. Women’s entry into academia in many ways profited from an instrumentalist approach. Arguments for middle-class women’s education rested on the recognition of their need for employment in the absence of successful marriage (Harford 2008, p. 133). The elevation of Home Science and Teaching into degree level courses allowed more women into the profession without crossing the borders into established (male) disciplinary areas. Signing the “pledge” to teach after graduation enabled many women to access grants in England after 1910 for a 3-year degree course, with a further year in an education department (Dyhouse 1995a, p. 20). The introduction of education departments into universities is a further example of border crossing whereby the changing nature of the institution itself opened up lecturing possibilities for women.

The work of Zuleika Arashiro and Malba Barahona (2015) resonates with Giroux’s analysis of power and pedagogy, reflecting the relevance of race and ethnicity and also how women professors can change the nature of what is taught. Ashiro and Barahona’s collection brings together academic migrant women from Latin America working in Australia, Latin America, and Europe. They acknowledge the difficulty of the process of making visible unseen assumptions and the risks involved in challenging the existing model. Although their reflections offer a significant insight into the role that women play in universities today, their critique “found a historically grounded framework, which captured not only the past but also helped us to understand the present modern/colonial forms of domination” (Arashiro and Barahona 2015, p. viii).

Methodologies from different disciplines help to untangle some of the anomalies that equal access should have solved. Martina McKnight and Myrtle Hill suggest that discourses of managerialism can “be instrumental in both sustaining and strengthening gender inequalities” (2009, p. 189). Using a case study of Queen’s University Belfast, they suggest that wider changes in academic jobs have effectively moved the goalposts for what constitutes a successful academic in terms of the career ladder, “the discourse of managerialism that pervades the contemporary academy (re) creates a workplace culture underpinned by hegemonic discourses of ‘peak’ or ‘hyper’ masculinity…not only sustaining but encouraging gendered inequalities” (McKnight and Hill 2009, p. 192). In interviews women recognize that there can be tensions between how they see themselves and how they perceive others seeing them, either in terms of race (Arashiro and Barahona) or in terms of age and gender (McKnight and Hill).

Examining the role of women in higher education raises a future direction for research that of the boundary of the university itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, a university as the institution of higher education was easily recognizable. Today, with changes in degree structures and the inclusion of more vocational programs, the institution is more varied. Kay Whitehead’s work on the heads of training colleges and their production and dissemination of new knowledge demonstrate that current definitions of higher education and the university are themselves gendered and that examining women’s trajectories within traditional universities is missing half the story of women’s growing professionalism in higher education (Whitehead 2016). Whitehead’s theoretical frame of transnational history highlights the mobility and professional standing of, for example, Mary Gutteridge and Lillian de Lissa. In omitting the early training colleges from definitions of higher education, we miss a significant recognition of the contribution made by women academics in the early part of the twentieth century. This is especially pertinent as many of the training colleges and day training colleges became part of university structures or universities in their own right. As such they contribute to the gendered histories of women academics in higher education today (Spencer et al. 2015).

Case Studies

The case studies focus on two motives that generate research into the history of women as academics. The first is the attention to the detail of the past, recognizing how the addition of women significantly changes the existing narrative. The second is the contemporary search for the origins of inequality in academia today.

The Federations of University Women: Understanding the Past

Research into the development of women’s role in higher education highlights the strength of the networks that women both drew on and contributed to in their quest to establish themselves on an equal footing as scholars and faculty. This short case study foregrounds the role of the National and International Federation of University Women in this endeavor. These organizations are still active which underlines both the links between academic women and campaigns for social justice; this is a narrative that has yet come to a successful conclusion. The British Federation of University Women (BFUW) was inaugurated in 1907 after an initiative by Ida Smedley who as chemistry lecturer had difficulty in accessing research money or promotion at the University of Manchester. One of the Federation’s central aims was to support the promotion and employment of women in academia (Dyhouse 1995b, p. 472). Manchester High School for Girls provided the venue for the first meeting, demonstrating the close links between girls’ secondary education, higher education, and the changing employment aspirations of women graduates. Archival evidence also exists for federations in other countries that could be mined for future research of women’s academic networks, for example, the archives of the New Zealand Federation in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

The demand by college women for group solidarity can be seen in the American Association of College Alumnae (ACA), inaugurated in 1881. It grew rapidly providing the networking needed for strength in numbers, money for scholarships, and fellowships. The significance of the reputation of the institutions at which women worked and studied was central to the aims of the ACA. By 1891 the secretary noted that their aim was to work to hold “the standard of collegiate education for women so high that the influence of the Association may be felt…by all collegiate interests in the country” (Levine 1995, p. 10). In commissioning the history of its organization, the American Association of University Women sought to challenge assumptions that the women’s movement declined in the 1920s and virtually disappeared in the 1950s before second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Their history suggests that “women’s organisations pressed for equal rights and confronted discrimination throughout the twentieth century, expanding their base of support and their influence in academic and legislative circles” (Levine 1995, p. 3).

The archives of the BFUW have contributed evidence for the debates above on the roles of women tutors required to engage in disciplinary or counselling activities with women students. This inevitably impacted on both their status and promotion prospects as academics. The BFUW were clear that women academics should not be required to take on such duties and disliked the idea of separate treatment for women students (Dyhouse 1995a, p. 69). The BFUW survey in 1931 has proved a rich data source; it demonstrated both the problems faced by early women academics and the effect of their networking through the BFUW to face key challenges. Dyhouse highlights how women isolated within individual institutions could come together for support through the networking provided by the BFUW. This continued at its international halls of residence, Crosby Hall in London and Reid Hall in Paris (Spencer 2017b). Dyhouse highlights the significance of the financial support for women academics provided by BFUW fellowships. National Federations also enabled the border crossing that association with the International Federation provided, facilitating the exchange of ideas through the international conferences. Additionally, the International Federation provided members with a voice in the League of Nations through the committee on intellectual cooperation and the subcommittee on universities (Dyhouse 1995a). The BFUW also provided support for German Jewish academic refugees during and after the Second World War when their religion prevented academic employment. Eventually this work extended to helping women from Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, Susan Cohen’s research stresses that most refugees were unable to find work commensurate with their professional qualifications, but BFUW membership did provide an intellectual home where academics could meet like-minded women (Cohen 2010).

The British Federation was one of the founders of the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) with Canada and the USA. Dean Virginia Gildersleeve from Barnard and Professor Caroline Spurgeon (Professor of English Literature at University of London) brought together national federations after First World War to extend women’s role in promoting peace. They argued that “their members had a unique contribution to make to international co-operation and world peace based on their expertise” (Goodman 2011, p. 706). Despite the struggles that they faced in their professional lives, the academic qualifications and positions enabled members to participate in League of Nations committees. The notion of world citizenship brought academic women together on an international stage. Joyce Goodman argues that a feature of the IFUW was “to progress university women’s careers in the context that few research opportunities were open to women” (Goodman 2011, p. 703). Through funding international fellowships, the IFUW could raise the profile and status of women academics in the interwar period, also creating a “complex and entangled network of contacts” (Goodman 2011, p. 704). Border crossings physically, intellectually, and professionally are exemplified in Goodman’s discussion of Una Mary Ellis-Fermor. Fermor attended Bedford and Somerville Colleges before acting as Assistant Warden at Ashbourne Hall, University of Manchester. She then managed the professional crossing to lecturing at Bedford before physically crossing borders to take up a fellowship at Yale in 1922 (Goodman 2011, p. 711).

The Historical Legacy Today

Concern has been voiced internationally around equality of access, promotion, and remuneration for women in academia. As a short study, this chapter can only highlight aspects of the historical legacy as a starting point for further reading and research. The evidence from across the world seems to indicate that similar challenges occur across borders, both academically in terms of disciplinary areas and socioculturally in expectations of wider gender roles, that combine to create structures that continue to disadvantage women in their academic careers.

Collections of articles such as those in Storming the Tower will in time become historical documents themselves in understanding the long progress toward equality (Stiver Lie and O’Leary 1990). The metaphor of “breaking into” a hitherto inaccessible institution underlines the problems that women have had, with few exceptions, in becoming academics; getting in was one thing, and achieving equality of status and recognition of their right to be there is another. Stiver Lie and O’Leary included contributions from India, Israel, Jordan, Norway, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, and Turkey in their examination of women in academia in a sociohistorical context. As a comparative study, the authors explicitly drew on the past to explain women academics’ isolation in the 1990s. They argued that “academic women have the potential to play a critical role in shaping tomorrow’s woman today. It is, therefore, important to understand their ‘herstory’ and their ideological commitment to improving the status of women in the academy” (Stiver Lie and O’Leary 1990, p. 17). They concluded that, except for Turkey, historical arguments about the suitability of women for academic work kept the status of women academics at entry level (Stiver Lie and O’Leary 1990, p. 21). Their research utilized the historical as a warning of global structural inequality.

Sara Delamont reviewed the status of women academics following the publication of the ESRC commissioned Winfield report into completion rates in Social Science PhDs in 1987. She argued that the report was gender blind in that “an all male committee consulted male experts to produce a report focused on male graduate students” and that policy recommendations arising from it severely impacted on the entry of young women into academic careers. After an overview of women’s entry into universities, she commented that “we have not left the nineteenth century with its prejudices and myths far enough behind” (Delamont 1996, p. 111).

Twenty years later, Robert Rhoads and Diane Yu Gu reviewed the progress of women academics in China and found similar inequalities in the representation of women at the higher level (25%). This is particularly salient given the very different geographical and cultural contexts of their work. As Chinese universities “catch up” with the West in focusing on research productivity and internationalization, it seems the position of women academics gets ever more problematic (Rhoads and Yu Gu 2012, p. 741).

Rhoads and Yu Gu emphasized that their intention was not to offer a case study of a situation unique to China but to contribute to the cross border global debate over the situation of women in academia. To the three frequently cited barriers, working double time (home and work commitments), the glass ceiling, and social exclusion of the boys’ club, they added a fourth, “comrades in arms” (Rhoads and Yu Gu 2012). This notion is presented as unique to Chinese culture whereby workers are treated the same regardless of gender differences; close knit groups of workers look after each other. However, it appears that the predominance of men, historically at the top of the hierarchy while paying lip service to “comrades in arms,” still results in a marginalized position for women, “no matter how thoughtful and understanding they may be…men control key organizational decisions and the related outcomes” (Rhoads and Yu Gu 2012, p. 746).

The approach discussed in the main body of this chapter notes the significance of the biographical in understanding women’s initial entry into the profession, more recent research utilizes oral history to offer insight into the ongoing challenges faced by later generations of academics. Rhoads and Yu Gu employed feminist standpoint theory to offer an in-depth understanding of how the historical context of Chinese society impacted on academics’ perceptions of their working lives. This approach foregrounds their research as “a political project in that it targets networks of power that have limited and undermined the opportunities for women and women’s lives to shape reality, and more specifically, to influence the production of what constitutes meaningful knowledge” (Rhoads and Yu Gu 2012, p. 737). Their research highlighted the importance of the historical dimension, as one male professor commented “from a traditional perspective, the women or the rights of women, during our long history have not always been so highly respected” (Rhoads and Yu Gu 2012, p. 742). The weight of historical inequality seems almost insuperable.

The strength of patriarchal traditions and gendered expectations as an explanation for women’s continued underrepresentation in the academy on the Asian continent was also cited by Louise Morley and Barbara Crossouard in research into women’s leadership in the expanding higher education system in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka). Drawing on interviews and statistical data, they concluded that those women who did achieve leadership roles had to “negotiate and navigate a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities” (Morley and Crossouard 2016). They drew on surveys from the 1990s, but implications of a much longer historical relevance to the future professional development of women’s role were glaringly apparent.

As previously noted, a focus on gender inequality in higher education obscures complex intersections with inequalities of race. In South Africa, a historical dimension that foregrounds race is essential to understanding women’s unequal representation as academic leaders (Mabokela and Mawila 2004). Mabokela and Mawila situate their research into women and academic leadership in South Africa within the wider global context, utilizing a border crossing theoretical framework that draws on Newman and Williams’ research on life experiences of Black women in Britain (Newman and Williams 1995). Mabokela and Mawila draw on the historical origins of racial and gender inequality within the profession to make suggestions for improving women’s future access to academic employment.

Silences in research into the historical dimension of women’s inequality in academia include disability (Chouinard and Crooks 2003; Taylor 2015; Wilson-Kovacs et al. 2008) and sexuality (Renn 2010), perhaps because in these areas, the historical underrepresentation of men and women is still under-researched. Additionally, the binary nature of the gender divide that underpins the discussion is increasingly unstable, although outside the remit of this chapter should be recognized as a future significant direction for researching gender differences within the academic profession. Current research tends to focus discussion on how transgender issues affect students, but not faculty (Bilodeau 2005; Rankin and Beemyn 2012).

Heather Eggins introduces a range of articles that report on women’s experience of academics work across six continents all of which discuss current progress in relation to their historical background. Eggins observes that cultural shifts in attitudes to women “are shared at some level by every nation” (Eggins 2017, p. xxii). Borders have not so much been crossed as subsumed into a global view from the global village that highlights both women’s progress in the academic hierarchy and the nature of the academic role itself; a careful use of the historical dimension is in evidence throughout. The universal change in expectations of women’s role in paid employment is highlighted, but inevitably individual women campaigners, pioneers, and leaders take second place to statistics and official reports. This type of “historical wallpaper” maybe problematic as a quantitative analysis of change over recent time does not offer insight into how that change occurred.

Conclusion and Future Directions

This chapter began by setting out debates over the use of history to increase our knowledge of the past. The history of women in the academic profession is also found in articles and books campaigning for improvements in women’s promotion, pay, and participation “today.” Older articles on the topic such as Acker (1980) and Bagilhole (1993) are frequently cited when authors seek to explore why little has changed. Yet in this use of the past, carefully researched though it is, the overarching trends obscure the individual women who made a difference or who simply got on with the business of being a lone woman in a department. The two case studies should be read together to appreciate the uneasy but complementary relationship between history for the past and history for the present.

Linda Eisenmann’s framework offered categories of institutions, money, networking, and religion for perspectives on the gendered nature of women’s academic employment. A further category, that of border crossing, considers both the increasing globalization of academic work and highlights the extensive movement of women and their ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When we explore the experience of women academics on the world stage, a somewhat irregular pattern emerges where the similarities in the warp of women’s experience, and attitudes to their role in the academy, must be set against different colors within the weft of individual women’s biographies and national difference. Each of the books or articles cited draws on a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and archival material. Some archives in the form of oral histories have yet to be created. The depth of existing research opens up further possibilities for future research that both enriches our knowledge and highlights the debt that we owe to the past.