AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Ideologies1. Postwar Gender Expectations and Realities2. Educators Consider the Postwar College WomanPart II: Explorations3. Research: The American Council on Education's Commission on the Education of Women4. Practice: Advocacy in Women's Professional Organizations5. Policy: The President's Commission on the Status of WomenPart III: Responses6. Women's Continuing Education as an Institutional Response7. The Contributions and Limitations of Women's Continuing EducationConclusionNotesIndex
This history explores the nature of postwar advocacy for women's higher education, acknowledging its unique relationship to the expectations of the era and recognizing its particular type of adaptive activism. Linda Eisenmann illuminates the impact of this advocacy in the postwar era, identifying a link between women's activism during World War II and the women's movement of the late 1960s. Though the postwar period has been portrayed as an era of domestic retreat for women, Eisenmann finds otherwise as she explores areas of institution building and gender awareness. In an era uncomfortable with feminism, this generation advocated individual decision making rather than collective action by professional women, generally conceding their complicated responsibilities as wives and mothers.By redefining our understanding of activism and assessing women's efforts within the context of their milieu, this innovative work reclaims an era often denigrated for its lack of attention to women.