e discussed, in the context of the more general social developments associated with the women's movement.
Various periods or phenomena of American history (e.g., Progressive Era, Jacksonian Democracy, Gold Rush, Reconstruction, Manifest Destiny) have been designated with sobriquets according as they facilitate an understanding of the dominant forces shaping the American experience in given circumstances and periods. By and large, such attributions have not been routinely made with reference to women's experience, though suffragettes before 1920 and "Women's Lib" after 1970 attained some currency in American culture. In any case, this research will make use of designations that are meant to help clarify the connection between the women's movement as a social trend and the context for the experience of women teachers in various American venues.
Education has been a feature of community building and nation building in the United States from the earliest period of European settlement of North America. Yet the educational system of the United States as an organized, unitary, and institutional structure, having the official sanction and support of government and the iconographic and instrumental status did not appear in the American culture fully formed. For decades, a variety of educational structures existed in North America that reflected the backgrounds and experiences, in Europe, of those who came to the New World. Certain commonalities did exist, however, where the educational experiences of males and females, and the dominant attitudes toward those experiences, were concerned.
The enterprise of uncovering and interpreting who Americans are and what their time is, with reference to who they were and what their time was, with a view toward suggesting ways of understanding the experience of being American is hazardous in whole but accessible in parts, and this research intends to illuminate a part of the enterprise related to the...