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Public Advocacy and Women’s Education
Worldwide
Joanne V. Creighton, President, Mount Holyoke College
Bellagio Conference, August 2007
What we have in common is that we are women’s
colleges. Some are old, some are relatively new, some are coordinate,
others are independent. We span many parts of the globe. We vary widely
in history, wealth, size, circumstances. What binds us together is
caring about and contributing to the education and advancement of
women. That is our shared mission. Our markets are challenged by what
is now the dominant tradition of coeducation in the world and by the
continuing domination of the world by institutions shaped by and governed
by men. What is the place of women’s colleges in this 21st century
world?
I thought it would be helpful to sketch a broad overview
of the history of women’s colleges in order to think about our
individual and collective roles in the world. I want to scrutinize
with you the raison d’etre of this organization. In addition
to the benefits we derive from interacting with one another, do we
have a perspective that is sufficiently different and significant
to attract public attention? Despite our obvious differences can and
should we as WEW speak with a unified voice? How can we be advocates
for women and women’s education? What would our messages be?
And how would we send them?
It is important to remember just how recent in the
millennia of human history are the less-than-two-hundred-year fledging
beginnings of women’s higher education. One doesn't have to
go back very far in time to see how recently women were invited into
male institutions: only a few generations. A powerful book on this
subject is A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1929) by Virginia Woolf, who suffered throughout her life the pain
and stigma of being denied a university education. In her wry, polemic
book, a fictitious woman, Mary Seton, is invited to a male college
one day. And while she is waiting she wanders onto the grass to read
a book, onto the beautiful inviting lawns of "Oxbridge."
Very quickly a policeman tells her in no uncertain terms that “Only
the Fellows and Scholars were allowed” on the grass: and she
must return to “the gravel.” The rest of the book is a
meditation upon the continuing and repeated examples of being kept
off the grass and directed onto the gravel. She is barred from the
library as well, metaphorically excluded from the world of learning,
because ladies must be accompanied “by a fellow of the College.”
She ponders the misogyny across history and imagines it embodied in
a insufferable man, Professor von X, who writes a massive work entitled
The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. In
fact, she wasn’t so far off in her caricature: many male authorities
of Woolf's period and before did believe women unfit for education.
Edward H. Clarke, a Harvard professor, warned in 1873 that medical
theories proved that higher education would cause women's uteruses
to atrophy. (1)
Within the western world, the tentative beginnings
of women’s higher education were in the early 19th century.
In the US before the Civil War in the mid 19th century, only three
private colleges admitted women as well as men. All were in Ohio:
Antioch, Oberlin and Hillsdale (which later moved to Michigan), and
only two public universities, the University of Iowa and the University
of Deseret (which was later named the University of Utah). Later in
the century, more institutions opened their doors to women, but there
remained a chilly climate for women on predominantly male campuses
and at many, as they grew in numbers, there was something of a backlash
against them. A good example of this is Wesleyan University where
I served as chief academic officer and provost and then interim president
before coming to Mount Holyoke. Wesleyan has the distinction of having
coeducated twice: in 1872 and again in 1970. Although the first intrepid
Wesleyan women did very well academically, male students, board members
and alumni feared that Wesleyan—in having women students while
its all-male competitors did not—would be perceived as a “namby-pamby”
college: Wesleyan’s “pride and boast” was said to
be its “masculine virility and strength.”(2) Because Wesleyan’s
enrollments decreased while other all-male colleges grew, Wesleyan
was said to be victim of “terminal feminization”: something
had to be done! After the Board’s vote ousting women in 1909,
the headline of the school paper read: “The Barnacle is at last
to be scraped from the good ship Wesleyan!”
The prestigious standard bearers, 370-year-old Harvard,
like 800-year-old Oxford and Cambridge, excluded women for the lion’s
share of their history. In the mid nineteenth century, a few women
actively sought admission, but were denied. A woman applied to Harvard
Medical School in 1847, and even though the Dean assured the Corporation
that she was old and unattractive enough to not disturb her fellow
students, she was denied. Charles Eliot, president for over 40 years,
staked out a position against coeducation in his 1869 inaugural address.
Not only would women distract male students, there were inadequate
data, he said, about the “natural mental capacities” of
the female sex, a remark that has an eerie air of familiarity about
it, as a recent Harvard president said almost the same thing in the
same words.
The tentative beginnings of women’s education
at Harvard started in 1894 with the formation of Radcliffe College,
the female coordinate college, but with careful perimeters established.
It did not have a faculty of its own but was designated an “annex,”
with its students taught in separate classes by a handful of Harvard
faculty members – all male. In 1943 women were integrated into
most of Harvard’s classes rather than taught separately, and
the first lonely female faculty member was hired in 1948, but many
central aspects of undergraduate life were closed to women. Indeed,
even when I was there as a graduate student in the mid sixties, the
reading room of the undergraduate library and the faculty club were
closed to women and the faculty was still overwhelmingly male; the
English Department had only one female faculty member, who did not
get tenure. In countless obvious and subtle ways, women at Harvard
were, from the first, made to feel marginalized, on the fringes of
an intimidatingly male-centric world, although, to be sure, Radcliffe
College was a supportive coordinate sphere where women lived, dined,
and studied. This story of protracted foot-dragging and begrudging
acceptance is not, I hasten to say, the best way to develop confidence
and to unlock women’s potential. Luckily this was not the only
model of women’s education.
Sixty years before Harvard’s toe in the water
on women’s education, an important development in the history
of higher education was taking shape, thanks to the dream of an impoverished
female educator from the hills of Western Massachusetts, Mary Lyon.
Quite unlike the Radcliffe annex, Mount Holyoke, Lyon insisted, would
be an entirely separate and independent institution with its own buildings,
endowment, faculty and values. While Mount Holyoke relied on male
supporters and professors from Amherst and elsewhere in its earliest
years, women were from the start in leadership positions—forming
an unbroken succession of ambitious and visionary female presidents
for the first 100 years—and women scholar/teachers very quickly
took over completely the academic program. Because women scholars
were largely excluded from institutions like Harvard and most of higher
education, Mount Holyoke had a pick of the outstanding women for administrative
and faculty positions. Together they shaped a vision of education
that was and remains remarkably coherent and resonant and in keeping
with Lyon’s bold original vision.
“Attempt great things. Accomplish great things,”
Lyon exhorted. In many ways she was a revolutionary in thinking that
women – especially women of modest means – mattered; that
they would profit every bit as much as men from rigorous study in
all fields, including the sciences, that education was of the whole
person connecting mind, body, and spirit and connecting the individual
to the larger human community, indeed, to the larger world community;
that the end of education is about making a difference in the world.
“Great privilege brings great responsibility,” she insisted.
Of course, we mustn’t forget that Mary Lyon
was part of an evangelical missionary tradition which had its share
of naiveté and chauvinism in sending emissaries out to “do
good” in the world. Some of her followers ventured foolishly
into hostile territory and met a disastrous end. Nonetheless, overall
the record of accomplishment of intrepid Mount Holyoke women, particularly
in founding schools and colleges and in pioneering work in science
and other disciplines, is nothing short of astonishing. A distinguished
scientific tradition continues today at Mount Holyoke and our historic
sister colleges. Mount Holyoke, for example, is first among all liberal
arts colleges in producing women who went on to receive U.S. doctorates
in the life sciences and physical sciences from 1966 to 2004.
In a world shaped and dominated by men, this female
tradition stands apart and has ramified out into the world having
an influence disproportionate to its size. “Go where no one
else will go. Do what no one else will do,” Mary Lyon urged
her students, and in a missionary spirit successive generations of
graduates heeded her call becoming pioneers in a number of fields
and founding well over forty schools and colleges across this country
and in Canada, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Armenia, Persia,
India, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Africa and serving as president
or principal of over a hundred others. Several of the schools they
founded served people excluded from traditional educational systems:
Native Americans, African Americans, the blind, the deaf, the educationally
impaired.
Women’s colleges modeled on Mount Holyoke and
other pioneers had a great flourishing in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century both in the United States and in many parts
of the world. The Seven Sisters, of which Smith and Mount Holyoke
are a part, were thought of as the female equivalent of the Ivy League,
rigorous and prestigious.
But some might say that was then and this is now.
I believe most people would accept that women’s colleges have
had a distinguished history and tradition, but there is a lot of skepticism
about their future. With women now accepted at institutions of all
kinds and coeducation nearly universal, and women in fact the majority
at most institutions, shouldn’t women’s colleges go coed,
merge, or go out of business? Indeed, that is what one of our sisters,
Radcliffe College, did: it merged into Harvard University in 1999
to become the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. And just recently
the head of the Radcliffe Institute, Drew Faust, a woman, has become
the president of Harvard University. This action seems hugely significant
and symbolic, marking a watershed in the history of women’s
higher education.
Undoubtedly, the naming of a woman president of Harvard
is a giant step for womankind and for Harvard itself, long a bastion
of white-male privilege. That the new President will cross the street
from Radcliffe Yard to Harvard Yard seems especially freighted with
symbolic import. Because women are no longer excluded from Harvard
and elsewhere in the formerly male-dominated academy, and because,
like Drew Gilpin Faust, they are now in greater numbers assuming positions
of leadership within it, some might think that women’s colleges
are now redundant or outmoded and should, therefore, follow Radcliffe’s
example and either assimilate or co-educate themselves. Yet of the
six other “Seven Sisters,” only one, Vassar, has gone
coed and that a while ago, in 1969. Why are Mount Holyoke, Smith,
Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Wellesley and dozens of other women’s colleges
around the country stubbornly carrying on as single-sex institutions?
Indeed, I am frequently asked if Mount Holyoke is still single-sex
as if somehow Mount Holyoke had missed the coeducational boat and
is quaintly out-of-date and out-of- touch.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Mount Holyoke College has never been more robust, nor its mission
more resonant, and the same goes for our historic “sisters”
and many others which are experiencing record-high numbers of applicants,
growing endowments, and a significant presence among the very best
liberal arts colleges in the country.(3) We are far from smug, however.
The competition for students is fierce and the costs of high quality
education are escalating. We have to work harder than one might think
necessary, given the quality of these institutions, to get young women
to consider attending them (although once they come, most become passionate
advocates for women’s college education). The prevailing trends
towards coed, large, public, urban, professional, nonresidential education
are strong; indeed, from high of 300 or so women’s colleges
before the widespread coeducational movement, there are fewer than
sixty women’s colleges remaining in the U.S. and every year
or so, another coeducates, assimilates, or closes,(4) a move which
usually provokes passionate outrage of students and alumnae and speculation
in the media about the status of women’s colleges. Reports of
the death of women’s colleges, however, have been greatly exaggerated,
to paraphrase Mark Twain. To be sure, they serve a tiny percentage
of college-going women students, but their graduates remain significantly
overrepresented in academic, professional, and public life. For example,
prominent women’s college graduates in government today include:
Senator Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ‘69), Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi (Trinity ’62); and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao
(Mount Holyoke ’75).(5) Four of the ten women (40%) who served
as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in 2006 are graduates of women’s
colleges.(6) Indeed, Drew Faust (Bryn Mawr ’68 ) herself is
yet another women’s college graduate who has achieved prominence.
Despite high profile success stories and considerable
progress, women have not achieved equity and parity by any measure
in the United States and other Western countries, let alone the larger
world. Four decades after the Equal Pay Act, women in this country
earn on average 77 cents of every dollar of their male counterparts.
They are dramatically underrepresented in positions of power in business,
education, and government. Not only do women represent only 2% (10
of 500) of CEOs, they held only 14.7% of the board seats at Fortune
500 companies in 2005 and only 23% of university presidencies. Only
one of 9 Supreme Court justices is a woman. Of 100 senators in the
110 Congress, only 14 are women, with 3 of those graduates of women’s
colleges; of 435 members of the House, only 70 are women including
12 graduates of women’s colleges. In fact, as of March 2006,
the U.S. ranks 69th in the world in terms of women's representation
in national legislatures or parliaments out 187 countries.(7)
Not only have women’s colleges had a formative
role in shaping the history of women’s education and propelling
women forward both in the United States and in the larger world, but
they, in conjunction with coed institutions, continue to have an important
role in the education and advancement of women. As the “founding
sister” and as the longest standing higher education institution
for women in the world, Mount Holyoke spawned a distinct, influential,
and powerful “other” educational tradition, which, while
drawing from the dominant male tradition, bears significant differences
from it. This tradition has worked remarkably well in inspiring and
enabling women to achieve their fullest potential and to make a positive
difference in the world and, as such, it has had influence and reach
well beyond what you might expect from the small size and limited
numbers of such institutions.
Virginia Woolf famously argued that, for their intellectual
and creative talents to flourish, women needed rooms of their own.
A women’s college, as a place for and of and by and about women,
is an academic culture of women’s own, that functions some ways
as “an alternative small public sphere,”(8) a place infused
with its own powerful traditions, norms, and values, providing a temporary
reprieve from the presumptions of the larger male-dominated society.
In a world shaped and dominated by men, this female tradition, this
“alternative small public space,” stands apart and has
ramified out into the world having an influence disproportionate to
its size. Experiencing a culture in which many of the norms of a male-dominated
world have been lifted, students typically grow in self sufficiency
and, when they leave, they are often more able to see gender-repression
when they encounter it and more able to distinguish between personal
and systemic barriers to success.
From the beginning, Mount Holyoke was a school of
access -- “for the daughters of farmers” -- quite unlike
the stereotype of the elite women’s college as a bastion for
the wealthy and privileged. To be sure, some of the “Seven Sisters”
were less egalitarian in their founding ethos and did, in their early
years, draw students from well to do families; and Mount Holyoke too,
as it developed a reputation for academic excellence, drew its share
of such students. Today, however, the Sisters stand out among elite
liberal arts college peers both for the economic diversity of their
students -- drawn from the entire socioeconomic spectrum -- and for
the comparatively large percentage of students drawn from the lowest
socio-economic strata,(9) which include older women recruited through
such programs as the Frances Perkins Scholars at Mount Holyoke and
the Ada Comstock Scholars at Smith. So too have these colleges made
substantial commitments to generous financial aid policies with tuition
discounts among the highest of peers – commitments which put
considerable pressure on institutional budgets. And likewise other
women’s colleges in the country have adapted their missions
and expanded their reach from traditional markets to attract older
women, part-time, working and evening students, those within neighboring
communities, ethnic minority populations, and women from lower socio-economic
strata – usually with sizable financial assistance and concomitant
budget challenges. Some institutions have added professional, graduate,
and weekend programs and, a number over the years have, in order to
survive, gone coed or assimilated into other institutions. Such decisions
make sense. I don’t think we can hold to the adage: better dead
than coed. One can only hope, however, that these institutions are
not subjected to the same pernicious pressure – that has so
insidiously characterized women’s entry into the academy --
to eradicate so-called “terminal feminization.”(10) Rather,
they should hold on to their historical legacies. “Feminization”
of a male-dominated tradition is good: an opening up to fuller human
potential for all students.(11)
Mount Holyoke College – I hasten to say-- is
not contemplating coeducation but, like other women’s colleges,
it too has made a virtue of necessity to some extent, which is reflected
in the changing demographics of its student body. But I wish to emphasize
that the College’s commitment to access, diversity, and affordability
is deeply felt, widely shared, and repeatedly affirmed in institutional
planning. Intentionally, the student body and faculty are notably
diverse along multiple lines: race, class, age, socioeconomic status,
religion, region and country of origin. The faculty is nearly evenly
divided between men and women with 30% foreign born and 24% people
of color, the highest of all peers, coed or single sex. The College
has embraced its long-standing international reach. Our student body
is the most internationally diverse among our peers, with 15% of our
students from approximately 70 countries around the world. Many of
our students from developing countries come thousands of miles and
overcome daunting barriers on their astonishing journeys towards self-actualization.
They bring to our campus a cosmopolitan diversity that enriches and
expands learning opportunity for all students. Indeed, our goal is
to internationalize the education of all students and to develop in
them a nuanced appreciation for the complex, globalized world of the
twenty-first century, so that they can take their place as leaders
and change agents within it; so too has the College itself taken up
with renewed dedication its historic role in advancing women’s
education worldwide.
This was the impetus for us joining together with
Smith College in 2004 to hold the first ever gathering of presidents
and chief academic officers of women’s colleges from around
the world. With no comprehensive data on women’s colleges of
the world to aid us, we know our approach was far from systematic
or comprehensive.(12) This we know: that the model of single-sex education
pioneered at Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges in the
United States was in the mid to late 19th century replicated in Europe
and Australia and imported to the Far East, to Southeast Asia, to
Africa, and the Middle East. Given the variegated history of women’s
education in each country and region of the world, one must be tentative
in generalizing about the current state of affairs. In some countries
and regions (India, Japan, Southeast Asia) single-sex institutions
have a continuing strong presence in numbers and influence even though
coeducational models are becoming more numerous; in others (China,
South America, Europe) coeducation, with a few notable exceptions,
is now nearly universal. In yet others (Korea, North America) a small
but significant number of historic women’s colleges remain in
a predominantly coeducational educational landscape, and in some countries
(Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kenya, Sudan, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe) new
women’s colleges are emerging where limited opportunities for
women’s higher education existed before.
We were heartened by the response we received in
our call to meeting: we drew together 47 leaders from 29 different
countries spanning 5 continents.(13) We now have some forty institutions
signed up. You will remember that initially we focused our discussion
on two topics: sharing the critical issues for each of our institutions
and defining challenges and best practices for the education of women
in science. While recognizing not only the wide variances among our
institutions in age, size, wealth, and circumstances, but also differences
in the severity and nature of the challenges to women’s education
and advancement in our countries, we nonetheless found much common
ground. We could agree, for example, on the need to develop students’
self-confidence and leadership and to combat gender inequity, discrimination,
and cultural and financial barriers to women’s access to education.
A highlight of our second meeting in January 2006, at Dubai Women’s
College in the UAE, was that a delegation of Mount Holyoke students
had been invited to conduct a week-long leadership training workshop
for DWC students, and they shared their compelling experiences and
learning outcomes with the WEW participants.
We believe that the collective power of our institutions
is great. By working together, we can encourage progress on crucial
social issues affecting women. What is most encouraging is that in
the past two decades, new women’s colleges are springing up
in parts of the world in which women have historically had less access
to education. Not only are American women’s colleges again serving
as models, we are learning a great deal from these emerging institutions
as well. An enduring partnership among women’s colleges will
benefit all of us, providing tools to make our institutions better
and increasing our understanding of each other.
Along with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who was the
keynote speaker at our first conference, we believe that “few
subjects match the social significance of women’s education
in the contemporary world.” As he has conclusively demonstrated
in his research, when women are educated, all of society benefits—whether
in terms of economic productivity, public health, or an engaged citizenry.
Women are still the world’s greatest underutilized natural resource.
Education is the key to unlocking that potential. It is a disgrace
that 800 million of the world’s people are illiterate with 67%
of them women and that in virtually every country of the world women
are consciously or unconsciously subjected to sexism, discrimination,
or worse.(14) From the beginning, women’s colleges have functioned
as “alternative spheres” that helped to instill in women
a sense of competence, confidence, and agency. Indeed, women’s
colleges have a distinguished heritage and a continuing stake in advancing
the great unfinished agenda of the 21st century: the education and
advancement of women across all ethnic, racial, age, and socioeconomic
groups both within our country and around the world. We are compelled
by this agenda as never before.
Despite their small size, fewer numbers, and counter-cultural
proclivities, Mount Holyoke, its historic “sisters,” and
the hundreds of institutions founded in their likeness here and across
the world, have had a radically disproportionate effect in generating
“social capital” and in propelling women forward as change
agents in the larger world that devalues them. Now more than ever
the world needs them.
But, does the world need WEW as well? What is the
broader public advocacy function of our organization? How do we use
this organization as a collective voice? What are our messages? How
do we deliver them? That’s what I now ask you.
Endnotes
1. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her
Own Good: 150 Years of Experts' Advice to Women (Anchor, 1979).
2. “Indeed, this “virility” was
displayed when male students beat any men seen talking to a female
student, barred women from appearing in the yearbook, and excluded
them from membership in student organizations. Here too classroom
segregation was practiced with women seated on one side of the room,
men seated on the other. Louise Wilby Knight, "The 'Quails':
The History of Wesleyan University's First Period of Coeducation,
1872-1912" (Honors thesis, Wesleyan University, 1972): 30-47,
117-22.
3. There are about 17.5 million total undergrads
in the U.S., and 187,000 of these are students in liberal arts colleges,
about 1% of total; of this about 50,000 are in about 25 “research
liberal arts colleges” (less than 1/5 of 1%); and of them about
10,500 (20%) are in the five remaining Seven Sisters: a large share
of a top group, a tiny share of total US population of undergraduates.
“Research liberal arts colleges” are those which have
scholar/teacher faculty with strong research profiles. See Robert
McCaughey, “But Can They Teach: In Praise of College Professors
Who Publish,” Teachers College Record (Winter 1993), Vol. 95,
Issue 2, pp. 242-257.
4. A substantial portion of those closed, going
coed, or assimilated--perhaps as high as two-thirds—were Catholic
colleges, but many of these did not have robust collegiate models
but were rather “sister formation” institutes. When religious
orders of women went through their declines after Vatican II, the
majority of their colleges experienced economic distress because the
nuns were the “living endowment” i.e. --they worked for
free to keep the place going. A number survived by going coed or merging
into their coordinate male universities. I am indebted to Patricia
McGuire, President of Trinity University (DC), for these observations
based on her analysis of IPEDS data.
5. The first woman to serve in several high-level
government positions were women’s college graduates. They include
Frances Perkins (Mount Holyoke ‘02), Secretary of Labor; Ella
Grasso (Mount Holyoke ’40), first women governor (Connecticut)
in the US elected in her own right; Madeline Albright (Wellesley ’59),
Secretary of State; Donna Shalala, (Western College for Women ’62),
Secretary of Health and Human Services; Christine Todd Whitman (Wheaton
‘68), Head of the EPA.
6. Mary F. Sammons (Marylhurst College ’70),
Rite Aid (No. 129); Anne M. Mulcahy (Marymount College ’74),
Xerox (No. 142); Marion O. Sandler (Wellesley ’52), Golden West
Financial (No. 326); Paula G. Rosput (Wellesley ’58) Reynolds,
Safeco (No. 339).
7. http://www.thewhitehouseproject.org/v2/researchandreports/snapshots.html
8. Phrase used by my colleague sociologist Eleanor
Townsley in “Re-membering 1955,” a reflective essay based
on her research methods course (Sociology 224) at Mount Holyoke in
2005 where students used archival, interviewing, and survey methods
to help to illuminate the collegiate experience of the Mount Holyoke
Class of 1955. Townsley suggests “that the college functioned
historically and continues to do so as an alternative small public
sphere in U.S. society, and the world more generally” and that
the College is a “strong, ongoing, valuable, coherent project
grounded in the higher education of women.”
9. In 2004, among the nation’s 30 highest-ranked
liberal arts colleges, the five historic Sisters have the five highest
percentages of low-income students enrolled in undergraduate programs
with Smith at 25.9%, Mount Holyoke 20.5%, Barnard 17.9%, Wellesley
17.0%, and Bryn Mawr 16.3%, according to the Journal of Blacks in
Higher Education analysis of data from the Department of Education
(Autumn 2006), p. 56.
10. It is worth noting that fear of “feminization”
across human history is complex and multifaceted, and sometimes it
is a guise of homophobia and sometimes women’s colleges are
disparaged as bastions of lesbianism. In fact, while women’s
colleges are typically nonjudgmental about sexual orientation and
supportive of all students, it is not at all clear that lesbianism
is any more prevalent at women’s colleges than at coed ones.
As Jill Ker Conway has trenchantly argued, underneath the concern
is the view that “the life of the mind was a male activity to
which women were lucky to be admitted. . . . So if women chose to
be educated separately from men, their reasons couldn’t be intellectual--
they must be sexual and involve sexual rejection of men.” A
Women’s Education (New York: Knopf, 2001), 121-22.
11. The Women’s College Coalition –
a thirty-five-year affiliation of North American women’s colleges
-- has in recent years been energized by focusing less on women’s
colleges per se and more on the tradition and mission which animate
them. It has invited back into the Coalition those institutions with
historic roots as women’s colleges and it is reaching out to
organizations and institutions committed to women’s education
and advancement.
12. Data on women’s colleges and universities
of the world are spotty and unreliable. Women’s Colleges and
Universities in International Perspective: An Overview, by Francesca
B. Purcell, Robin Matross Helms, and Laura Rumbley (Center for International
Education, Boston College, 2004) is a start, but more and better research
is needed.
13. This historic meeting included not only long-established
institutions such as our American “sisters,” the women’s
colleges of Cambridge University and the University of Sydney, but
also newly emerging ones such as then two-year-old Kirri Women’s
University of Science and Technology in Kenya, five-year-old Effat
College in Saudi Arabia, and in the planning stages, Asian University
for Women to be located in Bangladesh. (Intending to come, but unable
to get a visa was the president of Ahfad University for Women in Sudan.).
At our subsequent meeting, we were joined by the newest women’s
university in the world, the Royal Women’s University of Bahrain.
See our website at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/proj/wew/
14. On International Women's Day, March 8, 2006,
The Independent, a U.K. newspaper, published a bleak status of women
around the world: 1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women;
70% of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty are women and children;
21% of the world’s managers are female; 62% of unpaid family
workers are female; 67% of all illiterate adults are female; 1440
women die in childbirth each day (one every minute); 35% of lawyers
are women, but only 5% of them are partners in firms; 4% of girls
in Chad go to school; 85 million girls worldwide are not able to attend
school, compared to 45 million boys.
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