Rowold's focus in this intriguing comparative study is not the history of the admission of women to higher education in the three countries, but rather the rhetoric about women's mental capacities, health, reproductive functions, and sexuality that accompanied that process. In general terms, she sees a progression from early concern about the deleterious effects of study on women's health and development to later anxiety about the eugenic consequences of intelligent women delaying or avoiding marriage for higher education and a career. In other words, there was a transition from concern with whether women could study effectively without damaging themselves to one with whether women should study if the likely result was damage to the nation or “race.” For each of the three countries, Rowold draws on the writings of both proponents and opponents of higher education for women, ranging from well-known figures such as Charles Darwin, Helene Lange, and Concepción Arenal to a number of more obscure individuals.

Within this broad framework, however, she emphasizes the “sharp differences in the ways in which different approaches to women's higher education intersected with understandings of the female mind and body in individual countries” (p. 1). For example, in England Rowold finds much less discussion about the possibilities of combining career and motherhood than in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, England in the 1870s and 1880s witnessed much greater “anxieties about the female body's potential to degenerate” (p. 206). Some physicians and feminists, however, answered the fears of Henry Maudsley and others with the counterargument that idleness and “too little mental occupation” (p. 31) was more damaging than serious study. Darwin's view of the differentiation of the sexes in the course of evolution could, in some hands, turn into an argument for the mutability of gender roles over time; and a number of English feminists even suggested that well-educated women would pass on their acquired characteristics. Several also responded to eugenicists' concerns about the future of the race with insistence on the claims of the current generation over future ones.

For Germany, Rowold argues that debate about women students “acquired much of its dynamic from a specific understanding of the role and nature of university education” (p. 69), especially the ideal of Bildung and the emphasis on research. She stresses the ongoing relevance of notions about the “character of the sexes” dating back to the late eighteenth century, which gave a continuing influence to philosophers in the era of evolution and eugenics. In the 1870s and 1880s, this translated into opponents stressing women's limited intellectual abilities more than the harm study would cause them. Improved educational opportunities, nonetheless, were more central to the German feminist movement than to the English. German women tended to adapt notions of evolutionary differentiation to fit with their ideas of “relational feminism” or “spiritual motherhood,” arguing that well-educated women would make different contributions to society than did men. The League for the Protection of Mothers operated separately from, and largely in opposition to, the main eugenic organization, a division not seen in England.

Rowold realizes that many of her readers will be less familiar with events in Spain, and she provides more of the basic history of female education there. She emphasizes the lateness of full-scale admission of women to the universities—in 1910—despite some women earning degrees more than a quarter century earlier. She also highlights the absence of an organized women's movement pushing for the opening of higher education, although there were prominent writers who espoused the cause. In contrast to England and Germany, liberals in Spain in the late nineteenth century suffered from an acute sense of backwardness and viewed expanded education for women as both a means to and a sign of progress.

After defeat in 1898 confirmed the belief in Spain's disastrous decline, debate about “regeneration” impacted views of women's education. Feminist Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer saw the unused powers of women as a basis for revival, whereas many men considered the decline of “virility” as the source of Spain's problems and called for a reinforcement of traditional gender roles. Vigorous Jesuit antifeminism also opposed women's rights as a catastrophic foreign import into Spain that had hastened the country's slide; the Catholic church also condemned the gradual development of coeducation in secondary schools, a result of the lack of separate girls' schools. No organized eugenics movement emerged in Spain at this time, but there was concern about training girls to raise healthy children.

Only Germany rates three chapters in the book, because Rowold sees discussion about “masculine minds in female bodies” (p. 131), or lesbianism, as playing a much larger role there than in England or Spain. For some involved in discussions of sexology, lesbians needed access to education and professional careers precisely because “motherhood played no role” (p. 133) in their personalities. Rowold admits, however, that “members of the women's movement hardly engaged with the discussions about lesbianism” (pp. 141-42). One could add that questions of gender orientation also played a very minimal role in debates in university senates, state legislatures, and ministries of education about admission of women to universities. In fact, Rowold devotes much of this chapter to the works of Richard Krafft-Ebing and Otto Weininger, who were Austrians, without explicitly justifying their inclusion.

One might also ask if Rowold underestimates the extent to which the “the specific understanding of the role and nature of university education” at Oxbridge affected English discussion of higher education for women. Overall, however, this work makes a significant contribution to comparative gender history.