From the late 1960s through the 1980s, second-wave feminist historians generated groundbreaking work detailing women's ever-expanding access to US colleges and universities. These accounts largely focused on elite institutions, much like their authors’ alma maters or employing institutions. Over the past few decades, however, a diverse array of new scholars has joined this still-growing project, certainly deepening and broadening what we know about women and higher education but also, importantly, complicating those understandings.

In her new edited volume, Margaret Nash has brought together an impressive range of these “new historical perspectives.” Contributors examine women's experiences in a variety of educational institutions, such as female seminaries that enhanced the lives of white women and excluded African American women, normal schools, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), coeducational universities, and colleges and universities established by Catholic nuns and sisters. Authors focus variously on faculty members, administrators, founders, and students as well as those denied access. They also interrogate race/ethnicity by, for example, discussing how Native American, Latina, and Chinese women navigated studies at predominantly white institutions; exploring how African American women challenged both exclusion from white institutions and gendered power structures at HBCUs; and making whiteness explicit and subject to critique. Some authors address queer activism and identity in chapters detailing more recent history. Nash also strategically solicited work from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though, as she notes in the epilogue, more research is needed from earlier eras.

With this broad, intentional variety, the essays in this collection nonetheless harmonize elegantly. Nash has arranged chapters in roughly chronological order but also drawn thematic connections between adjacent contributions where feasible. Impressively, each chapter refers to ideas and narratives of other chapters in the collection, building thematic connections and effectively enhancing the coherence of the whole.

Most importantly, though, Nash's introduction offers theoretical perspectives by which these works might be understood. While historians of education generally have been reluctant to incorporate theory explicitly in their work, Nash examines “what it might mean to apply the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to the field of women's educational history” (p. 3). With this, she questions a prevailing narrative of the field: “a progressive trajectory of increasingly democratized access” in which women have been added (p. 3). Instead, she explores Foucault's theories of power, for example, understanding that “power is everywhere, diffused, and always relational; it is in constant flux and negotiation” (p. 5). A narrative of women gradually gaining a place in higher education then gives way to more helpfully complex understandings in which contests for power exist in every dimension of women's experiences—large and small—and those contests are contextually contingent. These large and small contests permeate the book's wide-ranging chapters. Nash suggests ways to interpret women's experiences—countering their normalization, resisting comprehensive metanarratives, and understanding that within oppressive systems, power is continually negotiated. Though many authors of succeeding chapters do not overtly employ this framing, it successfully situates each part of the volume all the same.

Stories in the first three chapters unfold largely during the nineteenth century. In the second chapter, Lucia McMahon profiles several white women who led female academies and seminaries in the early 1800s. These women earned the respect of their colleagues and students—to the extent that memoirs about them were published after their deaths. That other educated women eagerly read these accounts tells us much about how they attempted to navigate their expanding opportunities and simultaneously prescribed the bounds of white, middling-class femininity. These institutions, however, excluded middle-class and elite African American women. Kabria Baumgartner's third chapter examines how free African American women resisted their exclusion by arguing that it resulted in the miseducation of white women, denying them opportunities to gain broader perspectives on race. Baumgartner makes a highly compelling case that “the exclusion of African American women was actually central to the rise of female seminaries in early America” (p. 47). Kelly Ann Kolodny explores some of the earliest normal schools in Massachusetts in chapter 4, recounting how students, many of quite modest means, expanded their cultural understandings and general knowledge, developed social confidence, and expanded their range of expression through both formal assignments as well as voluntarily selected reading and writing activities.

Huping Ling, in chapter 5, describes Chinese women who studied in US colleges and universities from the late 1800s through the twentieth century. She notes extraordinary accomplishments among some and describes social/cultural challenges, much like those experienced by other Chinese women who immigrated. She also recounts the significant impact of changing US immigration policies on who could study in the US. In chapter 6, Linda Perkins portrays black women professors at Howard University during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the university enjoyed considerable funding and a stellar faculty compared with other HBCUs. However, President Mordecai Johnson's misogyny and sexism hampered the university's extraordinarily gifted black women faculty. Perkins powerfully describes how faculty like Lucy Diggs Slowe nonetheless persistently fought for gender equity and built strong community for mutual support. Meanwhile, at women's colleges, research-active women faculty encountered barriers, too, as Mary Ann Dzuback describes in chapter 7. She profiles several women social scientists who were largely restricted to positions at women's colleges—with little support for research. Dzuback explores how these women built vibrant research communities, established funding sources, and expanded their ranks on campus despite these challenges. In chapter 8, Kelly Sartorius examines the significant work of early women deans in developing both self-government and elected student government for women students. These deans then expanded the focus of women's governance to include suffrage and career awareness as ways of further empowering students. Sartorius explains, however, that these initiatives have been overlooked despite their foundational influence on coeducational student government and in forming national networks of women's campus programs. In the next chapter, Jennifer Talerico-Brown profiles Cleo Caudell, a Choctaw and one of the early American Indian women to attend college. Talerico-Brown describes a convergence of factors in the 1930s that resulted in an increase in the numbers of American Indian students qualified for college. Barriers persisted, however. In the end, Caudell enjoyed few career opportunities; she spent her career working “within the confines” of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (p. 205).

Kim Tolley highlights the significant roles that Catholic women have played in women's higher education in the US; yet their efforts have received little scholarly attention. In chapter 10, she persuasively argues why this should change. She offers a sweeping overview of orders of Catholic sisters who have founded US educational institutions, revealing their often-surprising agency and independence within a larger patriarchal institution. In chapter 11, Victoria-María MacDonald and Alice Cook offer several vignettes describing Mexican American women who pursued higher education in the decades before the Chicana civil rights movement. They discuss four well-framed factors that Mexican American women needed to navigate in their higher educational experiences. MacDonald and Cook close by describing some of the unique historiographical problems that continue to discourage much-needed work in this area. Linda Eisenmann, in chapter 12, offers a superb synthesis of second-wave feminist historical scholarship on women's higher education—a particularly valuable contribution about the antecedents of recent scholarship like the work showcased in this book. Eisenmann incorporates personal touches, a meaningful approach, especially because of her own sustained, deep, and significant roles in advancing scholarship on women's higher education. In chapter 13, Jess Clawson offers a fascinating examination of “trans-gressive” women during the 1970s and 1980s at three Florida universities. At the center of Clawson's analysis are queer people who “were not assigned female at birth, yet they present in feminine ways” (p. 278)—which effectively calls into question what we mean by “women” and gender binaries. This expansive approach profoundly and thoughtfully complexifies this book. Nash closes with her epilogue outlining future directions for scholarship. She appeals to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social production and argues that such work might consider interactions of economic, social, and cultural capital in perpetuating social distinctions.

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive synthesis of the history of women in higher education. Nash describes her own ambivalence about the possibility of such a comprehensive account, which might serve as an important development in the field but at the same time would necessarily be frustratingly incomplete. Instead, Nash has carefully curated an impressive collection, each chapter revealing consequential power contests; portraying these contests with provocative, telling detail; examining how most of these contests have been little- or unexplored in existing scholarship; and provoking readers to rethink what they may know about this larger history. Her theoretical framing not only insightfully connects important strands throughout but also serves as a fine example of how such framing might be employed. Finally, readers might eagerly anticipate future work that interrogates not just “women,” but a fuller gender range as well as rich analyses of intersectionalities with sexuality, race/ethnicity, and multiple forms of capital. Thankfully, Nash has suggested these directions and set the stage for that work.