Historians of American higher education know that women students were long ignored, although sometimes tolerated, throughout most of its centuries of development. Occasionally—especially during wartime—women students prospered, keeping colleges solvent in challenging times. Yet, in 1981, women overtook men in being the majority of degree recipients, and since then have never earned less than half the degrees. Historians also know that the latter half of the twentieth century constituted a boom in federal funding for college students, building from the 1944 GI Bill and the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) and its subsequent Pell Grants and Stafford Loans. These measures were designed to increase college access through funds provided directly to students, resulting in a growing proportion of Americans seeking degrees.

But were these developments connected? That is, did growth and change in federal higher education policy result in women's educational achievement and subsequent movement toward greater equality? Deondra Rose explores that issue in this expansive, careful, and significant book. In short, her answer is yes: by expanding women's educational attainment, these policies helped establish women as first-class citizens, thereby strengthening their social and political participation. Although acknowledging social movements and feminist advocacy as important parts of the history, Rose argues that higher education policies played “a significant, though often overlooked, role in the gender dynamics of American citizenship” (p. 21); further, without them, women's progress in the last fifty years “might have been more modest” (p. 11). Through their “combination of redistributive and regulatory policy,” these federal efforts constituted “a one-two punch sequence in the assault against gender inequality in higher education access” (p. 3) that Rose suggests is often unrecognized by educational historians.

Rose is a “political scientist, political historian, and policy feedback scholar” (p. ix), and that wide mix allows her to explore collegiate history with different questions and tools than educational historians customarily use. Her historical chapters are strong, and she builds on them with empirical analysis to ask how policies affected women and the ways in which they enhanced gender equality. She applies policy feedback analysis to show how participants experience the dual mechanisms of resource effects—gaining knowledge and capacity for better citizenship— and interpretive effects—recognizing that the state's investment signals first-class citizenship. As these effects interact, women participate more fully in political involvement, voting, advocacy, and schooling, and in generally seeking resources that mark first-class status.

Historians will naturally scrutinize the book's middle three chapters on federal policy development. These respectively treat the NDEA, the HEA, and Title IX of the 1972 HEA Education Amendments. These are excellent chapters that, while addressing previous historical analyses, add interesting new source material through Rose's interviews with policymakers, activists, and legislative aides directly involved in the efforts, including Senator Birch Bayh, advocate Bernice Sandler, and Mary Allen Jolley (aide to Alabama representative Carl Elliott during his advocacy for the NDEA). Rose emphasizes how each of these three policies was crafted by creative legislators whose strength lay in identifying—and exploiting—the contemporary political context, along with a deep understanding of how to move legislation through Congress.

The NDEA, she argues, was a “watershed moment in the development of US higher education policy” (p. 44) by offering, for the first time, need-based federal loans for students irrespective of previous service (as with the GI Bill) or college attendance (as with the 1930s National Youth Administration work-study program). Carl Elliott and Senator Lister Hill, also of Alabama, seized a window of opportunity opened by the apparent Soviet scientific domination revealed in Sputnik's launch. Long committed to educational advancement, Hill and Elliott recognized that national concerns over Americans falling behind might allow their bill to advance. Rose's interesting contribution—along with emphasizing how these southern Democrats unexpectedly helped strengthen the modern welfare state—is suggesting that the NDEA advanced women through what she calls “accidental egalitarianism” (p. 46). That is, the NDEA was written as a gender-neutral measure, but mostly because Elliott and Hill needed a vaguely worded bill that would pass muster in the era's debates over race and religion in education. These southern lawmakers wanted the federal resources that would help their region but had seen such efforts stymied by concern over federal involvement and its push for racial integration. Crafting the NDEA to give money to needy students wherever they chose to attend college allowed both sides to benefit. Ultimately, Rose concludes, this “unprecedented public support” (p. 76) for women resulted more from Cold War politics and civil rights than from targeted egalitarian activism.

Rose's analysis of the HEA similarly emphasizes its gender-neutral aspects and egalitarian results. The HEA built on the public's new comfort with governmental support for education (what political science calls “path dependency”), extending it to middle-class families in a combination of loans and grants. Here, Lyndon Johnson's presidential leadership began to identify higher education as an antipoverty measure, and Rose argues that women were general beneficiaries rather than specific targets of its equal-opportunity approach. Nevertheless, a federal policy once again helped reshape gender dynamics.

By 1972, these two “redistributive” educational policies had highlighted the inequalities in women's access and progress. The contemporary national climate supported a more regulatory approach in Title IX, whereby “lawmakers ventured beyond offering direct support to students to reform institutional practices” (p. 101). Its advocates crafted a measure to allow women better use of the financial support the NDEA and HEA offered, outlawing sexual discrimination by colleges that accepted federal aid.

After tracing these three important policies, the book's second half uses political science tools to ask how these policies impacted women. Rose first explains “the gender dynamics of social citizenship” (p. 121), that is, how women's socioeconomic well-being and gender parity were affected by greater educational attainment and its concomitant social and economic advantages. She shows that women used student loans and Pell Grants in greater proportion than men. Further, as women recognize the importance of this government support to their success, they develop more positive attitudes toward government and citizenship. Political citizenship is also advanced through these financial policies, generally through “knowledge and skills that promote political engagement” (p. 163) and its resulting growth in political efficacy, interest, and participation. These two chapters on political and social citizenship clearly outline Rose's empirical quantitative methods; lengthy appendices permit examination of her methodology and datasets.

This book keenly demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary analysis. Rose carefully explores the history of three legislative developments while pushing historians to recognize their unintentional—though hugely significant—benefits to women. In this, she offers a new conception of how gender, higher education, and citizenship interact. While not dismissing the importance of midcentury social movements, Rose argues that the NDEA, and even the HEA, preceded second-wave feminism. Thus, rather than those movements prompting attention to women's needs, here they are rather downplayed as background to the political contexts and legislative skill of policymakers. Historians might argue that such political interest and will do not occur in social vacuums, but this book shows the value of applying different lenses to historical developments.