A vision for girls: A story of gender, education, and the Bryn Mawr School
Description
The Bryn Mawr School (BMS) is an exceptional college-preparatory school for girls founded in 1885 in Baltimore and still thriving today. This dissertation outlines the history of BMS from its founding to the present, using the school as a lens for exploring the evolution of girls' education with focus on changing understandings of the purpose of single-sex schools and their relationship to ideas about women and their place in society BMS's founders (among them noted educator M. Carey Thomas) planned an education for girls which would equal that offered in the best boys' schools of the day, and, indeed, BMS would be the first exclusively college-preparatory school for girls in the United States. BMS maintained unprecedented standards for academic achievement and improvement of physical health and was intended to serve as a model for women elsewhere to emulate But envisioning an exceptional education and translating those ideals into a working school institution were two different things. Long-time Headmistress Edith Hamilton was particularly instrumental in adapting BMS to the expectations of families in Baltimore in the 1890s and early 1900s. With the increasing popularity of higher education for women and the growth of city suburbs, BMS would further evolve in the 1920s and 1930s, essentially remaking itself in the image of fashionable country-day academies. By the mid-century, BMS was gradually becoming a school that mirrored, more than challenged, social expectations for girls By the 1960s, however, the relevancy of single-sex schools was in question as rarely before. Indeed, the modern preference for coeducation would force schools like BMS to reexamine their single-sex identities. By the 1980s, BMS was embracing a dialogue that offered promising new reasons why girls' schools should continue to exist, even thrive. Along with other single-sex institutions and a host of researchers and popular commentators, BMS would particularly explore issues of female difference which, notably, had been adamantly rejected by its founders in favor of emphasis on the similarities between the sexes. This dissertation thus concludes by exploring the nuances and implications of the modern dialogue about female difference and single-sex education