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In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled.
In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond.
Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.
Andrea L. Turpin is Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University.
"Andrea L. Turpin offers fresh and important perspectives on two intertwining features in U.S. higher education in the years 1837 to 1917—its opening to women and its shaping by American religious culture. With these threads in motion, the author adds the critical contribution that colleges and universities made during these eighty years to their male and female graduates' choices of occupations and commitments to social reform. A New Moral Vision is a major contribution to both the history of education in the United States and to American cultural and social history."
Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, author of In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783:
"In this carefully researched and insightful book, Andrea L. Turpin complicates and enriches the history of religion and American higher education. Her detailed case studies and sure-handed treatment of broader contexts (especially developments within American Protestantism and repercussions from World War I) show both how women became participants in the moral discourse of American higher education and then how they redirected it significantly. It is an excellent book."
Julie A. Reuben, Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, author of Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality:
"A New Moral Vision helps us understand how broad changes in American culture and society, changes in higher education, changes in religion, and changes in expectations and understandings of gender intersected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In accomplishing this impressive feat of intellectual synthesis, Andrea L. Turpin also pushes us to see these subjects in new ways."
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