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The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools - The Atlantic(April 1998) function fixHeights() { if (document.getElementById("thisissue")) { document.getElementById("thisissue").style.height = document.getElementById("subcol").offsetHeight - 68 + "px"; } } cmSetProduction();cmCreatePageviewTag( "Article:Wendy Kaminer:The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools:199804:Free:1", "politics/article/199804/single-sex" ); The Atlantic Home  sponsored by ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;document.write(' displayMainMenu(); document.write(' April 1998 Atlantic All-female schools are "models of equivocation," the author, a Smith graduate, writes. They "reinforce regressive notions of sex difference" while at the same time helping women into the professions by Wendy Kaminer The Trouble With Single-Sex SchoolsArticle Toolssponsored by:document.write(' American women won the opportunity to be educated nearly a hundred years before they won the rightto vote, not coincidentally. In the beginning women were educated for the sakeof family and society: the new republic needed educated mothers to producereasonable, responsible male citizens. But although the first all-femaleacademies, founded in the early 1800s, reflected a commitment to traditionalgender roles, which reserved the public sphere for men, they reinforced anascent view of women as potentially reasonable human beings -- endowed with the attributes of citizenship.Education also contributed to women's restlessness and impatience withdomesticity. It may or may not have produced better mothers, but it did seem toproduce fewer mothers. Young female secondary-school graduates of the mid-1800stended to marry later than their uneducated peers or not at all. "Our failuresonly marry," the president of Bryn Mawr, M. Carey Thomas, famously remarked inthe early 1900s.The first generations of educated women were products of single-sex secondaryand undergraduate schools, with few exceptions (Oberlin became the country'sfirst coed college, in 1837). The Seven Sisters opened their doors in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century and evolved into a female Ivy League,educating the daughters of elites and providing social and professionalmobility to some members of the middle class. Such schools were essential tothe nineteenth-century women's movement. They not only inspired activism inwomen and prepared them to work outside the home but also created wage-earningwork, as schoolteaching became one of few respectable professional options forunmarried females.Still, single-sex education was not exactly a choice; it was a cultural mandateat a time when sexual segregation was considered only natural. Early feministshoped eventually to integrate men's schools as well as voting booths, and equaleducational opportunities proved much easier to obtain than equal electoralrights. By the turn of the century more girls than boys were graduating fromhigh school and coeducation was becoming the norm. In 1910, out of the nation's1,083 colleges 27 percent were exclusively for men, 15 percent exclusively forwomen, and the remaining 58 percent coed.Today females outnumber males among college graduates, and a mere 1.3 percentof all women awarded B.A. degrees graduate from single-sex colleges. Now thatthe Ivy League is coed, academically elite women's colleges -- Smith, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke -- are apt to lose the best-credentialed students to schools like Harvard, Brown, and Yale. In the 1970s, after men's colleges and universities began accepting women, the SAT scores of Smith College applicants declined; they stabilized and rose slightly during the 1980s.The image of women's colleges has improved in the past five years, thankspartly to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley class of 1969. Applications towomen's schools have steadily increased -- but so has the number of collegeapplicants overall. It's highly unlikely that with competition from the IvyLeague and in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, women's colleges willever recover the popularity and prestige they once enjoyed. Only about threepercent of female high school seniors even consider attending any of thenation's eighty-two women's colleges. But if single-sex college education seemsto generate relatively low demand among young women, support for it is on theincrease among their elders.Having gained entry to virtually all the nation's public and privateuniversities (and military academies), many women are questioning the benefitsof coeducation at every level, but especially in secondary schools. Accordingto popular feminist wisdom, coed schools are detrimental to the self-esteem ofgirls; they discourage rather than inspire girls' achievement, particularly inmath and science. Many parents of girls seem to share these beliefs -- or theywant their daughters protected from the attentions and temptations of boys.(For gay and bisexual girls, however, single-sex schools can be fraught withsexual tension.) All-girls elementary and secondary schools are in the midst ofa "renaissance," according to Whitney Ransome, the director of the NationalCoalition of Girls' Schools. Since the early 1990s applications have increasedby 21 percent and four new all-girls secondary schools have been established.Pursuant to federal law, single-sex education is primarily a privateprerogative; public schools are generally barred from discriminating on thebasis of sex or race. But separatism has been enjoying a resurgence among somefeminists and advocates of racial justice, who are challenging restrictions onsegregated public classrooms. The belief that segregation necessarily sends amessage of inferiority, which underlay the Supreme Court's 1954 decision inBrown v. Board of Education, has been upended. Now segregatedschools are heralded for raising self-esteem in disadvantaged groups.Of course, integrationists still have the law on their side. In 1991 threepublic schools proposed for African-American males in Detroit were quickly andsuccessfully challenged in a federal district court by the parents of girls inthe city's public schools, along with a coalition of feminist and civil-rightsgroups. In that suit, Garrett v. Board of Education, the courtheld that the all-boys schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment and federalequal-education laws. Supporters of these schools characterized them as aresponse to a crisis facing young African-American males, who as a groupsuffered inordinately high dropout, unemployment, and homicide rates. But, asthe court observed, there was no evidence that the presence of girls in classincreased the risks faced by boys or interfered with efforts to help them:"Although co-educational programs have failed, there is no showing that it isthe co-educational factor that results in failure." Besides, girls were incrisis as well. Sex was "inappropriately" invoked as a "proxy for `at risk'students."Undeterred by this decision, advocates for single-sex education recentlyestablished a public all-girls school in New York City. Named The Young Women'sLeadership School, and known informally as the East Harlem Girls' School, itopened in September of 1996 with one seventh-grade class of fifty girls, andwas immediately challenged by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New YorkCity chapter of the National Organization for Women, and the New York CivilRights Coalition.Last September the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights issuedan informal preliminary finding that the school appeared to violate federallaw. Two remedies were suggested: sexually integrate the school or establish aseparate but equal school for boys. (The State of California has recentlyinitiated a pilot program encouraging the establishment of single-sex academiesfor middle and high school students.) But New York City's school chancellor,Rudy Crew, has said that he will neither admit boys to the East Harlem Girls'School nor establish a brother school, and civil-rights activists would fightattempts to establish a separate but equal boys' academy anyway. Compromiseappears unlikely. The battle rages between those who pursue equality throughintegration and those who pursue it through separate institutions for thepresumptively disadvantaged.Supporters of the East Harlem school have cast the debate as a class struggle.The school serves Latinas from lower-income families, and Latina activists havedenounced its opponents, NOW in particular, as upper-middle-class meddlers outof touch with the needs of less-affluent minorities. The image of NOW as agroup of elite feminists does not reflect reality (Anne Conners, the formerpresident of the New York chapter, observed that the average income of memberswas $20,000), but wealth is relative. As outsiders to the East Harlemcommunity, NOW activists may be "meddling" -- but so were northerners who fought for an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. A commitment to civil rights assumes a responsibility to meddle.Of course, whether the establishment of public all-girls schools retards oradvances civil rights and social equality is a central question in this case.Supporters of The Young Women's Leadership School assert that it provideslow-income families with the option of single-sex education that has alwaysexisted for the upper classes. Rich parents send their daughters to all-femaleschools; why shouldn't the daughters of the poor enjoy similar advantages?That's an appeal bound to elicit sympathy, especially from guilty liberals, butit begs the question of whether the daughters of the rich benefit fromsingle-sex education. Perhaps they benefit merely from being rich and attendingelite private schools with favorable student-teacher ratios and superiorfacilities and curricula. Perhaps many would fare better at elite coed schools.In any case, the tendency of some affluent parents to choose single-sex schoolsis not evidence that single-sex education provides advantages for girls. Thetraditions of the rich, such as coming-out parties, are not necessarilyprogressive.In fact, challengers of the East Harlem school charge that its establishment ispart of a campaign by conservative elites to dismantle the public school systemthrough privatization. The school was conceived and partly funded by AnnRubenstein Tisch and her husband, Andrew Tisch, the chairman of the LoewsCorporation management committee. It represents the initiative and ideals ofupper-class meddlers, whose motives the middle-class meddlers suspect.Does The Young Women's Leadership School represent a small step toward the goalof equality or a step away from it? The more that girls' schools are celebratedfor nurturing achievement and self-esteem, the more futile efforts to improvepublic coeducation may seem. And feminist supporters of girls' schools areoften opposed to boys' schools, so the prospect of success presents them with aquandary: which girls will be sacrificed to coed schools in the hope ofsocializing the boys?Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 next> Wendy Kaminer is a contributing editor of The Atlantic. Her most recent book is It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture.Article Toolssponsored by:document.write(' More From the Atlantic More on Politics & Society Also By Wendy Kaminer March 1996Second Thoughts on the Second Amendment  October 1993Feminism's Identity CrisisThe most effective backlash against feminism comes from within. November 1992Feminists Against the First AmendmentA critique of a movement that is winning new recruits among politicians and on college campuses—a movement that appeals to the widespread loathing of pornography, that promotes a view of men as lubricious brutes, and that has united authoritarians on the left and the right in an assault on free speech. NameAddress 1Address 2CityState ZipEmailAtlantic Voices Andrew Sullivan "Arab" Not "Arab Terrorist" Read more 11 October 2008 2:06 P.M. Ross Douthat Be Careful What You Wish For Read more 10 October 2008 11:46 A.M. Megan McArdle More recommended reading Read more 11 October 2008 11:25 A.M. Marc Ambinder A Weird Invocation At McCain's Event In Davenport Read more 11 October 2008 12:26 P.M. Ta-nehisi Coates McCain walking it back Read more 10 October 2008 7:10 P.M. James Fallows Tom Wales, October 11 Read more 11 October 2008 07:44 A.M. Jeffrey Goldberg Sarah Palin: Fatal Cancer? Read more 10 October 2008 08:20 A.M. Clive Crook Book review: The Closing of the American Border Read more 09 October 2008 8:54 P.M. Barbara Wallraff Off to Oxford Read more 10 October 2008 4:54 P.M. document.write('Home | Atlantic FAQ | Masthead | Site Guide | Subscribe | Subscriber Help Atlantic Store | Educational Program | Jobs/Internships | Privacy Policy | Feedback | AdvertiseCopyright © 2008 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. _uacct = "UA-20189-19";urchinTracker();_uacct = "UA-20189-2";urchinTracker(); |
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