In March 1904, at a time when the Prussian Ministry of Education was giving serious consideration to the admission of women to institutions of higher education, it received a petition signed by the rectors of eight of Prussia's nine universities. The rectors expressed strong opposition to the introduction of coeducation and called instead for the creation of a separate university for women, where they suggested that professorial appointments would “be open to the best scholarly talents among the women.” To support this viewpoint, they noted that in the United States, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr colleges employed 249 women as professors, versus just 88 men.

The traditional view of antebellum colleges, as exemplified by the works of Richard Hofstadter and others, depicts them as dogmatic, elitist, inflexible, and hostile both to science and to more practically oriented subjects, such as engineering. Only in recent decades have scholars disputed this view. Stanley Guralnick in 1975 challenged the contention that antebellum colleges were antagonistic to science, demonstrating that they made extraordinary and successful efforts to modify their curricula and add faculty to increase science offerings. Shortly after, in 1982, Colin Burke published a broadly based, quantitative study of antebellum colleges which revealed that they were far more successful, accessible, adaptable, and progressive than previously recognized.

The teacher rightly holds a prominent place in the educational, political, and social history of Canada. During the nineteenth century, provincial politicians, town councils, school administrators, and parents worried about what kind of people would make up the growing cadre of public school teachers and whether there would be enough of them to staff burgeoning schools. As for the spread of schools, few doubt that the establishment of universal public schooling was one of modern history's major social changes. Not only did schooling expand and illiteracy turn from the social norm into a social disability within a century but learning itself was transformed from an informal process, conducted in the home or as part of everyday activity, into a formal institutional setting which occurred outside the home and became the main occupation of childhood. Teaching changed from an itinerant, entrepreneurial, part-time activity to a spatially confined, hired, primary activity with a guaranteed income. Public schooling with hiring, certification, and a common curriculum necessitated a new relation between teacher and state. The teacher was a government employee who could aspire to a place in the bureaucratic hierarchy but who would also claim independent professional status, establishing associations to regulate that status and also mediate with the employer (the government) about wages, working conditions, and professional standing. Expansion of schooling, at first horizontally, bringing more and more children into school, and then vertically, extending years of schooling, meant that teaching was a growth industry offering secure, respectable employment and social mobility for educated sons and daughters of lower-middle status. It offered young women a way station between school and marriage or a respectable career for unmarried women.