In the United States today schooling is thoroughly identified with the special place in which formal teaching and learning occur. So intimate is the link between schooling and the schoolhouse that in the 1960s “schools without walls,” where pupils learn while associating with adults in everyday environments, were hailed as revolutionary. Americans expect their young to be instructed in separate spaces, and since the inception of public education in the early nineteenth century, they have become increasingly conscious of the appearance, layout, and location of those spaces. They have invested enormous sums of money in the design and construction of schools; in turn, schools have become among the most numerous and easily identifiable public buildings in the United States. The schoolhouse is synonymous with education and a reminder to all of an important time in their lives.

The field of family history has been in creative ferment in recent years as historians have debated whether or not the early modern era brought a fundamental change in family life. While historians such as Philippe Ariès, Lawrence Stone, and Edward Shorter have claimed that families became closer and more child-centered, others deny major changes in the emotional lives of families have occurred. The skeptics suggest the impossibility of deriving any conclusions about the level of attachment family members felt for each other. They also point out that those emphasizing increased intimacy and attachment cite different time periods when this change is supposed to have occurred: estimates range from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, with most historians settling on the eighteenth century.

Commenting primarily on American and German educational historiography, Konrad H. Jarausch lamented that the “initial excitement” of the “new history of education” had abated and that education was no longer in the forefront of discussion in social or cultural history. Was this perception based upon an assumed coherence of the various trends which he described? Characteristic of the “new history,” according to Jarausch, had been, first, a radical criticism of the prevailing Whig tradition; secondly, a shift of focus from pedagogical ideas to social context; and thirdly, the adoption of social scientific techniques and quantification. All three features have contributed significantly to the development of research in British educational history, yet it would be artificial to postulate a unitary movement. Rather, various trends are visible, which reflect the institutional infrastructure within which history of education is produced in Britain. Changing priorities in and approaches to research in the history of education cannot be understood apart from the ties between the study of educational history and the institutional and research environments in which British historians and educationists work, as well as the wider context of contemporary educational politics.

Although sixty years have passed since its original publication in 1929, Thomas Woody's monumental two-volume treatise A History of Women's Education in the United States remains the authoritative, indeed the only, comprehensive survey of the history of women's education in the United States. Women's lives have changed greatly since the appearance of this now-classic study. Moreover, recent decades have seen an explosion of scholarship in women's history and the history of education, inspired by the social ferment of the 1960s, including feminism, and the methodologies and interests of the new social history. This essay will reappraise Woody's treatise in relation both to its own times, the 1920s, and to the events and scholarship of the intervening years. After providing background information about Woody and his study, it will ask in what ways A History of Women's Education in the United States remains useful to scholars today and in what ways it should be supplemented or revised.