In her published 1990 presidential address to the American History of Education Society, Maxine Schwartz Seller contends that much research on the history of education in the United States, including the history of women's education, “treats the nation as though its boundaries were impenetrable walls.” She poses the question: “What happens to the history of education in the United States—women's education in this case—when we see the United States not as a self-contained unit, but as part of an interconnecting, interacting North Atlantic, or Western hemisphere, or Pacific rim community of nations?”

This essay addresses a gap in our understanding of the social forces promoting female literacy in New England between 1750 and 1820. Historians generally agree that a rapid expansion of female literacy occurred during that century. Measuring literacy by the ability to sign one's name, studies have shown that in many communities only half as many women as men were literate in 1750. An example of this differential is the case of Elbridge Gerry, who courted but did not marry a young woman who, though she was the daughter of a Harvard graduate and state legislator, could neither read nor answer his letters to her from the Continental Congress. Yet by 1850 when the first federal census measured literacy by gender, both white women and men in New England were almost universally literate. Since older women were also universally literate, the change appears to have been complete among girls by 1820. After Kenneth Lockridge first pointed out the discrepancy between male and female literacy rates in colonial New England, scholars have amended many of his findings, but they have not yet found a way to explain the rapid increase in female literacy that occurred in New England after 1750.

“Civilized nations have long since been convinced,” Emma Willard declared to the New York legislature in 1818, “that education with respect to males, will not, like trade, regulate itself.” Thus Willard introduced her famous argument for state support of female education by observing the limits of market principles for promoting good schools.

The future historian John Lothrop Motley, aged ten in 1824, wrote to his father from boarding school outside Boston: “I want to see you very much. I suppose you remember that it is my turn to come home on Saturday next? This is Thursday, the day on which we speak. I was third best…. My nose has bled very often lately, but I believe it will not bleed much more. I have had a pain in my side once or twice.” Motley's education involved intensive training in languages as part of a curriculum consisting of linguistic drill and a bit of math and science, which did not satisfy his growing thirst for reading. “In the morning, from half-past five to seven, I study French,” Motley wrote his mother a year later, “after breakfast I study Spanish, from nine to half past ten, when we go out and stay about ten or fifteen minutes; and when we come in, I study Greek until twelve, when we are dismissed; and in the afternoon I study Cicero and recite to Dr. Beck, a German.” Two years later Motley complained about the lack of reading material, asking his father for books and announcing the organization of a reading room by one of the masters. But the reading room failed to satisfy him, Motley explained to his brother, because no one contributed books and the few newspapers there were all “a hundred years old” and all mutilated within an hour of being deposited. “Reading is not to be thought of, as there are no books in school.”

In 1911 M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, faced a golden opportunity. An alumna of the college had died suddenly, leaving Bryn Mawr its largest gift since Joseph Wright Taylor's initial endowment for the establishment of the college. Emma Carola Woerishoffer's unrestricted $750,000 donation provided Thomas unaccustomed freedom to expand Bryn Mawr's curriculum. In 1915 Thomas used a large portion of the bequest to establish the Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research for the training and certification of social workers and for the master's and doctoral education of social researchers. Bryn Mawr's department and program were unusual, as training schools for social workers were run largely by charity organization societies. The department's singularity was derived from its location within an academic institution and its determination to provide women the opportunity to pursue research in the social sciences.