During the decades around 1900, changing intellectual currents and the creation of the research university led American colleges and universities to alter the role of religion in students' education. Simultaneously, women matriculated in large numbers for the first time, forcing individual institutions to ask whether and how to incorporate them. Using the lens of all-male Princeton University, this article explores how these two trends combined to help instill gender ideals in the Progressive Era male elite. Princeton sought to attract an elite constituency by no longer seeking to inculcate in students simply moral excellence in general, but rather traits associated with prominent men specifically. Princeton's leaders reinforced this gendered moral formation as they shifted from evangelical spirituality focused on relating rightly to God to modernist spirituality focused on relating rightly to the human community. That students embraced these changes suggests that a new approach to moral formation at prominent men's colleges—and coeducational universities that copied their approach—may help explain why, in an era when women could first access an education equal to men's, educated men nevertheless continued to see themselves as uniquely suited for certain public leadership roles by virtue of their sex.

In 1828, as the movement to improve educational opportunities for American women was gaining in prominence, Catharine Beecher approached first Mary Lyon, and a year later Lyon's associate Zilpah Grant, to join her as instructor at Hartford Female Seminary. Consonant with the era of optimistic reform in which she lived, Beecher believed Hartford could change the world, so she wanted the most well-known female educators on board. The key to Hartford's influence was to be the type of students it attracted. Beecher wrote to Grant that a “woman of piety and active benevolence, with wealth which enables her to take the lead in society, can do more good than another of equally exalted character without it.” Lyon and Grant both declined.