This paper examines women’s access to higher education in the United States through institutional, cultural, feminist, and intersectional historical perspectives. Drawing on scholarship related to race, gender, colonialism, and educational inequality, the analysis compares the experiences of White, Black, Indigenous, and Latina women across different historical periods. The paper argues that women’s access to higher education was not a uniform story of progress, but a contested process shaped by overlapping systems of power, exclusion, and historical inequality.
Boudour Abdalhak (Wed,) studied this question.