Reviews in American History

Historians of religion and higher education have naturally gravitated to the nineteenth century as a period that helps explain how an essentially medieval institution available mostly to a small number of elite men in 1800 became a common experience for many Americans, especially women, in the twentieth century. Since the establishment of higher education in North America, colleges had been contending with a secularizing society with increasingly liberal interpretations of religious doctrines. In response, administrators at Protestant colleges generally relaxed requirements for religious participation on campus in the late nineteenth century and began to focus on cultivating a service ethic among their graduates instead of instilling conversion-based religious orthodoxy. This coincided with a broader transition away from classical models of a liberal arts college to a coeducational, utilitarian, German-inspired university system where faculty conducted research instead of monitoring student behavior.

Two recent works examine the impact of modernist religious thought on American colleges and universities while highlighting the stories and contributions of often-overlooked groups. Andrea L. Turpin's book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917, surveys institutional changes at mostly northern and midwestern colleges, highlighting the role of women as educators, administrators, and students in liberalizing and repurposing higher education. In American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940, Thomas W. Simpson explains how the exiled Mormon population remained conflicted about secularized [End Page 253] education. While some Mormon men and women embraced the new educational and religious model as students and educators, many religious elders balked at the growing heterodoxy. Collectively, Simpson's and Turpin's books illustrate the challenges of questioning traditional religious authority. Both accentuate, to varying degrees, the contributions that women have made in modernizing the academy and society. Between the two, Simpson more thoroughly documents the direct impact of students on the operation and ideology of college campuses in the half-century after the Civil War.

Turpin's meticulously researched monograph, A New Moral Vision, concentrates on the responses to modernization of ten "nationally influential institutions" and "representatives of leading women's colleges": Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Princeton, Harvard, Evelyn, Radcliffe, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Michigan, and California (p. 6). Turpin's scope represents a balance of extensively studied elite colleges and women's colleges in order to show "what we [historians] have missed in plain sight" (p. 6). Therefore, she admittedly excludes "southern, Catholic, historically black" institutions, and those "that retained an evangelical (or, later, fundamentalist) identity long into the twentieth century" (p. 7).

A New Moral Vision contains several main arguments surrounding the intersection of gender, religion, and higher education. Turpin fashions an alternative vocabulary for thinking of the changes to religion and educational policy beginning in the late nineteenth century. In this idea of "relational spirituality," an older, stricter, conversion-based understanding of Christianity is dubbed "vertical spirituality" since the focus of religion is between the individual and a deity above in heaven, and the newer service-oriented Christianity is "horizontal spirituality" since the emphasis is on altruism and relationships between people (pp. 17–18). She argues persuasively that this terminology helps prevent readers from fallaciously assuming that modernist Christianity entailed a total lack of religious belief and practice among students. Turpin also argues that modernist, horizontally focused institutions arranged their curricula and broader moral messages according to gender roles more specifically than traditional schools. Turpin maintains that the elite male colleges that refused to accept women after the Civil War, such as Princeton and Harvard, insisted that their purpose was to train highly successful people, who just happened to be men. This argument suffers from a dearth of evidence in analyzing the language of masculinity in only a small...