Negotiating Social Contexts: Identities of Biracial College Women. Andra M. Basu. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, 2007; xi + 79 pages; ISBN 13: 978-1-59311-596-8; $39.99US (paper). Challenged by Coeducation: Women's Colleges since the 1960s. Leslie Miller-Bernal and Susan L. Poulson, Eds. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006, xii + 418 pages; ISBN 0-8265-1542-8; $26.95US (paper).

The study of wom en's lives in college continues to be characterized by examinations of identity, context, and history. In differing ways Negotiating Social Contexts, a study of individual transformation, and Challenged by Coeducation, a survey of institutional evolution, succeed in elucidating a deeper understanding of the com plexities wom en in higher education continue to face, despite the progress that been m ade in the last forty years.
In Negotiating Social Contexts, Basu offers a revealing picture of the lives of biracial college wom en. Through a m ixed-m ethods qualitative study of 14 biracial wom en attending an urban college in the Northeast United States, Basu utilized individual interviews, focus groups, and written narrative data to reconstruct the nuanced experiences of her participants. She pays special attention to fam ily, peer group, and educational social contexts to understand the ways biracial wom en m ake m eaning of their racial identities, both for themselves and in relation to the ways these identities are constructed and reflected back to them by others. At tim es persuasively confident, and at others cautiously tentative, the voices of the wom en in her study help the reader to understand the com plexities of claim ing one identity as prim ary, both identities as a meaningful am algam, or a third construct, "biracial," as their foundational sense of identity. Barriers to a full sense of belonging in either of their fam ilial cultures are also examined, and the im plications of all this for educational practice are also briefly explored.
By contrast, Miller-Bernal and Poulson's artfully edited volum e turns the spotlight on institutional culture and its im pact on American and British women collegians in the late twentieth century. Prior to the social tumult of the 1960s, high-achieving American wom en with a sense of intellectual purpose, as well as less motivated daughters of the moneyed classes hoping merely to enter into a m eaningful m arital arrangement with a young m an of the Ivy league, attended women's colleges, which then numbered in the hundreds. Today, fewer than 70 remain,

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inviting consideration of the factors that led to such a precipitous decline in interest in and comm itment to women's education. Miller-Bernal and Poulson's treatise begins with the plaintive exhortation, "women's colleges are an endangered species." The essays included in the volume exam ine the social, institutional and econom ic factors leading to the current state of affairs. Case studies of those institutions that have weathered the coeducational trend, and those that have bravely endured the potential perils of becom ing coeducational or being absorbed by neighboring universities, offer a candid assessment of all that matters about delivering "wom en's education."
The argum ent in both books centers around presum ed uniqueness of the female collegiate experience, and the developmental and intellectual milestones reached by wom en that require the nurturance of a specific social architecture. From the ground level, Basu's work gives voice to the com plexity of living as a border-straddler, both within and outside of two cultures sim ultaneously, in constant negotiation of belonging and visibility. Biracial wom en in this study have sought an enhanced sense of belonging in the cultural milieu of the urban college, gaining benefits from expanded peer support, identity-infused coursework, and the opportunity to both m entor and be m entored in their emergent and sometim es fluctuating racial identities.
The contem porary Am erican wom en's college likewise places a prem ium on connected learning, the centrality of relatable fem ale role models, and rigorous intellectual examination of social forces that contribute to the perpetuation of sexism. For that reason, it is argued, these colleges offer women a superior education, one that encompasses the whole person. Many of the institutions described in Miller-Bernal and Poulson's book, pushed to the brink of existence by the fashionable resistance to institutions constituted by feminism , are thus also navigating the borderland between single-sex and coeducational institutional worlds. In the lives of both biracial wom en and those of contemporary women's colleges, the path to

agency and a self-defined identity is marked by both challenge and triumph.
W hile both texts enlighten our understanding, notable omissions lim it what we might glean from them. Basu's choice to focus on the fam ily relationships and high school experiences of the wom en in her study limits the extent to which we can properly understand what it is specifically about the college context that has been both supportive of and challenging to biracial wom en. Devoting only two and a half pages to the cam pus and its im pact on the women in her study, Basu leaves fem inist educators with little food for thought about the ways in which design would aid biracial women in their self-discovery process. Miller-Bernal and Poulson's work includes only those institutions which have maintained a strong material commitment to educating women, providing important insight about how wom en's colleges can be successfully transformed and can persevere, but leaving little understanding of how women's colleges that have become coeducational may have failed in maintaining their commitment to women. Similarly, attention to lingering concerns about racial, class, and ethnic diversity at the most selective women's colleges are not addressed in this work. Additionally, the sole focus on Am erican and British University contexts may render their study less meaningful to readers in other national contexts.
Minor shortcomings aside, both Basu's study and Miller-Bernal and Poulson's edited book make significant contributions to our understanding of what values, priorities and experiences assist wom en in achieving a fully integrated sense of self. Not surprisingly, tenaciousness, carefully cultivated relationships, and creativity typify both the ways that biracial women navigate a sometimes-unfriendly world, and the ways that many American wom en's colleges are continuing to thrive and adapt with style and with guts. Both works remind us that while the provision of a decidedly fem inist college experience continues to be an uphill effort in today's educational m arketplace, the rewards of doing so, for the advancement of all

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women, continue to be worth the toil.
Susan Marine Harvard University
Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives. Elizabeth M. Smyth and Paula Bourne, editors. Toronto: Inanna, 2006; illustrations; 236pp; ISBN 0-9736709-3-2; $24.95 (paper).
Despite the subtitle "Historical Perspectives," W omen Teaching, W omen Learning's historical focus is lim ited alm ost exclusively to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. The two exceptions are Marjorie Theobald's examination of the legal contexts for early twentieth-century Australian teachers and Inga Elgqvist-Salzm an's article on a nineteenth-century Swedish teacher. Even Susan Mann's article on nineteenth-century Canadian women who travelled to Europe focuses on how those women "harnessed travel to a domestic agenda" (179). Eventually, I developed an appreciation for the volume's tight historical focus, but still wish that the subtitle were more precise.
The volume's strength lies in the subtle persuasions of feminist social history m ethodologies. W hat often begins as the biography of one or two women builds, in essay after essay, to consider wider social and political implications of wom en's educational and employment opportunities in shifting ideological contexts, with a strong recurring argument for women's active roles in shaping those ideologies rather than simply working within them. This is particularly true of Rebecca Coulter's fine analysis of Donalda Dickie's role in curriculum developm ent.
I can't help but feel I have been charm ed, at least in part, by Alison Prentice, the educator and historian to whom this volume is dedicated and whose influence is evident throughout. Diane Hallman and Anna Lathrop take up Prentice's work most explicitly. They write, "Prentice held that the close examination of individual scholarly wom en shed light on com m onalities and

controversies in the relatively brief history of wom en in higher education and the professoriate" (45). Hallman and Lathrop turn Prentice's attention to women of "scholarly passion" to two more women, Irene Poelzer and Mary Hamilton, who took her educational projects outdoors. They conclude that the academy is but one site of scholarly engagement for women, and one that is always inform ed by institutional practices and contexts that may not be in the best interests of wom en. Alison Mackinnon's essay on the attitudes and opportunities of women who attended elite, wom en's colleges in the 1950s explores the historical and intellectual milieu that nurtured Prentice herself. Despite the decade's hackneyed reputation for conservatism, Mackinnon argues that the 1950s were also "the tim e when significant numbers of women first fully engaged in the changing and confusing struggle to be both intellectual beings and fem inine selves" (209).
There are a couple of issues that could have been pushed further. Coulter's fleeting analysis of Dickie's positive although "somewhat sentimental and anglicized" representation of Aboriginal peoples in her textbooks is likely worthy of a separate discussion (32). Moreover, some contributions are m arred by an unfortunate tendency to take wom en's words at face value. Mann, for example, insists that travelling women's diaries were "free of the exigencies of editor, publisher or even reader" (179). Diaries have not always been strictly "private" documents, nor have the boundaries between public and private been either im perm eable or ideologically neutral. Despite her rejection of post-modern and post-colonial "invasions" into women's travel writing, Mann's own analyses of travelling wom en who "m oved about quite com fortably within an empire, a class, a gender...[and] showed little inclination to explore, m uch less step beyond those confines... [because] they did not see them as confines" evinces Simon Gikandi's "complicity/resistance dialectic" articulated in Maps of Englishness.
Overall the volume's focus on larger ideological contexts, at work either at the

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