Women and Education: Equity or Equality

This collection represents an evolving generation of scholarship
on the role and position of women in education. The political
rhetoric of the early 1970s served well the purpose of marshalling
forces against sexism; perhaps now we can move on to more
fundamental scholarship and to seek solutions to the problems that
have been so well identified. An examination of the problems and
issues confronting females in education reveals sets of interwoven
variables and situations, some which fit neatly within one model or
theory, and some which appear to have no best fit. Many variables
often describe situations or elemen~s that result from an interaction
or interplay between persons, events, and situations. It is obvious
that throughout the literature not enough attention has been paid to
conceptual development or to the application and testing of
theoretical constructs. So elementary is this step to the proper
analysis of social change that one is shocked by the failure of social
scientists who have made so little serious effort to develop true
conceptual models applicable to the processes evident within the
feminist movement, particularly with regard to the educational
status of women.