Most of the Ivies were much more academically rigorous in the past. There were no ideological, unrigorous majors like Sociology or Gender Studies. Graduates were expected to read both Greek and Latin.
Those divinity students at a good school in the 1800s were incredibly smart and erudite. Even if you think theology is wrong or silly, it doesn’t mean the people were silly.
Weirdly, I don’t think society and the role of gender in it are worthless topics of study, and I don’t think intellectual rigor should be measured primarily by knowledge of the languages that form the roots of the non-Germanic portion of English.
While I'm equally skeptical of certain modern majors, I'm not convinced that just because the "educated Western man" (and, yes, we're mostly talking men) of the 19th century were expected to be well-versed in certain subjects doesn't mean there aren't better options for many today.
Almost all of those men went on to marry women who were also very well-educated on the classics. Education was about social class much more than gender.
The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.
From what I see, that was mostly a Victorian era thing. Not sure about earlier--though there were certainly tutors for the upper class. Certainly, in general, women weren't learning classical languages in universities until female colleges became fairly common in the US and Britain.
Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented, so you can't exactly infer an absence of education from the absence of evidence.
What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.
An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.
Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.
> Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented
There are plenty of female diarists. Court cases often delved into women’s lives. Women belonged to institutions like convents that kept records.
The real gaps in documentation aren’t based on gender but class. Not entirely clear what medieval peasants did with their time.
But even then, inquisitions kept meticulous records and regularly investigated small towns. Women were questioned as often as men.
Modern historians (pre-1970s) may have been less interested in women’s lives, but they weren’t necessarily less documented.
Edit: another big gap in records is from the wars of the 20th century. WWII and the wars of the 1990s destroyed “the record” in large parts of eastern europe.
Musical education absolutely, which in the days before recorded music was a relatively widespread and practical undertaking. I assume that private tutoring in classical subjects for upper class women was, if not the norm, probably not rare. And we do know of some examples like Ada Lovelace.
>they were a men's club for a shockingly long time
But, yeah. A lot of elite universities had a rather small percentage of women well into the latter half of the 20th century. Those that have larger numbers was often because there were sister female schools like Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Dartmouth College didn't start admitting women until the 1970s.
I forgot to add this, and it still seems relevant: before the industrial revolution (the Victorian era), education in the West was pretty rare in general for members of both genders, and very much the privilege of the upper classes.
