In Torches of Light, Ann Short Chirhart uses the stories of white and black Georgia teachers from the 1920s through the 1940s to examine the role played by educators in preparing Georgians for the coming of the modern South. For most of these groups, liberation did not denote an overturning of the system, but rather their inclusion within it. The four works examined here focus primarily on the efforts of immigrants, African Americans, and women to use education to broaden their own opportunities and pry open the door to full citizenship rights. While disenfranchised groups often tried to use education as a form of liberation from grueling farm or factory labor, the nation's elite often viewed schools as places that would reinscribe the dominant society's race, class, and gender roles, perhaps creating an even more efficient working class and peaceful domestic sphere. Groups historically denied access to the full benefits of first-class citizenship in the United States viewed schools as the pathway to accessing the American dream. society, and the place of people of color in the United States throughout its history. (Mar.Touted as the gateway to a better life, schools have been the focal point of debates over the process of Americanization, the role of women in U.S. Although what's best for girls continues to be controversial, DeBare presents a workmanlike but cogent history of how single-sex schools have survived and thrived. By the end of the 1990s, girls' schools, which two decades earlier had 'seemed headed for extinction,' were enjoying a revival, DeBare notes.

The historical account gives way to a psychological and sociological report, as DeBare treats psychologists Richard Kraft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis, who cast 'a shadow over the kinds of romantic female relationships that had been accepted as normal through most of the 1800s.' Then there's groundbreaking Carol Gilligan and Myra and David Sadker, along with AAUW (American Association of University Women) studies that would 'ultimately change the entire image and mission of girls' schools' by teaching educators about girls' psychological development and unearthing sex discrimination in coed schools. She also covers public, Catholic and African-American girls' schools, finding similarities and differences. Beginning with the early 19th century, 'when educating women was a gutsy act,' DeBare traces the evolution of girls' schools from middle-class to elite institutions, with particular attention to Emma Willard (a prominent early- and mid–19th-century advocate of girls' education) and to Clara Spence, Lucy Madeira and Miss Sarah Porter (founders of eponymous schools). Journalist DeBare offers a combination general history of girls' schools in America and the particular history of cofounding an all-girls middle school in Oakland, Calif.

Where Girls Come First by Ilana DeBare