Bending the Future to Their Will

Book excerpt: This lively and thought-provoking collective biography uncovers the contributions of past women educators who promoted a distinctive vision of citizenship education. A distinguished group of scholars, including editors Margaret Smith Crocco and O. L. Davis, Jr., consider the lives and perspectives of eleven women educators and social activists—Jane Addams, Mary Sheldon Barnes, Mary Ritter Beard, Rachel Davis DuBois, Hazel Hertzberg, Alice Miel, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Bessie Pierce, Lucy Maynard Salmon, Hilda Taba, and Marion Thompson Wright—concerned over the last century with issues of difference in schools and society. This volume's reconstruction of "hidden history" reveals the importance of these women to contemporary debate about gender, pluralism, and education in a democracy. Characterized by views of education that were constructivist, customized, and transformative, their lives and ideas present an alternative model to dominant conceptualizations of education—one sensitive to the demands of pluralism within civil education long before the present-day debates about multiculturalism.