Book

book cover

My first book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, was published by Oxford University Press in April 2025. You can buy it here, or access it online (if you have institutional access to the Oxford Academic platform) here.

Media and reception

Synopsis

Teaching Gender explains the construction of the male/female and hetero/homo binaries in early-twentieth-century Britain through the improbable but illuminating lens of higher education reform. In Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities were one of many institutional structures that increasingly became part of a modern state to whose conception of citizenship gender difference, the male breadwinner ideal, and heterosexuality were central. Though the state could enforce these norms through the parameters it set on the extension of the franchise or the distribution of welfare benefits, individual women and men also played active roles in creating them through the messy interactions of everyday life. Teaching Gender immerses the reader in lecture theatres, University Senate meetings, student unions, nightclubs, and halls of residence: showing how individuals’ efforts to find workable paradigms for relating to one another across gender lines took shape within specific institutional, political, and financial constraints, and in the context of a historical moment when anxiety accrued around non-normative genders and sexualities as symptomatic of wider social and political instability.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of ten colleges and universities across England and Scotland, I show that the nationalisation and centralisation of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century resulted incidentally in coeducation, over the protest of feminist activists who supported gender segregation; that students’ negotiation of cross-gender interaction in coeducational universities ultimately led them to identify heterosexuality as a seemingly less fraught paradigm than more gender-neutral conceptions of ‘corporate life’; and that single-sex men’s and women’s colleges, though increasingly marginal, became important sites for the theorisation of life paths and identities outside the heterosexual norm. Through detailed recovery both of political and financial decision-making and of the experiences and emotions of faculty, students, administrators, donors, and national politicians, I paint a vivid and resonant picture of the university campus as a key site for the transmission of norms around gender and sexuality.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I: Making the Coeducational University
Chapter 1: Inventing Higher Education for Women
Chapter 2: Efficiency, Centralization, and Integration

PART II: Gendering the Student
Chapter 3: ‘Corporate Life’
Chapter 4: Student Masculinities in Public
Chapter 5: Staging Heterosexuality

PART III: Lost Causes
Chapter 6: The Single Woman
Chapter 7: The Higher Sodomy

Epilogue: Sex on Campus