The Insider

Reviews / Votes

Nancy Woloch's deeply researched, beautifully written biography of Virginia Gildersleeve reveals a complicated figure: a fighter for equal rights who greatly expanded opportunities for educated women at home and abroad, but also a defender of her class and tribe who repeatedly compromised her egalitarian ideals. -- Rosalind Rosenberg, author of <i>Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray</i> I liked this book as soon as I read the introduction. Its strong, confident tone and willingness to confront head on the challenges of writing about Virginia Gildersleeve's life and place in history demonstrated one of the main things I look for in a biography: a good match between biographer and subject. -- Susan Ware, author of <i>Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote</i> Nancy Woloch has written as good a biography of an American academic leader as we have. She offers a cool-handed analysis of how Virginia Gildersleeve managed her relations with Columbia, with her own board of trustees, and with her faculty for more than thirty-six years. She handles Gildersleeve's private life with sensitivity and addresses her ideological blind spots with candor. In all, a serious contribution to the history of higher education and to women's history. -- Robert A. McCaughey, author of <i>A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard</i> In this judicious biography, Gildersleeve emerges as a complicated figure. A resilient administrator, internationalist, and promoter of women's higher education, she also restricted Barnard's admission of Jews and Blacks and was briefly pro-Nazi. By deftly treating her subject's intimate relationships with two women, Woloch brings Gildersleeve's private life into focus. -- Helen L. Horowitz, author of <i>Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s</i>