Students: A Gendered History

From the privileged youth depicted in Evelyn Waugh's novel,Brideshead Revisited,to the scruffy denizens of "Scumbag University" in the 1980s cult television comedy series,The Young Ones, representations of the university undergraduate have been decidedly male. But from the 1970s the proportion of women students in universities in the UK rose sharply and has continued to rise so that female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts. In this compelling and stimulating book, Carol Dyhouse explores the gendered social history of students in modern Britain, focussing on access, ambitions and the troubled politics of co-education in institutions formerly dominated by single sex colleges and segregated opportunities for men and women.

Carol Dyhouse if Professor of History at the University of Sussex.