Racism, Medievalism, and Anglo-Saxon

Abstract

This chapter analyzes three case studies (of Bryn Mawr College, the Industrial Institute and College, and Spelman College) to demonstrate the ways that the study of Anglo-Saxon affirmed a student's connection with the racial superiority assumed by an overwhelming proportion of the white population throughout the United States at the turn to the twentieth century. Rather than simply a triumphant and progressive history of women's access to an academic specialty, the narrative of the study of Anglo-Saxon in the women's colleges interrogates the shifting, intersectional power structures of race, class, and gender that those white, largely upper-middle-class women inhabited.