Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 158 in the academy there is a core of understanding and commitment that will respond to academic leadership. In this sense as well as, the authors make clear that education is the intellectual equivalent of the environment, in which the implications of decisions taken today will not be fully understood for years. As such, a cautious approach to change and innovation is a warning we should be able to appreciate. While the book addresses the American experience, its contents are critically relevant to the contemporary Canadian university. There are experiences to be learned f r o m , avoided or emulated, in these pages. From the dangers of responding unthinkingly to market definitions of quality or discounting the meaning and value of undergraduate education in favour of numbers, through to the pitfalls of looking for m a n a g e m e n t solutions that are s u p e r f i c i a l l y comfortable but not rooted in the scholarly and humanistic traditions of the academy, those involved in the operation and governance of Canadian universities would be wise to reflect upon the contents of this work. If, as the authors contend, "...the greatest enemy of the good is often the perfect" (p. 271), then the greatest threat to undergraduate education in the current public debate is the sense that quality is a static institutional goal. Universities have an accumulated base of knowledge and wisdom that has consistently integrated successful innovations and approaches, and left the failed experiments behind. In this, as The Quest for Quality so eloquently demonstrates, quality does not just exist in the eye of the beholder, but is built upon proven traditions applied, refined, developed and championed by those who have dedicated their skill to university education. Stewart, Lee. "It's Up to You": Women at U.B.C. in the Early Years. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press for the U.B.C. Academic Women's Association, 1990, pp. xii, 176. Illustrations, 16 pp. Reviewed by Diana Pedersen, Department of History, Concordia University. Published by the U.B.C. Academic Women's Association, It's Up to You commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the University of British Columbia and inaugurates a new monograph series on Women and Universities. A promising beginning that bodes well for the series, Lee Stewart's examination of women at U.B.C. in the first half of the twentieth century is the strongest Canadian contribution so far to the flourishing literature on the history of Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 159 women in North American and British universities. Also part of a growing body of scholarship on the social history of higher education which has abandoned the traditional institutional focus, Stewart's history of U.B.C. turns from administrators and buildings to new areas of concern to historians, such as the curriculum and student life. Given the growing number of reports documenting the "chilly climate" for women on Canadian university campuses, and the designation of Women and Universities as a theme meriting special attention at the 1991 meeting of the Learned Societies, this is also a particularly timely book. Informed by a sophisticated grasp of the issues currently facing women in academia, Stewart's case study of women at U.B.C. clearly demonstrates the value of bring a historical perspective to contemporary problems. It's Up to You traces the origins of the present "chilly climate" to the introduction of coeducation itself. Stewart's account of the arrival of women at U.B.C. challenges the popular notion that the introduction of co-education in public universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented a commitment to the ideal of equality and to the education of women. No triumph for feminism, co-education without segregation was merely the cheapest way the institution could find to accommodate women's demands for equal access and opportunity. In fact, Stewart concludes that the notion of the university as a cultural entitlement, contained in the literal translation of the U.B.C. motto, Tuum Est, as "it is yours," has always been applicable to male, rather than female, students. The popular translation, "it's up to you," in her view, conveys both the "shrug of indifference" (p. 129) that greeted the arrival of women and the onus placed on women to adapt and defend their own interests in a male-defined institution. Following a difficult twenty-five year struggle, U.B.C. was founded in 1915 both to serve the needs of a middle class that viewed higher education as a means of achieving its goals and to train men for the needs of a resource economy. In this context, the task of promoting w o m e n ' s interests and defending their place in the new institution was taken up by the skilled strategists and vocal lobbyists of organizations such as the Local Council of Women and the University Women's Club. Stewart's account of the role played by B.C. clubwomen in defining women's education until well into the 1950's, provides new and significant insights into the workings of women's networks and into the relationship between w o m e n ' s education and the w o m e n ' s movement in the Canadian context. Despite U.B.C.'s promise to make "full provision" (p. 12) for the admission of w o m e n , Stewart argues that the nature of their e d u c a t i o n r e m a i n e d Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 160 problematic and tended to be shaped by pragmatic considerations and larger institutional imperatives rather than by any commitment to women's equality or to expanded employment opportunities for women. This pattern is documented in two case studies of the introduction of nursing and home economics programs. In 1919, U.B.C. created a department of nursing, thereby becoming the first university in the British Empire to combine hospital training with a degree program. Stewart attributes the university's enthusiasm for this initiative, despite a difficult financial situation and opposition from doctors, to "the need of hospital administrators to create a hierarchy within nursing, rather than a desire in the u n i v e r s i t y to a d v a n c e the status of w o m e n or w o m e n ' s w o r k " (p. 3 5 ) . In addition, a nursing program could usefully serve to overcome public hostility to large financial grants by demonstrating that the university could provide practical solutions to social problems, in this case the shortage of nurses in the province. By contrast, the establishment of a home economics program, which lacked male support and any obvious benefit to the university, necessitated a sustained campaign by local clubwomen that produced no results until 1942, when the university once again yielded to the demands of expediency. A home economics program was a response both to critics who accused the university of elitism and to administrative concerns about post-war expansion and the accommodation of returning veterans. By the end of the war, dietetics majors found themselves recruited to operate the dining services in campus residences as part of their instruction. During the early years at U.B.C., Stewart argues, women actively attempted both to modify the male environment in which they found themselves and to redress the imbalance in co-education that favoured male priorities. Women students, allied with the University Women's Club and the B.C. women's network, successfully campaigned for institutional supports in the form of a Dean of Women and residences for women students. But once again, these concessions reflected additional administrative imperatives and implied a symbolic rather than a genuine commitment to women. In hiring its first Dean of Women in 1921, the university was relieved of responsibility for the welfare of women students and at the same time acquired an inexpensive English instructor to teach the separate women's English classes that were spurned by male professors. Stewart sees the office of the Dean of Women as "both a conservative and a progressive response to the ambiguous status of women on campus" (p. 78), progressive in giving women a voice but conservative in reinforcing their separate status. In the case of U.B.C., the first women to serve in this capacity were given little institutional support but managed to make the Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 161 office effective through force of personality and the strong backing of B.C. women's organizations. The early Deans of Women played an important role in the long struggle to obtain residences for women students, who were clearly disadvantaged because they earned less than men in the summer months and because university policy prevented female, but not male, students from rooming together in unsupervised accommodation. This campaign ultimately proved successful in 1951, but only when demobilization following the war brought the situation to a head, forcing the university to accommodate the returning veterans, including women. Having demonstrated that catering to the needs of women was not a high priority for U.B.C., Stewart devotes two chapters, constituting the strongest section of the book, to an analysis of how "boys' rules" and "girls' rules" shaped the educational experience of women students. In a context of public uncertainty about the importance and purpose of higher education for women, female students encountered hostility and indifference and continually found it necessary to justify the social usefulness of their education. Ultimately the onus was on women students to accommodate themselves both philosophically and practically to the requirements of an institution whose historic function was to educate men. The cult of the campus beauty contest symbolised women's attempts to make this accommodation by conforming to the prevailing social expectations about femininity which, by the 1930s and 1940s, were increasingly linked to "sex appeal." In their extracurricular activities, however, women were no longer obligated to play by the "boys' rules," and in a sensitive treatment of the social and organizational life of women students, Stewart identifies the strategies they employed to reconcile the contradictory pressures they faced. Examining the Women's Undergraduate Society, sororities and campus clubs, women's sports, and an unsuccessful campaign for a Women's Union Building, Stewart documents the difficult struggle of women students to gain academic credibility while conforming to the prevailing image of femininity. In their extracurricular activities, where they played by their own rules, women students created an environment that fostered female solidarity and provided women with power, respect, and recognition. The thematic approach taken in this book allows Stewart to explore in a skillful and sensitive fashion some important aspects of women's experience in the early years of the history of U.B.C. Despite the promise of the title, however, the experiences of all women at U.B.C. are not addressed, and the reader is left puzzled by the omission of any discussion of female faculty and support staff. Given the parallels that Stewart convincingly draws in her strong Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 162 conclusion between the experiences of women at U.B.C. in the early years and the present day "chilly climate" for academic women, it is not clear why this study ends with the period following the Second World War. It would be interesting, and surely relevant, to know whether the introduction of women's studies courses in the early 1970s followed the pattern that Stewart has documented in the cases of nursing and home economics. Stewart's tantalizing study leaves the reviewer wanting to know more about the later period in which the Dean of Women came to be regarded as an anachronism, the names of women prominent in the early history of the university were forgotten, and the record of earlier lengthy debates over how best to achieve an equal education for women was obliterated. As a former undergraduate student in the first interdisciplinary w o m e n ' s studies course offered at U.B.C., I remember participating in enthusiastic critiques of women's education in a context where I and my classmates were ignorant of the history of women in our own institution and had little knowledge of their earlier struggles to define an equal education for women. Fortunately, because of studies such as this one, today's students will not be condemned to a similar ignorance. It's Up to You is an important contribution to contemporary debates about the issue of women in Canadian universities, and clearly has implications that extend far beyond the boundaries of one campus. Axelrod, Paul. Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada During the Thirties. Montreal & Kingston: McGill Q u e e n ' s University Press, 1 9 9 0 , 2 6 9 p p . P r i c e : $ 3 4 . 9 5 . R e v i e w e d by N a n c y M . S h e e h a n , University of British Columbia. Making a Middle Class is a breakthrough in the historiography of Canadian higher education. For the most part, the history of higher education in Canada has focussed on histories of single institutions. Axelrod's study is a sign that this is changing. It is also a study of students, as opposed to the more traditional university history that concentrated on administration and perhaps a few colourful professors. Axelrod's contribution, however, goes further with explicit attention to an underlying theory - a theory in three parts. First, it bases the examination of the history of student life in Canada on a multi-institutional front using "middle class" as its organizing construct. Second, it does so with the theory of a three class system (working, middle, and