Abolishing female colleges
That didn't happen. They're not abolished and they didn't die after WWII. The peak was supposedly
around 1960, at 230 (I saw 261 somewhere, but close enough) or so.** Yes, there are fewer and fewer, but when I was in college (long after WWII, tyvm - by 45 years or so), there were many girls' schools still - Smith*, Wellesley*, Sweet Briar*, Mount Holyoke*, Hollins*, Barnard*, St. Catherine's (St. Kate's)*, Scripps*, Spelman*, Bryn Mawr*, Wesleyan (College, not University)*, Mary Baldwin (admitted residential men first in 2017), Radcliffe (until 1999) - I've seen ## today stated as 26-35, not sure why the range from recent data, but at least a couple dozen. As ever, they tend to be small, private, and pricey, many are selective, and there are many more on the East Coast then other parts of the country, but they exist.
* still women's colleges, though of course many are partnered/affiliated and many co-learn with men's schools.
** all-male college numbers peaked in the several hundreds (in the 19th c, iirc, though women couldn't even go until around 1835-37 (depending
on your source)), and all-male colleges are down to just 3-5, depending on criteria
Btw, why did all-male schools go co-ed? Pure
competition, as men were turning down single-sex opportunities in favor of coed:
In the United States, coeducation happened because it was in the strategic self-interest of all-male institutions like Princeton and Yale to admit women. By the late 1960s, these schools were beginning to see their applications decline, along with their yields. The high school students they called the “best boys” no longer wanted to go to all-male institutions, and the key issue was their ability to continue to attract those “best boys.” (Harvard had begun to pull away from Princeton and Yale in the competition for the best high school students.) Coedu- cation became the means for places like Princeton and Yale to shore up a first-rate applicant pool and enrolled student body. It was not the result of a high-minded moral commitment to opening educational opportunities to women, nor was it the result of deep thinking about how to educate women. Rather, it was about what women could do for previously all-male institutions—about how women would help these schools renew their hold on the “best boys.”