The Science Education of American Girls by Kim Tolley gives an explanation of high schools in America for females. "Higher schools for females served as important centers for the dissemination of the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, institutions commonly located in small towns and in rural, rather than urban, areas. The ideology prevailed in antebellum southern institutions serving elite girls who never expected to work for wages outside the home, in northern schools that explicitly south to prepare teachers for the nation's growing common schools, and in Catholic academies on the western front."