The history of girls’ education in Europe from 1700 until the present is relatively understudied despite the importance of education in forging gender roles. Phyllis
Stock’s general book on the subject, Better than Rubies, was published in 1978, well before the spate of monographs on the subject, and remains the only attempt to provide an overarching narrative. As a result, no study exists that seeks to draw together the threads of the more specialised, generally nationally oriented studies that have emerged since then. General textbooks in women’s history have sought at times to incorporate an analysis of education in their studies of women’s changing place in society, but these rarely span three centuries, tracing continuities and change. Within the English-speaking world, the weight of Anglo-American scholarship in this field has heavily contributed to setting a certain number of agendas whose pertinence has not always been examined within other national traditions. The following discussion traces the broad frameworks within which histories of girls’ education have developed while providing insights into generally lesser-known scholarship concerning continental Europe.
The early Anglo-American as well as German histories of girls’ education written between the 1960s and 1980 tended to adopt a feminist perspective, emphasising how ideological and material constraints limited women’s access to learning. In these narratives the actions of feminist foremothers challenged patriarchal attitudes towards women and gradually established networks of more serious schools for girls that offered the tools to envision careers beyond that of motherhood. As a result of this scholarship, portraits emerged of a variety of ‘grand ladies’ whose schools and writings were critical in a process of change that challenged conventional images of primarily middle-class womanhood. The focus on middle-class education was in part a product of available sources. Middle-class schools tended to generate more archival documents and the pioneering middle-class reformers - such as Emily Davies in England, the Dutch headmistress Anna Barbara Van Meerten-Schilperoort or Betty Gleim in Germany - wrote letters, petitions, reports and even diaries that allowed historians to trace the origins of their efforts, to shed insight into their network of relations and to trace their defeats as well as their successes. In many ways, this scholarship presented a ‘heroic’ image of female education where clear-sighted proto-feminists understood that a lack of learning contributed to women’s oppression, whereas access to learning led to emancipation; schooling emerged then as an important factor in the modernisation of European societies. These early histories of girls’ education established a chronology of change, where the middle decades of the nineteenth century represented a critical turning point, as the first wave of feminist organising placed education at the heart of its demands for reform. The movement from dark obscurantism to the light of wisdom and knowledge was never clear-cut and unambiguous, nor did these histories ignore how class determined access to knowledge, but the general framework was marked by the modernisation paradigm prevalent in historical scholarship at the time.
The extraordinary development of women’s and then gender history in the 1980s began to complicate the historical picture, particularly through the success of a new interpretive framework which used the nineteenth-century categories of the public and private sphere to understand women’s roles and status in a given society. This framework highlighted a different chronology of change, drew on a broader array of sources and nuanced existing interpretations about the characteristics and constraints of the private or domestic sphere. Once again this framework, which was mainly adopted by Anglo-American historians, tended to privilege middle-class women’s experience through studies of the ‘woman’s culture’ that emerged within all-female teaching institutions. In these interpretations girls’ education for domesticity acquired new meaning and was not necessarily viewed as oppressive and reactionary. On the contrary, training for motherhood was situated within a broader cultural nexus that highlighted the new, more powerful role granted to women and mothers within British protestant evangelicalism, within the German movement around Froebel, and, to a lesser degree, within French Catholicism.2 At the same time that historians argued for a more sympathetic reappraisal of early girls’ schools, Martha Vicinus showed how the women’s culture of nineteenth-century British girls’ schools gave women the skills and confidence that allowed them then to move beyond feminine ‘domestic’ spaces into the public world.3 Although the public-private paradigm has since been extensively criticised, within the history of girls’ education it offered a way to understand how the culturally conservative messages of domestic ideology within religious, pedagogic and even early feminist writings could in fact produce a heightened concern for girls’ learning thus encouraging the development of schools, the emergence of more serious curricula and a concern for better teacher-training.
The professionalisation and feminisation of the teaching corps has offered another framework to approach the history of girls’ and women’s access to learning. Once again, Anglo-American as well as German historians of education have been the most productive, rewriting studies of professionalisation initially conceived solely around male actors. By highlighting the ways women fought to pass the same exams as men, to form professional associations and to benefit from training, these studies have positioned women teachers and their schools more clearly with respect to emerging national systems of education and have argued for a need to see these systems in gendered terms. While these studies tended to follow a chronology that emphasised changes in the second half of the nineteenth century, the recent analysis of Christina de Bellaigue has argued for contextualising our understanding of the process of profes-sionalisation as she calls attention to changes within the teaching profession in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.4 Juliani Jacobi has shown how the feminisation of the teaching profession in Germany contributed to redefining the profession and pedagogy in more feminised terms.5
More generally, recent scholarship has begun to revisit the binary division between professional and amateur thus rescuing for historical investigation myriad figures of female amateurism, ranging from the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century governess to the owner of dame schools or the headmistress of boarding schools. By questioning the notion of professional and by paying heed to the ways these women laid claims to authority, these studies have redirected historical attention to the years between 1780 and 1830 when schools for girls began to proliferate. These ‘revisionist’ approaches have drawn upon a wealth of new archives, examining sources concerning specific institutions, local communities and, at times, individual men and women. Trade books, correspondences and school advertisements have received new attention, as historians examine where girls’ schools fit within a local economy.
In Catholic France and Ireland, historians of girls’ education often wrote within an anti-clerical republican interpretive framework. The story of girls’ access to better schooling was represented as a struggle between the republican meritocratic state and the retrograde anti-modern church. In France, this meant that serious education for girls only emerged in the 1880s following the Ferry laws, while in Ireland the
Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878 is considered to have provided the real breakthrough in girls’ secondary education. Drawing upon recently opened private religious archives, historians of religious orders, including myself, have begun to challenge this interpretation while recognising that the messages transmitted within religious schools, such as those of such domestic ideologues as Hannah More in England or the German J. H. Campe, were of course culturally conservative. Still, the hierarchical organisation of religious congregations, where aspiring nuns attended novitiates and acquired both spiritual and pedagogical training, at times encouraged the emergence of more rigorous standards in girls’ education, as Sarah Curtis has recently shown in her study of teaching orders in the diocese of Lyon in France.6
The cultural turn within social history, as well as the influence of postmodern and particularly Foucauldian approaches to history, have also left their mark on the ways historians have analysed girls’ education.7 Studies of women’s culture within schools bear ample testimony to how both anthropological and linguistic approaches have changed the sorts of questions historians ask as well as their use of sources. More generally, Foucault’s vision of the disciplinary nature of the modern state as well as his call to consider the relationship between power and knowledge and to understand power as operating in a diffuse fashion within all social relationships are clearly evident in many histories of girls’ education. Women historians have taken seriously the call to consider schools as the sites of a broader disciplinary project, but have also increasingly heeded the ways women within schools, be they teachers or students, modified and at times resisted the dominant cultural messages within girls’ schools. As a result, the early emphasis on studying rulebooks has been leavened to some extent by the use of such private documents as diaries, correspondences and memoirs that reveal how individuals circumvented norms. The interest in understanding the relationship between a disciplinary project and lived experiences is perhaps most evident in studies of teacher-training, such as that written by Anne Quartararo for France and Elizabeth Edward’s recent book on English normal schools.8
Scholarship on twentieth-century girls’ education is far less abundant than for earlier periods, although once again Anglo-American and northern European scholars have been quicker to extend their analyses toward the present. The decline of singlesex institutions partially explains that women historians have tended to focus on earlier periods, while studies of more contemporary educational politics and policies have not yet attracted widespread interest. Nonetheless, existing studies point in three directions that reflect the ways educational history has been influenced by other fields, notably sociology, anthropology, psychology and public policy. In recent years a spate of oral-history projects have sought to understand how women teachers and students experience the educational process and then make sense of it through their narratives. In part thanks to incitement from the European Union, there is also growing interest in female leadership and governance within educational institutions, as policy-makers address the fact that supposedly egalitarian educational systems have led to a widely feminised teaching body, notably in pre-school and elementary schools, whereas women principals and schools administrators are few and far between. Recently, interest in co-education, both its growth and its contemporary critics, has also stimulated a number of studies that bring gender scholarship on girls’ education into the twentieth century.
In the sections that follow I will present a history of girls’ and women’s education that owes a great deal to Anglo-American gender scholarship. In particular, I have been inspired by the scholarship on the public and private spheres and believe that the defence of the family in the nineteenth century and the attention paid to the role of women within the family did indeed provoke improvements in girls’ education. Nonetheless, countless studies have showed the interconnections between these two spheres and have warned about the dangers of studying them in isolation. I have come to view schools, then, as precisely one such bridging space between the two spheres. Women who opened and taught within schools operated within a very public world where money, status and influence all played a role, despite the messages transmitted within these institutions. Furthermore I take seriously the idea that knowledge represents a form of power, so that even the most reactionary learning experiences transmitted knowledge, be it simply the ability to read, that allowed certain women to challenge contemporary representations of femininity and thus contributed to changing women’s lives. Finally, I want to acknowledge the resolutely optimistic vision of the history of girls’ education that follows. Like many feminist historians, I have moved away from interpretations of women’s history that view women as pawns trapped in a patriarchal society, buffeted by the masculine forces of history, be they great white dead men who held the reins of power or the more anonymous forces of industrial capital and national state-making. Certainly, women were disadvantaged compared to men in all spheres of society and in all realms of activity, except motherhood, and their range of choices was more limited. But they did have some choices, and hence agency, which allowed them to act on the historical stage, writing and reading books, opening schools, teaching girls, communicating a vision of femininity that included an access to knowledge and the ability to reason. It is thanks in great part to these women who fought for a better education for girls that we are where we are today, able to write a history of European women that makes a difference.
World History
