The most dramatic and widespread changes in European girls’ education occurred after 1830 in the wake of other social, economic and political changes. Industrialisation and the growth of a tertiary sector in the economy generated a need for more workers with different skills than those required to run a family farm or to darn wool. Urbanisation changed the face of European cities, providing new opportunities for women schoolteachers to open schools that addressed more varied needs than the early charity schools or the elite boarding school. The democratisation of European societies produced a rhetoric about the need to form citizens, the mothers of future citizens and then women citizens themselves; this rhetoric then was accompanied by an expansion of educational systems that led to the provision of more schools for girls. Finally, the forces of imperialism encouraged European countries to pursue their civilising mission beyond the home soil into the ‘uncivilised world’; for women this meant setting up schools for girls throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia. As more women acquired access to learning, their range of opportunities also increased and yet the available vocational choices for active women in this period before the First World War remained quite limited. The new industrial jobs tended to restrict women to those tasks that resembled traditionally feminine occupations, those that required manual dexterity, relatively little physical force and repetitive movement. In the final quarter of the century, the service sector mainly welcomed women as office workers and sales clerks. Access to more schooling and, at times, qualifying degrees rarely opened doors into anything more than teaching and caring jobs. As a result, for the years under consideration here, girls’ education expanded, but it remained very focused on producing ‘good’ girls and women, whose place was first and foremost within the family. The relative success of this education for motherhood can be traced to a wide variety of factors, and its most vocal champions can be found in a burgeoning ‘domestic’ literature often inflected with religious overtones.
Domestic ideology in nineteenth-century Europe
Man must be formed for the country’s institutions; woman must be formed for man, as he has evolved. Our natural state and dignity are as wives and mothers.
(Mme de Remusat, 1824)
The expression ‘domestic ideology’ is used to describe the set of ideas that emphasised women’s ‘special’ qualities - their sensitivity, their emotionalism, their maternal instincts - all those attributes that meant their ‘natural’ place was in the family. But domestic ideology did more than just position women within the home, it also proclaimed the importance of the home and family within society, thus enhancing the role of women and opening a wedge in a potentially repressive ideology if carried to its extreme. Domestic ideology generally went hand in hand with a certain set of religious values that emphasised woman’s necessary subordination, but also her purer and more religious nature, which Coventry Patmore captured in his four-volume verse narrative Angel in the House (1854-62). While this ideology probably achieved its greatest eloquence and impact in Great Britain, variants can be found throughout Europe, in part thanks to the translation of pedagogical, literary and religious texts, as well as the circulation of people and ideas. Encouraging women to think about themselves in relationship to the family is often seen as a primarily middle-class phenomenon since lower-class women all had to work. Still, there is ample evidence that the messages of domestic ideology were also directed towards working-class women, be it in schools, in churches or in encounters with charitable or philanthropic ladies. For women, the messages of this ideology were conservative, and they emerged in societies that sought to respond to the upheavals caused by political and economic transformations: the twin effects of revolutionary ideals and industrialisation. Reconstituting a stronger, more moral family appealed to many across ideological lines. And yet, by granting women authority within the family, the champions of domesticity often developed a discourse that unwittingly encouraged women to think about and move beyond the private sphere. Specifically, they all called for more serious girls’ education so that women might better fulfil their roles within the family. Once girls tasted the fruits of learning this carried a certain number of them to call for roles outside the family as well, thus challenging the premises of this domestic ideology.
Male and female authors trumpeted the virtues of domestic life throughout Europe, spreading this ideal in moral tales, poems, etiquette manuals, pedagogical treatises, schoolbooks and even gardening manuals, such as John Loudon’s The Suburban Gardener (1838). In England, Sarah Ellis was the best-known ideologue of domesticity who, in Women of England: Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839), emphasised women’s responsibility to regenerate society from within. Similar messages were repeated in the writings of the French history professor Louis Aime-Martin or the Swiss pedagogue Adrienne Necker de Saussure. Aime-Martin’s De I’education des meres de famille, ou de la civilisation du genre humain par les femmes (The Education of Mothers; or, the Civilization of Mankind by Women) (1834) went through nine editions in the following thirty years and was quickly translated into English. Like many such writers, he positioned women within the family, but argued for their influence throughout society:
The influence of women is extended over the whole of our lives; a mistress, a wife, a mother - three magic words which comprise the sum of human felicity. . . On the maternal bosom the mind of nations reposes; their manners, prejudices, and virtues - in a word the civilisation of the human race all depend upon maternal influence.30
Necker de Saussure’s influential pedagogical treatise developed similar reasoning and offered a plan of study for girls from infancy to old age that included intellectual study but also physical exercise and womanly talents, such as drawing and singing, to develop a girl’s soul and to train her eyes and ears. More overtly religious than many of her contemporaries, she was suspicious of the dangers of the world: ‘society... is all that seduces, all that intoxicates, all that draws thoughts away from God and duties’. As a result, she positioned women in private life but believed that the public and private spheres were inextricably intertwined:
Concerns of general interest occupy men; they defend the entire family, the city, the nation, society. On the contrary, women are responsible for individual interests or those that fall within a more restricted circle. . . Poor or rich, married or free, women have influence on private life, the happiness of families depends largely on them. We speak about private life in opposition with political life and public functions for we have no intention to restrict women’s actions to their household. On the contrary we believe they are destined to produce good widely, but their influence is always along similar lines. They speak to individual souls, their advice concerns the individual and the relations he entertains with those around him. As a result there is constant action and reaction between public and private life and it is this interaction which allows civilisations to progress along two lines. For while outside movement constantly brings new wisdom into families, these families can offer an example of the most perfect organization, the least subject to vices of all sorts. In this fashion a more perfectly understood domestic administration would spread its purifying influence through a thousand different channels into society.31
In addition to individual authors whose texts were frequently reprinted, magazines flourished as well, directed to both mothers and their daughters. In England, mothers could consult The Magazine for Domestic Economy (1835), in France, La Mere insti-tutrice (The Mother Educator) (1834-45) while in the Netherlands Barbara van Meerten published many pedagogical texts. These works all emphasised women’s special role within the family, while also at times expressing more overtly feminist arguments, often centred on the need to provide women with more serious education in the event that they should need to work. In Germany, this more feminist tone was evident in the Leipzig journalist and author Louise Otto’s journal, the Frauen-Zeitung (Woman’s Newspaper) which appeared between 1849 and 1852. The revolutionary context of 1848 stimulated, of course, a wide-ranging criticism of women’s position in society. Women needed ‘intellectual elevation’, the newspaper argued, to teach mothers their ‘most exalted duties and to counteract the prejudices that bind us. . . the family must become strong. . . for the reform of the entire nation depends on the reform of the family’.32
This expression of what historians have termed maternalist feminism would develop strongly in the second half of the century and undoubtedly represented an important strand in European women’s efforts to improve girls’ education and women’s lot in society. Alongside such pronouncements, however, other voices also used domestic ideology to limit women’s range of activities and to naturalise their position within the home. Be it the misogynist statement by the French socialist Proudhon that woman’s place was either as a housewife or a harlot, or the Pope’s elevation of the status of the Virgin Mary in his encyclical letter Urbi primum (1849), many mid-nineteenth century men and women believed that women’s natural frailty, combined with their maternal instincts, necessarily limited their range of actions. Domestic ideology cut both ways.
Schooling for the lower classes: the civilising mission at home
Although only middle-class women would have had the time, the money and the cultural ability to read the magazines and treatises discussed previously, the tenets of domestic ideology influenced the provision of schooling for the lower classes. In part this is because middle-class men and women were active in efforts to bring lower-class girls into schoolrooms, so they might acquire the rudiments of education, but also learn how to be better wives and mothers. In many respects, the concern to educate both boys and girls was part of a far broader civilising process that involved inculcating
Values and behaviour involving self-restraint, respect for hierarchy, the importance of hard work and thrift and, for girls, modesty, piety and gentleness. These values were integrated into elementary systems that increasingly became both compulsory and free, thus affecting most children between the ages of six and thirteen.
The motley variety of early modern charity schools, Sunday schools and religious free schools continued to exist in the nineteenth century, but the general trend was for private initiatives to give way to public elementary schools that were incorporated into national systems of education. While boys’ schools were generally the initial focus of state legislation, little by little girls were included in the systematisation of provisions for schooling that took place, be it through their inclusion in mixed-sex schools or through the creation of girls’ schools. The German states were precocious in this movement; as early as 1794 the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht (General Code) decreed ‘The instruction in school must be continued until the child is known to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being’, and by the latter half of the century all German states decreed compulsory schooling for both sexes from age six or seven to fourteen. Such compulsory schooling also existed in Protestant Denmark as early as 1814. The strength of the voluntary system in England meant that the state did relatively little to establish uniformity; compulsory school attendance only emerged in 1880, but there were efforts to improve the quality of schooling through funding and payment by results.33 In France, the Falloux law of 1850 required communes of 800 inhabitants to open elementary schools for girls seventeen years after the Guizot law (1833) first created a public elementary system for boys; schooling only became compulsory, free and secular with the Ferry laws of the early 1880s. Similarly, in Italy, elementary education became compulsory in 1877, but the law was not enforced, particularly in the south. Still, by 1907, 93 per cent of all school-age children attended schools. In Spain, primary schools for girls remained primarily vocational and a majority of girls did not attend school.
The spread of education for lower-class girls probably did not dramatically change the content of schooling received in charity or religious schools, but it did mean that states increasingly insisted that both boys and girls should know the rudiments; religion and needlework was no longer sufficient for being a good housewife and female worker. For girls who attended private, frequently religious, schools, the curriculum gradually expanded over the course of the century to include lessons in history, geography and often a smattering of natural sciences, particularly biology, which was considered useful for future mothers. The messages of this education remained socially conservative and often practical in its orientation. In England, the spread of schooling for lower-class girls tended to reinforce gendered differences in the curriculum, notably through the expansion of domestic subjects. Domestic economy was made a compulsory subject for girls in 1878 and grants were created in 1882 for the teaching of cookery and in 1890 for laundry work. Cary Grant, a teacher in a London elementary school, complained about the monotony of practising thimble drills or knitting pin drills for an hour at a time. The intent of such schooling, however, was to provide practical skills as well as character-training as Margaret Rankin made clear in her textbook on the art and practice of laundry work:
There is nothing more likely to aid in the development of character in children
Than the thorough inculcation of this science of cleanliness. . . While guiding
The pupils into methodical ways of working, . . . [the teacher will] influence the character of the pupils by the formation of habits such as punctuality, cleanliness, tidiness, carefulness and order.34
In France, the republican elementary system that emerged in the 1880s was ostensibly less gender differentiated: boys and girls attended separate schools but they learned essentially the same subjects, aside from the presence of military training for boys and needlework for girls. A study of elementary-school textbooks has shown, however, that gendered messages persisted within the stories and moral tales that pupils read within the classroom. While boys were encouraged to develop a certain amount of independence and to think of themselves in relation to the world and work, girls were directed towards the home and marriage where they practised the feminine virtues of patience and resignation. Eliminating religion from the curriculum did little towards eliminating a vision of womanhood modelled along the image of Mary.
Improvements in lower-class girls’ schooling remained strongly tied to geographic location well into the twentieth century. Female literacy and access to schools remained abysmally low in Mediterranean countries: in 1878 in Portugal a mere 10 per cent of women were literate while overall literacy in Spain was only at 47 per cent in 1900, and one can assume women’s literacy was far lower. Despite the tsarist state’s encouragement of elementary schools for all classes, religions and sexes (statute of 1864), the first reliable census in Russia in 1897 revealed that only 13.1 per cent of Russian women were literate (although this percentage jumped to 33 per cent in cities).35 Interestingly, high literacy rates did not always correlate with the early establishment of compulsory primary education, as the following list indicates: Prussia (1812), Denmark (1814), Norway (1827), Greece (1834), Sweden (1842), Switzerland (1848), Scotland (1873), England and Wales (1880), France (1882). While the northern European countries did indeed enjoy high male and female literacy rates, the same is not true of Greece. Moreover, the tardy dates of compulsory schooling in Great Britain and France did not prevent private schools from contributing to relatively high literacy rates by the time elementary schooling became compulsory.
The expansion of schooling opportunities for lower-class girls occurred in part thanks to state intervention, but also through the development of private initiatives, particularly the growth of female religious orders. In France in 1865 historians estimate that 56 per cent of all girls were schooled by religious teachers. French orders were particularly active within an educational diaspora that sent nuns to open schools throughout Europe, the New World and the colonies. Although this movement began in the early modern period as nuns settled in New France, it accelerated steadily over the course of the nineteenth century, reaching a peak at the turn of the century as French religious orders were banned from teaching in 1904. Within Europe, orders such as the Sisters of Charity, the Ursulines or the Good Shepherd opened both convent and free schools for Irish, English and German Catholic girls. A strong missionary impulse pushed Catholic nuns to open schools in foreign lands, so that the transmission of religious values was often uppermost in the schools they established. Still, like their counterparts who remained at home, religious lessons were combined with lessons in the rudiments in order to form good God-fearing wives and mothers.
Bringing civilisation to ‘native’ girls
Belief in the civilising process permeated relationships between the classes, and also European nations’ relationship with colonised societies. As a result, it is intriguing to highlight the similarity between domestic efforts to educate lower-class women and their translation onto colonial soils. Female missionary orders, laywomen as well as missionary wives were present from the outset in the colonies, developing their vision of the civilising process for imperial subjects. Not surprisingly, the women who participated in the imperial project focused their attention on other women and tended to judge the level of ‘civilisation’ of the colonised society on the basis of women’s status. Raising the status of native women involved thinking about their education and seeking to introduce change. While many of these women were sensitive to the cultural differences they encountered, they nonetheless believed strongly in the superiority of European culture and sought through their ‘civilising projects’ to improve women’s roles within families, which they assumed formed the cornerstones of the societies they were colonising. In this fashion, religious and lay women exported aspects of the domestic ideology that so strongly marked girls’ education in Europe by seeking to transform African, Asian or Near-Eastern girls into good domestic wives and mothers. However, attitudes of cultural and racial superiority often blinded teachers to the needs and desires of the populations they encountered, thereby limiting the influence they had hoped to exert.
The British, French and Dutch were the most active in setting up schools for native girls throughout the colonial world. The women who ran these schools generally had the support of colonial authorities, although not necessarily official funds. The French Ministry of War did, however, finance women’s schools: in 1839 Minister Duperre indicated that the Congregation de Saint-Joseph de Cluny had been chosen to establish schools throughout the French colonies ‘in order to effect the social transformation of the slave populations in the colonies’36. The nuns of this order set up girls’ schools in Senegal as early as 1826, while the first boys’ school was only started in 1841; by 1900 they were present throughout the world running schools in Africa, in the French Antilles and French Polynesia, in South America and Asia. Although teachers’ goals varied according to the populations they encountered, early encounters reflect what appear to be strongly utopian convictions in the power of girls’ education to transform native societies: ‘women exert a tremendous influence on the morals of this country, so one must act through them to give this population the love of work, as well as more industrious, more active and more French habits’, wrote a French colonial official as he encouraged religious missionaries to set up schools.37 Sir Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control in India expressed a similar view in the early 1850s:
The importance of female education in India cannot be overrated; and we have observed with pleasure the evidence which is now afforded of an increased desire on the part of many of the natives to give a good education to their daughters. By this means a far greater proportional impulse is imparted to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of
Men
The Church Missionary Society in southern India opened day schools and boarding schools for Hindu girls. In 1866 the Unitarian social reformer Mary Carpenter went to Calcutta to encourage female education; six years later she helped set up a normal school.
Although well intentioned, European women frequently misread the needs of the societies they encountered. In Indonesia, the Dutch orientalist romance with a supposedly feudal aristocratic native culture led women progressives to open schools for upper-class Javanese girls while blinding them to the needs of the poor. Concern for respecting supposed Eastern customs combined with a series of conflicting Western messages, such as, girls should both earn their own bread and fulfil their maternal destiny, so that the schools were not a success.39 A similar failure to understand the cultural needs of the colonised female population existed in Sumatra in the early decades of the twentieth century. Here, missionaries working for the Nederlands Zendelinggenootschap (Dutch Missionary Society) sought to lead Karo women, one of several Batak peoples in the Sumatran mountain range, to emancipation through Christian morality and education. The education they proposed in religion and basic literacy was intended to free women from the restrictions imposed on them while training them to become housewives and mothers. Even when Karo families pushed for more vocational training in nursing, the Dutch teachers continued to see their task as one of producing wives and mothers, each ‘more suited for her task later in life’. Despite the progressive character of girls’ education in the Netherlands, Dutch teachers only reluctantly recognised that the domestic orientation of their colonial schools was inappropriate.
In twelve years the times have also changed in this respect. And so, because the girls themselves and their parents increasingly asked for it, we must accommodate, although it is unfortunate, the demand that this training should earn one a diploma and suit one for a well-paying job elsewhere. In this way the emphasis of this work was laid ever more on the material value and the profit rather than on ideals, and increasingly the real value of this work for our mission was lost.40
At times, the British were also insensitive to the needs of the local population. A demand for trained domestic servants for the local settler population led the head of the Bloemfontein Training School in 1877 to reorganise the educational programme; every other week students worked eight hours a day in the laundry room, with academic lessons in the evening. This manual reorientation of studies provoked a student rebellion, supported by their parents who were all related to the local chief of the Selaka Rolong.41 In Algeria, Mme Allix Luce’s school for Muslim girls encountered opposition not from students but from local Muslim notables who declared that ‘no self-respecting Muslim would ever send his daughter or choose a wife from this school’.42 Here, the colonial effort to effect a ‘fusion of the races’ through girls’ education ran headlong into patriarchal attitudes that believed women belonged only in the home. In many colonised areas girls’ access to learning represented a distinct challenge to local representations of the gender order. Meddlesome European women teachers were better advised to stick to home soil.
Promoting kindergartens and vocational training
Provisions for lower-class girls grew over the course of the nineteenth century and acquired an increasingly vocational orientation in western European countries. The most innovative measures for this social category undoubtedly occurred within kindergarten and pre-school education. Here the influence of child-centred pedagogical methods, notably those of the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and the German Friedrich Froebel inspired an international movement to provide schooling for the very young. Both men saw the mother-child relationship as critical, hence its appeal to female middle-class reformers. These women were active in the development of preschool education, intervening in public debate from mid-century onwards. Their success in setting up schools and in getting municipal, federal and, at times, national support was in large part due to the way they couched their demands in the rhetoric of domestic ideology, portraying the growth of these schools as women’s special mission.
Infant schools developed throughout Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Often controlled by religious authorities or philanthropic groups of women, these schools generally welcomed both boys and girls and offered primarily a religious and disciplinary environment for large groups of infants. The growth of pre-school structures throughout Europe increasingly offered women opportunities as teachers and then as inspectors, as most European societies conceded that women’s maternal responsibilities gave them special authority at this level of education. In France, for example, the first women to become mid-ranking civil servants were nursery-school inspectresses in 1837 who were responsible then for overseeing the organisation of a widespread system of salles d’asile (nursery schools). Pre-school education received particular attention in Germany thanks to the enthusiasm generated by Froebel’s ideas. The Hochschule fur das Weibliche Geschlecht (High School for the Female Sex) founded in 1850 was emblematic of such efforts; students received training in philosophy, literature, mathematics and kindergarten pedagogy, as well as practical experience in a kindergarten supervised by Froebel. Although this school closed in 1852, the concern to provide women with training in teaching continued in Germany - by 1877 there were twenty kindergarten seminars in German cities to train future kindergarten teachers. Kindergarten organisations affiliated with Louise Otto’s Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein (German Women’s Association) (1865) promoted childcare and women’s special role in this care. Similar movements can be found throughout Europe: in the Netherlands by 1858 there were 395 modern infant schools with 415 female teachers running them and as of 1844 a part-time training college existed for infant-school teachers. In Italy, the Swiss Protestant Mathilde Calandrini, helped spread ideas about infant schools in Tuscany and at the same time opened a preschool for poor girls and a mutual school for girls in Pisa.43
Concern to develop kindergarten education developed in tandem with vocational training for women, notably in teaching. Religious organisations were often behind the creation of normal schools for girls: in England the first normal school for women was founded by the Anglican National Society in the early 1840s (Whitelands Training College), similarly a Catholic teaching congregation founded the first French normal school in 1838. Increasingly, however, the state also intervened, providing teacher training for girls throughout Europe: as early as 1832 in Prussia, 1858 in Piedmont,
1860 in Florence, 1866 in Belgium and Portugal, 1869 in the Austro-Hungarian empire, 1879 in France. The growth in normal schools for women both encouraged and accompanied a tendency throughout the Western world - the feminisation of the elementary teaching profession. For women, teaching was considered an extension of their maternal responsibilities; as a result, the decision to provide training for teaching could be justified using the rhetoric of domestic ideology. At the same time, it granted women a degree of economic independence and a foot in the working world. Schoolteachers’ working lives were frequently difficult, however. The Schoolmistress in 1885 described the ‘wretchedness’ of many teachers’ living arrangements in London: ‘The hastily swallowed breakfast, the cold meat dinner, the lonely tea (so enjoyable when shared with friends) and the solitary evening!’44 Letters from early twentieth-century schoolteachers in France also reveal how difficult it could be for single women to assume this new professional identity; contemporaries continued to think of women teachers as surrogate mothers, and in most European countries when they married themselves, they were required to resign from their position.
The middle decades of the century also witnessed the development in many European countries of schools that sought to train girls in skills that were not just those associated with being a good housewife. In France the Saint-Simonian Elise Lemonnier created the Societe pour l’Enseignement Professionnel des Femmes (The Society for Vocational Education for Women) and offered special courses in commerce, bookkeeping, commercial law and industrial drawing after three years of primary education. The Lette-Verein (Lette Association) in Berlin offered a similar programme in the late 1860s for lower-class girls, and elsewhere in Vienna, Prague and Russia, reform-oriented men and women opened schools to provide girls with vocational training. For contemporaries, however, the appearance of vocational schools for girls or the proliferation of women running kindergartens were relatively minor phenomena compared to the vociferous pronouncements of middle-class ladies demanding reforms in middle-class girls’ education.
Reforming middle-class girls’ education
Calls to reform girls’ secondary education began in England in the late 1840s and gathered momentum in the 1850s and 1860s along with similar movements elsewhere in Europe, often spearheaded by middle-class feminists. The reform movement addressed a number of concerns: the need to provide educational opportunities for women to improve their overall status, the need to provide better education for motherhood, the need to provide job training for single women, and the concern to make girls’ schools truly secondary in comparison with boys’ schools. As with the kindergarten movement, middle-class school reform used and reused the vocabulary of domesticity; still, the momentum that developed around this movement for educational reform led many women to challenge more directly the premises of domestic ideology: that woman’s place was in the home. As a result, the development of more serious education for middle-class girls represented an important step in women’s emancipation.
In Britain, recent scholarship on Scotland has revealed the emergence of more serious schools for young ladies in the 1830s, as well as the founding in 1842 of an institution for higher education: Queen’s College Glasgow.45 In England, Queen’s
College (1848) and Bedford College (1848) were an initial response to the anxiety generated by the plight of single middle-class women; they were founded to raise the educational qualifications of governesses. In the following years, British women mobilised far more broadly, campaigning to improve the quality of girls’ secondary education. In England, women such as Frances Buss, Dorothea Beale and Emily Davies not only brought public attention to the need to provide girls with a more rigorous education, but they also opened ‘reformed’ schools, notably the North London Collegiate School, revised curricula and fought for women to gain access to exams. Davies, in particular, campaigned for women to be able to pass the prestigious Cambridge Local Examination on the same basis as boys:
Every effort to improve the education of women which assumes that they may, without reprehensible ambition, study the same subjects as their brothers and be measured by the same standards, does something towards lifting them out of the state of listless despair of themselves into which so many fall.46
And she went on to note that this improved education and access to the same exams would also allow women to pursue university studies in England rather than be forced to seek advanced study in France or Switzerland.
Throughout Europe, reforms movements lobbied along similar lines. Women’s professional associations were often responsible for such lobbying, such as the Association of German Women Teachers and Governesses (1869) or the Czech Minerva Association. In Greece, feminists writing for the Ladies Newspaper (1887-1907) fought for equal educational and professional opportunities. But at times single women made their voices heard. Josephine Bachellery in France argued, albeit unsuccessfully, in 1848 for the need to create a superior normal school for girls (it was only founded in 1881), while in Austria, Marianne Hainisch was the first person to call for a Realgymnasium for girls in 1870. In the following years, private secondary schools developed, but the first public school was only opened in Graz in 1885 and a standardised curriculum decreed in 1900. Other notable figures in the struggle to provide middle-class girls with a more rigorous education include the Irishwomen Margaret Byers, Anne Jellicoe and Isabelle Tod who founded institutes to provide secondary education for girls in Dublin and Belfast in the 1860s. In the Netherlands Elise van Calcar and Minette Storm-van der Chijs campaigned for women’s education in the 1860s as statesmen debated an important law on education; the first girls’ Hogere Burgerscholen (citizen’s high schools) then opened their doors in 1867.
These efforts to improve the quality of girls’ secondary education were commented upon within numerous venues in the second half of the century - feminist newspapers or publications, government publications and universal exhibitions - and testify to the vitality of a small but growing international feminist movement. By sharing information about other school systems, feminists and educational reformers used this knowledge to challenge national stereotypes about women’s more fragile minds or constitutions through examples of countries where adolescent girls studied ‘masculine’ subjects with no apparent harm. After a tour of American university colleges for women, the French university professor, Celestin Hippeau wrote: ‘The admirable results womens’ studies have achieved [in the United States] are the most triumphant answer to the objections that emerge everywhere whenever the issue of the intellectual emancipation of women has not moved beyond mere discussion.’47 Fellow countrywoman and the first woman to obtain the baccalaureat degree, Julie-Victoire Daubie agreed. Her prize-winning book La Femme pauvre (The Poor Woman) (1866) was particularly critical of the sorry state of French girls’ education at all levels, the result, she claimed, of nuns’ dominance in girls’ education and the state’s indifference.
By the second half of the century, most western European countries had begun to develop networks of girls’ schools whose relationship to a system of boys’ education was increasingly under debate. For boys and men, degrees and diplomas existed that sanctioned a certain level of studies and opened doors to professional careers. In countries where national degrees existed, such as the German Abitur, the French bac-calaureat or the Austrian Matura, a self-consciously feminist women’s movement began at mid-century to argue for women’s access to such degrees. These demands concerned primarily middle-class women who increasingly sought access to careers in the service sector, notably in teaching. The reform of girls’ secondary schools opened up new opportunities in secondary teaching, since in most European countries - with the notable exception of the Netherlands - secondary education remained single sex well into the twentieth century. In 1880 when the French state finally established public secondary education for girls in colleges and lycees, the promoter of the law, Camille See, could offer a panoramic sweep of the Western world: noting the presence of serious secondary schools for girls in Russia, where the first girls’ gymnasia appeared in 1858; in Belgium, where Isabelle Gatti de Gamond founded a model secondary school in 1864; in Austria, where Madchenlyzeen were created after 1870; even in Greece, where a private institution known as the Arsakion offered secondary education as well as teacher training. James Albisetti has argued that the German model of secular secondary girls’ schools that was already widespread in the 1860s provided the impetus for many of these national developments; immediately after the French law, Italian reformers introduced the first state-run istituti femminile (feminine institutes).48
On the eve of the First World War, voices no longer openly questioned women’s right to receive an education, except at the level of the university, and institutions existed to provide it. Nonetheless, access to ‘male’ degrees remained difficult for most women graduates. In France, the public lycees did not prepare their female students for the baccalaureat until 1924 - and at all levels of education gender stereotypes continued. Lessons at the secondary level remained firmly committed to the ideal of forming good wives and mothers even if a handful of women used this education for wider purposes. Disappearance of a specifically female curriculum would only gradually occur over the course of the twentieth century. Still, despite these limitations, the expansion of formal schooling for girls meant that women could now apply for jobs in the burgeoning service sector, as office workers, postal workers and, especially, teachers. Professional positions in law, medicine or higher education remained, nonetheless, the domain of men.
World History
