Introduction

In 1846 an obscure French provincial schoolteacher wrote to the administrative governing council of Algeria that

Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe, but even more so in Africa. If you convert to our civilization 100 young native girls in all classes of society and in all the races of the Regency [of Algeria], these girls will become, in the nature of things, the privileged wives of the most important men of their class; they will become our guarantee of the country’s submission to our authority, as well as the irrefutable pledge of its future assimilation.1

She argued specifically that schooling Muslim girls was the solution to assimilating the new colonial subjects into French civilisation. This heart-felt endorsement of girls’ education as a pivotal aspect of the civilising process speaks powerfully to the values attached to learning in nineteenth-century Europe. Throughout the continent educated men and women believed that progress and the spread of civilisation came through learning. More importantly, from the eighteenth century onwards, women were included in this reflection; a country’s degree of civilisation increasingly depended on women’s status within society, and this status in turn hinged on their access to education.

This chapter explores the emergence of such ideas about women’s influence and status within European and colonial societies and argues that education was a critical element in determining women’s place. The history of girls’ education offers historians a way to understand enduring gender stereotypes since education is one of the primary ways that societies reproduce their values and beliefs. At the same time, by giving individuals access to reason and learning, education offers a key to understanding change. This dialectic between education as both a conservative force and a force for change helps explain how learning assigned women to certain roles, notably within the family as mothers and wives, but also opened doors for them to acquire new roles and responsibilities within the public sphere. Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth

Centuries, ‘enlightened’ voices introduced debates about women, their status in society and their ability to reason. The argument by some that gender differences might be the product of social and cultural conditioning rather than biological determinants opened opportunities for women to claim the need for a better education. More generally, however, individuals as well as religious associations promoted the development of schools for girls as well as boys, so that women might contribute to the betterment of society, as pious wives and mothers and as skilled and obedient working women. The effect of the French Revolution and the cultural conservatism of the early years of the nineteenth century justify a chronology that considers the period from 1700 to 1830 as a whole.

By the 1830s, the needs of industrialising societies significantly changed the interest attached to the question of girls’ training and learning possibilities. The debates about women’s place and women’s role became central as countries dealt with the enduring impact of revolutionary ideas, with the need to develop an efficient workforce and with the concern to form a docile citizenry. Increasingly, women were seen as critical within these broader processes, so that textbooks, conduct manuals and, of course, schools multiplied, offering lessons in what it meant to be a ‘good’ girl, wife, mother and worker. These lessons varied depending on the social class of the students, but they embraced women from all classes and even extended to women in non-European societies as nuns, missionaries and missionary wives spread the fruits of European civilisation to the imperial world. The reformed schools and the expanding educational opportunities of the latter half of the nineteenth century, combined with the emergence of a feminist movement to open doors for middle - and lower-class women, giving them access to degrees and qualifications that allowed them to enter a largely male working and professional world.

The twentieth century gradually witnessed the emergence of an integrated educational system within European countries that allowed students to progress from elementary to secondary education in schools, at the same time that middle-class women gained access to higher education, thus challenging ideas that women’s minds and bodies made them unfit for certain positions and responsibilities in the working world. Despite increasing opportunities for women in the twentieth century, however, scientific developments as well as sexist and racist ideologies combined at certain historical moments and within specific countries to produce discourses about women’s place in society that harked back to earlier periods. Such discourses, of course, had an impact on girls’ schooling and learning possibilities. The chapter concludes with the generalisation of co-education in the 1960s and 1970s that did much to break down the existence of distinctively feminine curricula, just as the second-wave feminist movement significantly changed attitudes towards girls’ education. We’ve come a long way, baby, but enduring gender stereotypes remain, often unconsciously reproduced within schools and educational systems that officially espouse an egalitarian social and gender ethos. The history of girls’ access to learning offers a particularly fruitful vantage point to understand the interaction between a society’s vision of women and the ways education enforces, modifies and challenges that vision to produce good girls and women.