At the close of the nineteenth century, Alice Zimmern heralded the changes of the past fifty years in England as a peaceful revolution for the education of women:
Very strange though it may sound, it was in truth a Renaissance - a survival of the past, and no new experiment. Or perhaps we should more fitly describe it as the realisation of an old dream, one that has been dreamed many times in the course of the age, but has waited till the nineteenth century for its complete fulfilment. . . The treasures of learning are no longer the property of an exclusive few, and the privileges of class and sex are breaking down simultaneously. Education for all, boys and girls, rich and poor, is the modern demand, which no party dare now refuse to consider. . . All the daughters of all the households of all civilised countries are to enter into their heritage. The much-discussed ‘ladder’ from the elementary school to the University is becoming a fact; and its rungs are being widened, that the girls may ascend it side by side with their brothers. La carriere ouverte aux talents, [a career open to talent] with no distinction of class, sex, or creed, is the demand of the nineteenth century.49
Speaking from her position in Girton College, Cambridge, her statement may appear overly optimistic and yet there was a grain of truth in her pronouncements. The expansion of national educational systems meant virtually all west European girls were present in elementary schools by the end of the century, although they were significantly under-represented in secondary education. But access to elementary education is only one part of a story that is not universally rosy.
The following section traces the ways women used improved education during their adolescent years to enter universities and to aspire to horizons beyond the home. Higher education only concerned a minority of women until very recently, however, and expanding opportunities for women did not progress along linear paths. The troubled inter-war years, with the triumph of conservative, authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies in many countries had an impact on the offer of schooling for girls and, above all, on its ethos. In the aftermath of the Second World War, most countries sought to promote democratic values through their educational systems. For European girls this involved two important changes. To begin with, the class distinctions between elementary and secondary education gradually disappeared as elementary school became the first step in all pupils’ educational journey and secondary schools increasingly welcomed both middle - and lower-class students. Second, most school systems adopted co-education as the norm, so that by the 1970s, single-sex education had become primarily the privilege of wealthier families or families seeking a private elite upbringing for their daughters. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century, the institutional specificities of girls’ education had largely disappeared.
Entering higher education
A small handful of women gained access to higher education in the final years of the nineteenth century. Swiss universities led the way in accepting women to attend courses and even to obtain university degrees. The University in Zurich was the first to allow women to enrol as regular students and in 1867 granted the Russian woman Nadejda Souslova a doctoral degree in medicine. The numbers of women enrolled in Swiss universities rose relatively quickly and by 1900 they represented 20 per cent of the student body. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of these students (between 80 and 90 per cent) were foreign women, mostly from the Russian Empire. The pattern of access to university studies varied widely in Europe. In England and Scotland, feminist groups pushed for the creation of residential colleges within established universities. At Cambridge, women such as Annie Clough and Emily Davies were responsible for the creation of Newnham (1871) and Girton (1873) colleges; Oxford followed suit a few years later with St Margaret’s Hall and Somerville, and in Scotland, the University of Glasgow established Queen Margaret College in 1883. While these single-sex colleges encouraged the presence of women within British universities, they did not eliminate debates and conflicts concerning women’s access to lecture courses and university degrees. The University of London was the first British university in 1878 to admit women to its degrees. In countries, such as France, Germany and the Netherlands, where specifically female colleges did not exist, resistance to the presence of female students was also high and their numbers relatively few and far between. Still, a number of women pioneers succeeded in getting university degrees: in France in 1875 Madeleine Bres was the first French women to obtain a doctorate in medicine; in Germany the Russian Johanna Evreinova earned a law degree from the University of Leipzig in 1873. In some countries, such as France, medicine was more welcoming to women, given women’s caring role, while in Scotland the impropriety of teaching anatomical classes to both sexes acted as a brake.
Countless caricatures and articles at the turn of the century testify to enduring masculine hostility to women’s claims for higher education, and as the numbers of women in universities increased so too did representations of the dangers this education represented. Excessive study would bring on hysteria some claimed, others feared it would weaken women’s maternal desires and many claimed that it was the first step in a dangerous reversal of sex roles. The phenomenon of the New Woman, with her claims for autonomy and independence were deeply troubling to many contemporaries. In France, for example, the prolific turn-of-the-century author Colette Yver wrote novels with evocative titles such as Les Princesses de sciences (Princesses of Science) or Les Cervelines (Women Egg-Heads) where ambitious university-educated women opted for careers rather than matrimony and motherhood, causing despair, divorce and even death. These manifestations of cultural anxiety about women in higher education should not obscure, however, the small numbers of women this actually concerned. In Great Britain, women in English and Scottish universities represented 16 per cent of the student population in 1900; this figure climbed to 24 per cent in 1920, 27 per cent in 1930, but had dipped once more to 23 per cent on the eve of the Second World War. Scottish universities were less elitist and more welcoming to women: at St Andrews, women were already 40 per cent of the student body in 1907-8. In France, Germany and Italy, women students were initially far more exceptional: a mere 7 per cent for France and Germany on the eve of the First World War, 6 per cent in Italy. The percentage of French women students climbed quickly in the inter-war period, so that in 1930 the situation was similar to that in Great Britain, where 26 per cent of the student body was female. In Italy the policies of Mussolini kept the figures from rising too quickly: women were 13 per cent of the student body in 1927-8 and still only 15 per cent in 1935, while in Germany women were still only 28 per cent of the student body in 1960-1.
Women’s access to higher education in the early twentieth century is testimony to significant changes in girls’ secondary training which increasingly allowed them to pass successfully university entrance exams or to obtain school-leaving certificates that opened the doors to universities. But it did not translate automatically into new attitudes towards women’s roles in society. Indeed, many of the new largely middle-class women students never obtained university degrees and those who did often never actually entered a profession. For these women, higher education had become a personal goal, but not one that led them away from domestic futures. Women often had to brave familial opposition, as did the brilliant French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir when she pursued her studies and achieved a teaching degree in philosophy in 1929:
In my family milieu, it was considered peculiar for a young girl to pursue higher education; getting work implied social decline. Obviously my father was a vigorous antifeminist. . . he considered that a woman’s place was in the home and in salons.50
Figures of European women who used their education to become doctors or lawyers or university professors remain extremely low throughout the first half of the century. Within universities there were countless examples of couples, such as Paule and Fernand Braudel, where the wife diligently read and copied for her husband without a professional position, salary or recognition. Some university-educated women used their talents to open institutions specifically for women. The German Alice Solomon was one such figure who, despite familial opposition and the absence of the Abitur, nonetheless pursued a degree in political economy at the University of Berlin, earning a doctorate in 1906 and then went on to found the Soziale Frauenschule (Woman’s School of Social Work), and in 1925 the Deutsche Akademie fur soziale und pada-gogische Frauenarbeit (Germany Academy for Women’s Social and Pedagogical Work). This academy trained women to become social workers, youth professionals, and so on, fields where women’s presence was far more acceptable than in the ethereal ranks of the university.
A quantitative jump in women’s presence as students in the university only occurred in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s as secondary education became far more available and as universities expanded and became more democratic. In France, female students were a third of the student body in 1945, 44 per cent in 1967 and 50 per cent by 1981. In most western European countries, rough parity in male and female university enrolment was achieved in the 1980s, although gender enrolments by academic discipline reveal striking differences in orientations with obvious impact on future employment opportunities. What has changed, however, is the number of women who use their university degrees to pursue professional lives afterwards. Home and motherhood are far less exclusively the ultimate goal of a girls’ educational trajectory.
Ideology and girls’ education
While women’s access to higher education in the twentieth century represents in a sense the ideological triumph of one strand of Enlightenment ideals, that ‘the mind has no sex’, other ideological currents during the century proclaimed the opposite and at times had significant impact on the type of learning available to girls and women. Within Italian Fascism and German Nazism, the obsession with virility in the creation of a ‘New Man’ involved creating as well a ‘New Woman’, who was decidedly NOT a university-educated woman aspiring for economic independence. The fashioning of the Fascist or Nazi woman in schools and youth groups offers insights as well into the way learning and knowledge acquired increasingly gendered traits in these years, traits that also emerged in Franco’s Spain and in Vichy France.
In Italy, the slow development of educational structures for girls in the nineteenth century meant that after Italian unification girls entered boys’ schools, thus benefiting from the same instruction. By the turn of the century, enrolments for girls in both elementary and secondary education rose at the same pace as boys. With Mussolini’s rise to power, complaints about the excessive democratisation of the school system as well as the undue influence of women as teachers led to a series of major reforms that severely restricted girls’ educational opportunities while highlighting the regime’s misogynist orientation. Giovanni Gentile, the Sicilian philosopher turned Fascist ideologue, fashioned an elitist reform of the educational system while Minister of Public Instruction from 1922 to 1924. His bias against women can be seen in efforts to defeminise the teaching profession by excluding women from holding ‘masculine’ positions at the secondary licei (high schools) in letters, Greek, Latin, history and philosophy, and by barring them from positions as directors of various schools. He also established new finishing schools for daughters of good families, liceo femminile, that offered a smattering of humanities, arts and crafts. Finally, he downgraded the quality of vocational education for women. While these measures did not prevent more and more girls from attending schools, they represented a clear setback in the eyes of Italian feminists. The restrictive character of schooling opportunities for women was reinforced with the promulgation of the School Charter of 1939. Article 21 read: ‘The destination and social mission of women, being distinct in fascist life, have at their foundation different and special institutions of instruction.’51 This differential treatment of men and women was particularly flagrant within the Fascist youth groups; under the cover of the umbrella youth organisation, Opera nazionale Balilla, girls learned first aid, rhythmic exercises and charity while boys did competitive sports, military-type excursions and mock-weaponry.
Policies directed towards women within the Nazi Party and state varied over time, but they were consistent in presenting women in ancillary positions, closely related to their role within the family. Nazi education policies were strictly ideological, as Frau Dr August Rebeer-Gruber, Consultant on Girls’ Education to the Ministry of Education, stated: ‘The task of our schooling. . . is simple: the moulding of German girls as carriers of the National Socialist point of view.’52 She oversaw the activities of all women teachers and vigorously fought to develop a specifically feminine and nonacademic curriculum that privileged home economics, psychology, folk art, eugenics and physical education. She located Nazi women within the home and felt betrayed in the late 1930s when Nazi policies reversed themselves to encourage women to assume a double burden in the workforce and at home. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink who led the Frauenwerk (Women’s Bureau) for the Nazi state was also active in an educational campaign to professionalise the role of housewife, a campaign directed more to older women than to the young. Two hundred and seventy-nine schools were established to train mothers in nutrition, interior decoration, economic management of household finance, childcare, cleaning methods and sewing. Over 1.5 million women per year enrolled in nearly 84,000 motherhood classes. For elite Nazi women, the Nazis went so far as to offer a programme that led to a master’s degree in household science. For younger girls, aged fourteen to nineteen, participation in the feminine branch of the Hitler Youth, Bund Deutscher Madel (League of German Girls), allowed adolescents to serve the Nazi cause. Despite policy changes, the Nazi period represented a distinct setback to earlier struggles to achieve equal educational opportunities for girls and boys. In higher education the number of women students at universities dropped from 20,000 in 1930 to 5,500 in 1939.
In Vichy France the concept of the ‘eternal feminine’ emerged as the state promulgated a vision of the family where women’s rights were sharply curtailed. In education, this translated into a resurgence in Catholic rather than secular education with Catholic women’s groups defending the idea that women’s place was in the home. Various ideologues once more directed their hostility against educated women: in 1941 Rene Benjamin wrote, Yerites et reveries sur I’education (Truths and Musings on Education) where he proclaimed that 300 women with university degrees had become prostitutes; he believed ‘a girl should first and foremost be the mirror image of her mother.’53 Within secondary education, a decree the same year specified that girls’ education should include lessons in music and housewifery, which were considered appropriate for their roles, while in primary education the content of manual work was made strictly sex-specific. In 1942 all girls were required to take instruction in family housekeeping for one hour a week for seven years.
Franco’s Spain represented another country where a Catholic conservative discourse about what constituted true Spanish womanhood led to increasingly inegalitarian educational measures over the course of the century. The National Catholic party that was in power from 1939 until Franco’s death in 1975 made it clear that girls’ education should serve patriarchal politics: girls should be trained to be devout and dutiful wives and mothers. A decree of March 1945 established the Instituto de Ensenanzas Profesionales de la Mujer (Institute for Women’s Professional Training). The latter’s goal was expressed thus: ‘The female sex is entrusted with the task of defending traditional family values and preserving the domestic arts, essential to maintain happiness in the home.’ Within the university, women’s presence was discouraged. While men accomplished their military obligations in a university militia, women were enrolled in a mandatory university social-service programme where they learned the fine art of home economics and received indoctrination into their special role within the nation, notably through a separate female section of the Falange.54
The resurgence of a domestic-oriented ideology for women within conservative or fascist regimes in the middle decades of the century should not be confused with what emerged throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. True, propagandists once more trumpeted the significance of women’s role within the home, but this role was tied to a national political agenda far more explicitly. It is important to distinguish here between the vision of the family in these different political regimes and how girls’ education was expected to serve the regime. The discourse and practices of Franco’s Spain probably harked back most clearly to a nineteenth-century model where girls’ education was strongly religious and housewifely in its orientation, as schoolbook learning took a definite back seat. In Vichy France and even more strongly in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, however, the needs of a technocratic state demanded in reality more of women’s education. As a result, the seeming familiarity of the domestic message belied a very different underlying purpose. While these regimes re-established the importance of biological differences in their understandings of masculinity and femininity, they could not erase history and the very real gains women had achieved in education, gains that became virtually universal in the final years of the century.
Co-education and changing visions of gender roles
In the years following the end of the Second World War, European countries reconstructed their societies and sought to heal their wounds; in terms of education this meant reforms that sought to ensure the triumph of democratic values amongst school-age children who would all, both men and women, go on to become voting citizens. It also meant more concerted efforts to provide better and more serious education to all classes of society. In Britain, the Education Act of 1944 provided all children with a free secondary education; in France, reforms in the 1960s expanded access to general non-vocational secondary schooling; in Germany, co-educational secondary schools were initiated in the 1960s. Throughout Europe, the school-leaving age moved up from twelve or thirteen in 1900 to sixteen by the 1960s. For girls and boys, however, the most significant educational change of the post-war world was probably the introduction of co-education in elementary and secondary schools. This major pedagogical transformation signalled in many cases the end of a sex-specific curriculum, but above all accompanied the emergence of a new youth culture where gender roles came under scrutiny. For girls, the messages of a woman’s movement that challenged traditional attitudes towards sexuality increasingly encouraged them to believe that in their private lives they could enjoy the same liberties as boys. At the same time, the economic revival opened opportunities for women in the workforce which also meant that schooling for women was seen as a step towards enjoying the same financial independence as men in their working lives. In reality, of course, neither educational nor cultural changes were sufficiently revolutionary to efface deeply engrained gender stereotypes. Still, co-education and the effects of the women’s movement changed for many girls the educational messages received in their formative years, leading them to assume that equality of the sexes was the ostensible goal of national educational systems.
By the late 1970s, co-education had become a reality in the state sector of most European countries, although in Ireland single-sex schools remained in the state sector and to some degree in England and Wales. Single-sex education also continued to exist within some subjects such as physical education and crafts in Poland, Belgium, Greece, West Germany and England and Wales. Overall, however, the decision to mingle boys and girls in the same schoolrooms and on the same school benches had become an accepted reality, in part thanks to the actions of feminist movements, but more often thanks to economic pragmatism. It was far cheaper to build one school for both sexes in the enormous expansion of educational systems between the 1960s and 1980s than to persist in providing separate schools. The achievement of co-education represented, however, a major revolution in conceptualising girls’ education, as the history of its introduction reveals.
Throughout the period under examination, co-education existed primarily in elementary schools and in rural areas where the cost of maintaining two schools made single-sex education unattainable. The emergence of a movement to promote coeducation dates back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it contained from the outset a utopian, egalitarian and feminist message. For the early promoters, co-education entailed far more than mixed schooling; it represented an attempt to change the relationship between the sexes to build a more harmonious society. For Englishwoman Alice Woods, the head of a co-educational school at Chiswick (1884-92), co-education was
The education of boys and girls. . . in companionship from the age of infancy to adult life, neither sex being segregated, but taught many subjects and sharing many games in common, with freedom to enjoy their leisure in one another’s company.55
Co-education was frequently debated in international feminist congresses and was part of the New Education movement in the inter-war period. Feminists argued that it would promote greater equality between men and women, by providing girls with the same learning opportunities as boys.
Opposition to mixed schooling reveals, however, how attitudes about masculinity and femininity continued to structure European societies’ approach to girls’ education well into the twentieth century. Despite the improvement in girls’ education accomplished over the course of the preceding century, many people remained firmly convinced that adolescent girls and boys, in particular, should not be educated in the same way and certainly not side by side. In many ways, the rise of psychological sciences and their application to the study of adolescence contributed to the belief that male and female psychological difference was different and that their education should, as a result, differ. For Catholics, Pope Pius XI’s encyclical, Divini illius magistri (1929) represented a powerful condemnation of the ‘coeducation of the sexes’, a method founded ‘upon a deplorable confusion of ideas that mistakes a leveling promiscuity and equality, for the legitimate association of the sexes’.56 Opponents feared co-education for a variety of reasons that speak tellingly to the strength of widely shared gender stereotypes in Europe. Mingling adolescent boys and girls was often described as inherently immoral and likely to provoke immoral behaviour among pupils whose budding sexuality was under only tenuous control. Some pedagogues argued that co-education, by providing girls with the same lessons that boys received, was simply inappropriate. For others, co-education encouraged the homogenisation of the sexes by making boys more feminine and girls more masculine. Defenders, it should be noted, often used the same argument but viewed it in positive terms: the rough ways of boys would be tempered through their contact with girls; girls would become more assertive and confident thanks to their acquiring male traits. Most disturbing for many critics was the fear that co-education would inspire young women to seek independent lives, thus contributing to an array of ills: divorce, falling birth rates, women professionals. The American practice of co-education at the level of high schools and universities provoked many negative comments about the effects of such an education. Maurice Caullery, a French biology professor who spent a semester in the USA in 1915-16 remarked:
One cannot help but think that the life [girls and women] have led during their studies has encouraged them to develop a taste for luxury which in many cases poses a serious threat to family life. . . [college graduates] are not prepared
Either psychologically or technically for the duties of family life and place special conditions on marriage which cause many men to flee.57
In essence, Caullery considered that the egalitarian nature of co-education failed to provide women with an education appropriate for their future lives. The bonds of domesticity were tenacious indeed.
Nonetheless, co-education made inroads in secondary education, with the Dutch leading the way. In 1880 a girl was admitted to a classical gymnasium with virtually no protest; in 1899 Hogere Burgerschool (citizen’s high schools) accepted the principle of co-education and by 1925 only 8 per cent of all girls attending this type of school were in girls’ schools. In part, this easy acceptance of co-education at the secondary level stemmed from the absence of boarding school education in the Netherlands and strong feminist support for the principle of equality between the sexes well before the turn of the century. Elsewhere in Europe, co-education progressed, but often in fits and starts. In France girls were allowed into the upper classes of classical boys’ lycees in 1922, but the systematic development of co-education at this level only occurred after 1959. In Belgium, by 1965, 67 per cent of all secondary state schools were co-educational, but virtually no Catholic schools. Despite the progress of co-education, debates about its effects have waxed and waned throughout the century, in response to a variety of factors. Early opposition to the practice tended to be conservative and particularly prevalent amongst Catholics, although some turn-of-the-century feminists were also against co-education, notably the headmistresses of girls’ schools who rightly intuited that the spread of co-educational schools would decrease the number of women principals. Interestingly, the questioning of co-education, once it had become a widespread reality in the 1980s, came mainly from feminist circles in both England and Germany. Feminists noted that despite the promise of co-education, it did not lead necessarily to equal opportunities for both sexes, and that within classrooms the effect of mixed schooling were often to the detriment of girls, as boys monopolised both linguistic space and teachers’ attention. While no one has called for a return to strict sex segregation within the school system, both progressive and conservative voices since the 1980s have advocated single-sex education in certain disciplines and for certain age groups. The interest in reclaiming single-sex education for feminist purposes reached a climax at the Universal Exhibition in Hanover in 2000 where primarily German feminists organised an International Women’s University that attracted women throughout the world. The university chose not to focus on women’s subjects, but rather to bring women from different disciplines together to discuss issues affecting all societies from a feminist perspective. The need for such an initiative illustrates how the path towards gender equality, while necessarily including access to learning, requires far more.
World History
