The past three centuries have brought girls from all social backgrounds into classrooms throughout Europe. This achievement is the result of a combination of factors that are difficult to untangle given their mutual interaction, but it is important to recognise that the debate about girls’ education always carried a political dimension. Religious and secular forces combined in the eighteenth century to provide the initial impetus for providing girls with education. Nuns and Protestant reformers sought to improve overall morality and to instil Christian sentiments by targeting girls because of their status within the family. Amongst the upper classes, both men and women also championed a woman’s right to knowledge often for similar reasons, although a few voices saw education as an inalienable individual right, a position that would spread over the course of the following century. No matter what the reasoning behind the defence of a girls’ right to learn, schools were opened and their numbers grew, offering a wide variety of educational experiences. For the minority of girls who attended schools, the lessons they received were limited in scholarly scope, intending to fit women for their proper sphere in life. The English evangelical moralist Hannah More summed it up nicely:
To woman, therefore, whatever be her rank, I would recommend a predominance of those more sober studies, which, not having display for their object, may make her wise without vanity, happy without witnesses, and content with panegyrists; the exercise of which will not bring celebrity, but improve usefulness. . . . She should cultivate every study which, instead of stimulating her sensibility will chastise it; which will neither create an excessive or a false refinement; which will give her definite notions. . . will lead her to think, to compare, to combine, to methodise. . . That kind of knowledge which is rather fitted for home consumption than foreign exportation, is peculiarly suited to women.58
In the following century these principles underlay countless conduct manuals, pedagogical treatises and educational programmes, although the actual content of this education came periodically under scrutiny. Most girls’ institutions continued to school and train girls for a future different to that of boys, more centred around home and family. The development of a feminist movement after the 1850s, however, began to challenge the tenets of this home-oriented education and to voice more openly the political implications of women’s education; most women reformers argued that education was the necessary first step for women’s social, economic and political emancipation, but some, such as the socialist French feminist Hubertine Auclert, believed true educational equality would only come when women were electors:
Women must vote in order to be educated. Young girls will never have serious instruction, a scientific and rational instruction until women have the right to debate budgets, to introduce a pair of scales in the budget of public instruction, and to establish the principle of equality for all children in these scales, that is to say, the same number of schools, the same quantity of science for girls as for boys.59
The political implications of women’s education were also evident in the European effort to export models of female schooling to the colonies. Whether proposing vocational training for future domestic servants or refined education for the daughters of native elites, European women argued for the ways girls’ education would further the imperial project and solidify ideological control over the families of colonised subjects.
The events of the twentieth century highlighted the ideologically charged nature of girls’ education and the way it played into both authoritarian and democratic political agendas. Educated women, whether they entered the workforce or not, were a force that nation-states had to acknowledge and to reckon with in educational systems whose general tendency was for increasing inclusiveness in terms of social class and sex. The solution to gender disorders could no longer be to prevent women from learning to read, as Sylvain Marechal facetiously suggested after the French Revolution. Instead, the Nazi and Fascist states provided girls with education, but an education that insisted on their biologically determined role. Even within democratic countries, the conviction that women’s destiny was in the home has had a particularly long life, despite the insights of countless feminists, including that of Simone de Beauvoir who explained in the opening line of The Second Sex (1949) ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one’, through culture and education. The appearance of female students in universities throughout Europe and the generalisation of co-education within elementary and secondary schools has not eradicated deeply held convictions that despite women’s proven ability to study the same subjects as men, their destinies are indeed different. As a result, sociological studies of European educational systems all reveal the persistence of gender inequalities despite evidence in many countries that female pupils outperform their male companions at all levels of the elementary and secondary education. These inequalities are most evident in the curriculum orientations of girls and women, their overwhelming tendency to pursue studies in literature and the arts, leaving the sciences and technological subjects to boys and men. These ‘choices’ have lasting consequences within European workforces as men monopolise positions of economic and political power often thanks to their educational trajectory. Access to education and knowledge does indeed translate into forms of power, as Michel Foucault has argued, but the conditions of this access remain gendered, so that women’s power operates in different realms, hierarchically inferior to those of men’s. Ironically, education is precisely one of those realms where women are massively present: in 1985-6, 90 per cent of pre-school teachers in France, Greece, Sweden, Spain and England and Wales were female, and the proportion of women primary teachers ranged from 61 per cent in Spain to 79 per cent in Great Britain in 19 8 8-9.60 Using this power over young minds to promote truly egalitarian educational systems and societies represents then the challenge for the twenty-first century.
World History
