The Reform of Girls' Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England

A Study of Elites and Educational Change

Joyce Senders Pedersen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351181662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1987, this title was first submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Completed just as the years of expansion in higher education were drawing to a close, it reflects the growing doubts of the period as to the ability of formal education provision alone to effect major changes in the distribution of socio-economic privilege at the group level, whether as between the sexes, classes, or ethnic groups.

Reforms in women's education had traditionally been dealt with as a small part of the women's emancipation movement. This book approaches the education reforms in a different way and begins with the question of which social groups participated in the movement. Seen from this point of view, a primary interest of the reforms is the function they served in promoting a redefinition of the status and roles of a social elite.

Chapter I
Some Socio-Economic and Demographic Perspectives on the Movement for Women’s Educational Reform

Demands for the reform of girls’ education had been voiced in England at least since the 17th century.¹ In 1697, Mary Astell addressed A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Regretting that women should be “like a garnish’d Sepulchre, which for all its glittering has nothing within but emptiness or putrefaction,”² the author suggested the establishment of “a Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies, whose good Example it is to be hop’d will so influence the rest of their Sex, that Women may no longer pass for those little useless and impertinent Animals, which the ill conduct of too many has caus’d ‘em to be mistaken for.”³ It was above all for the sake of their salvation that Mrs. Astell wished women’s education improved. A century later, the cause of reform was taken up by Hannah Moore and Catherine Macaulay. Animated like Mrs. Astell in the first instance by religious concerns, these reformers too wished to educate women primarily to make them better.⁴ Mary Wollstonecraft proposed educational reforms not only to make women better but also that they might be more rational beings and more self-sufficient.⁵ In the early 19th century, demands for women’s educational reform were made in a variety of quarters. In 1825, William Thompson included educational reform in his radical Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political and thence Civil and Domestic Slavery. A few years later, in 1831, the conservative Mrs. John Sandford’s Woman in her Social and Domestic Character appeared. Convinced that “Domestic life is a woman’s sphere” and warning that “knowledge is not to elevate her above her station,” Mrs. Sandford argued that woman’s education should be “more solid and less flashy” that she might better fulfill her domestic duties.⁶

In short, in the century and a half preceding the movement for women’s educational reform, a variety of proposals for reform had been aired with different ends in view. However, these demands were without practical issue. It was not until the middle decades of the 19th century that a sustained movement for women’s educational reform got underway, and it was only in the decades after 1870 that the main expansion of girls’ public schools and women’s colleges occurred. If one is to understand the timing of the reforms and why they took the form they did, it will clearly not suffice simply to survey the reformist literature. Rather the demands for reform must be considered in their broader social context. One must examine the social groups involved in the movement for educational reform and try to discover what moved them to participate in novel educational ventures at this time.

The following pages consider some socio-economic and demographic problems which especially concerned those middle class groups which aspired to upper middle class - or gentle⁷ - status and made some members of these groups receptive to the cause of women’s educational reform in the mid-Victorian period. It was from these social groups (and especially the professional people included in them) that most of the individuals associated with the reformed institutions - the organizers, the teachers, and the students - were drawn. It is not argued that the educational reforms were called forth by some specific societal need for newly-educated women. On the contrary, as will appear clearly in later chapters, the educational reforms served as much to create as to answer to a need for educated women. The intent is only to suggest that, owing to the status and other concerns outlined below, proposals for women’s educational reform found anchor in the interests of specific social groups in the mid-Victorian period and that the reforms primarily served the interests of women of these groups, not those of women generally.

1. Status Concerns and Economic Influences

It is … the … social motive that practically controls the education of girls.⁸

… except for the material need which exerted a constant pressure over a large and educated class, the “woman’s movement” could never have become in England a subject of popular comment, and to a certain extent of popular sympathy.⁹

Seen in one of their aspects, the reforms in women’s secondary and higher education served to affirm or secure the upper middle class, or gentle, status of those groups associated with the reformed girls’ public schools and women’s colleges. In promoting a redefinition of the education of a lady in a way which placed more emphasis upon intellectual achievement than formerly and in setting women educated at the new institutions apart from other women of the middle classes, the educational reforms helped set the seal of elite status upon both the liberally educated woman and her nearest male relatives. In addition the reforms helped secure the superior status of women educated at the new institutions by reducing the economic insecurities which threatened to undercut their privileged social position. This was accomplished by providing students with training which both gave them an edge in obtaining such desirable employments as were open to women and by redefining the components of gentle status in such a way as to permit a lady to take up paid public work without necessarily losing status. This section attempts to pinpoint the social groups involved, to sketch some social and economic problems they experienced in the middle decades of the 19th century, and to suggest how women’s educational reform helped alleviate their economic worries and helped support their social claims.

The social groups which concern us are those sections of the middle classes which aspired to upper middle class, or gentle, status. “Gentility” was a protean concept which not only vexed contemporaries in mid-Victorian England but also has proved elusive to modern historians.¹⁰ Gentle status was compounded of a suitable occupation, income, birth, life-style and outlook, and, increasingly in the mid-Victorian years, education.¹¹ However, standards varied from one locale to the next¹² and also over time.¹³ One historian recently remarked that gentility had to do with social acceptance, with gaining entrance to whichever elite group one sought entree. “The only sure way of knowing you were a gentleman,” this author concluded, “was to be treated as such.”¹⁴ Gentility was obviously primarily a problem for the marginal man or woman whose claim to elite status might be challenged. For a peer, a member of the gentry, a man at the top of one of the older professions (the Church, the law, the military, medicine) there was no problem. Their claims to social acceptance were unassailable. It is not, then, with the most eminent social groups but rather those on the fringes of elite society that the following discussion is particularly concerned.

Social status derived in part, of course, from occupation. Geoffrey Best and others have discussed how by the mid 19th century new occupational groups - especially professional men and wealthy¹⁵ business men - were demanding that their claims to elite status be recognized. While, as just noted, men at the top of the older professions had traditionally been acknowledged to be gentlemen, this recognition did not derive in the first instance from their occupation perse but rather rested primarily on other factors - e.g., their university education, often their birth, their wealth, the rank of their associates.¹⁶ The middle decades of the 19th century saw a change, as professionals (now greatly increasing in number)¹⁷ claimed elite status on the grounds of their occupation and as new occupational groups strove to achieve professional status.¹⁸ In addition, rich businessmen (some already secure at the top of their urban hierarchies) demanded broader recognition of their claims.¹⁹

The problem for both these groups - professionals and wealthy businessmen - was in effect to distinguish themselves from the mass of the middle classes and establish their affinity with the traditional elite. In this process education was to be the key. The boys’ public schools (whose rise to prominence in the 19th century has been examined by T. W. Bamford)²⁰ provided the institutional means for (in Best’s words) “preserving the quasi-hereditary social elite and satisfying the status ambitions of variously talented or wealthy professional and ‘business’ families.”²¹

Just as a public school and university education served to set the seal of gentility upon the son of a business or professional man, so it might attest to the elite status of his daughter. Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge, noted which social groups her proposed institution was designed for:

The two thousand sisters of the two thousand under-graduates who, at any given time, are under instruction at Cambridge, [who] will be found for the most part scattered about in country houses and parsonages, and in the families of professional men and retired merchants and manufacturers….²²

And in another essay the reformer explained:

… an education corresponding with that given by the universities to young men - in other words, ‘the education of a lady,’ considered irrespectively of any specific uses to which it may afterwards be turned - would appear to be the desideratum.²³

From Miss Davies’ remarks one might conclude that previously there had been no “education of a lady” but of course this was not the case. Rather Miss Davies - dissatisfied with the traditional “education of a lady” based on the accomplishments - proposed to redefine the term and so in effect redefine the criteria for determining who was a lady. Not only the woman’s status but also that of her nearest male relative was in question, for the male’s preference for a highly-educated - rather than a merely accomplished - woman might be indicative of his superior status as well. In the opinion of one proponent of women’s educational reform, “upper middle class men” were different from “middle middle class” men in that the latter preferred “a woman who is less educated to one who is more educated.”²⁴

Social status was also, of course, related to income. Contemporaries were not quite agreed as to the minimum income required to support a genteel life style in the 1850’s and ’60’s, but something over £300 was almost certainly required for a family, while for a single person probably a minimum £150 or £200 was necessary. The feminist Frances Power Cobbe, a spinster and proponent of women’s educational reform, found an income of “a trifle over £200 a year” a “narrow provision” on which to maintain herself.²⁵ Bessie Rayner Parkes (a publicist for the cause of women’s educational reform) noted the problems of “the poor but genteel merchant and the second-rate professional men … with from £300 to £400 per annum, and a growing up family.”²⁶ A statistician in the late 1860’s thought £500 an “upper middle class” income.²⁷ James Bryce spoke of men of the “upper middle class” (a “merchant or a professional man or wealthy shopkeeper” - men who sent their daughters to “genteel” schools) and those of the “lower middle class,” “persons whose incomes range from £150 to £600 per annum (excluding the professional men)” (including “clerks, warehousemen, and shopkeepers, with the highest grade of artisans … richer farmers, petty manufacturers, mine managers and so forth”).²⁸

It is noteworthy that Bryce granted professional men upper middle class status even when their incomes were not congruent with this rank. The first systematic information about professional incomes comes from a few decades later and suggests that at that time, anyway, man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Some Socio-Economic and Demographic Perspectives on the Movement for Women’s Educational Reform
• Chapter II: The Organizers and their Organizations I: Organizational Structure and Strategies
• Chapter III: The Organizers and their Organizations II: The Organizers’ Backgrounds and Aspirations
• Chapter IV: The Lady-Teachers I: The Lady-Teacher and the Family-like School
• Chapter V: The Lady-Teachers II: The Impulse to Reform
• Chapter VI: The Headmistresses I: The Public School and the Professional Woman
• Chapter VII: The Headmistresses II: Professional Influences
• Chapter VIII: The Headmistresses III: Two Professional Emphases
• Chapter IX: The Students I: Status Concerns and Family Relations
• Chapter X: The Students II: The Public Schools and Colleges and Public Life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index