Practical Visionaries

Women, Education and Social Progress, 1790-1930

Pam Hirsch, Mary Hilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317877219
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: European History

An examination of women educationists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Working with new paradigms opened up by feminist scholarship, it reveals how women leaders were determined to transform education in the quest for a better society. Previous scholarship has either neglected the contributions of these women or has misplaced them. Consequently intellectual histories of education have come to seem almost exclusively masculine. This collection shows the important role which figures such as Mary Carpenter, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Edwards and Maria Montessori played in the struggle to provide greater educational opportunities for women. The contributors are: Anne Bloomfield, Kevin J. Brehony, Norma Clarke, Peter Cunningham, Mary Jane Drummond, Elizabeth Edwards, Mary Hilton, Pam Hirsch, Jane Miller, Hilary Minns, Wendy Robinson, Gillian Sutherland and Ruth Watts.

Part One
The Emergence of Progressive Women Educators

Chapter One
‘Child of Reason’: Anna Barbauld and the Origins of Progressive Pedagogy

MARY HILTON

Progressive education, now somewhat in retreat in Britain, has constantly been assumed to postulate a Romantic and innocent child, a view first articulated by Rousseau. His idealised growing child, whose special nature and developing reason require a necessary freedom from all the corrupting restraints of society, has prevailed in the history of education.¹ A dialectical polarity has thus been erected between this representation and that of the puritan child, full of original sin, which view supported the evangelical fervour of much early nineteenth-century education. By examining the work of a distinguished pre-Romantic woman writer and educationist I wish to continue the recent challenge to this particular history of progressive ideology, returning to the rise of education during the Enlightenment as a central concern of liberal protestants, and the rather different ways the idea of reason was there configured and developed.²

Anna Barbauld was one of the most notable eighteenth-century women educationists who wrote directly for children. Her first poetry was published in 1773, and she was considered a talented literary woman even before she wrote her popular Early Lessons (1778) and Hymns in Prose (1781). She went on to write further poetry, tracts, sermons, hymns, essays and criticism. Here was a leading woman writer whose educational work was contiguous with her role as a civic personage, who crossed easily and gracefully from the discourse of political polemic to that of poetry, from educative stories for children to literary parody and learned criticism. As a result, however, her reputation was ambiguous.

On the one hand, she was remembered as a leading representative of liberal dissent and an almost perfect exemplar of eighteenth-century civility. According to her niece, ‘she was possessed of great beauty, distinct traces of which remained to the latest period of her life. Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair, with the bloom of perfect health.’³ She was an outstanding conversationalist, witty and subtle in thought, brave and elevated in writing, liberal in her opinions, just and reasonable in her attitudes to children, friends and (most notably) other writers. ‘I always wish to find great virtues where there are great talents, and to love what I admire’, wrote the bluestocking Mrs Montagu, queen of London’s literary society, in 1774, ‘so, to tell you the truth, I made many enquiries into your character as soon as I was acquainted with your works, and it gave me intimate pleasure to find the moral character returned the lustre it received from the mental accomplishments’.⁴

On the other hand, following the French Revolution of 1789 she became, like other dissenters and radicals, alienated from the growing conservative hegemony and was publicly denigrated. By the early nineteenth century, the urbane civic world of her upbringing – the world in which she had been so admired – had hardened into a public arena of unrest and hostility, marked by war, scarcity, rampant industrialisation, evangelical religiosity and romantic nationalism. The swingeing attacks made on her last poem in 1812 have acquired lasting notoriety,⁵ as has Lamb’s famous diatribe against ‘the cursed Barbauld crew, the blasts and blights of all that is human in man and child’,⁶ while Coleridge’s coarse name-calling still induces a feeling of distaste.⁷ Yet it is important for historians of education to recognise the political and gendered nature of these attacks, if they are to appreciate the radical nature of her thought, and the ways in which her educational views sprang from what Marlon Ross has called her position of ‘double dissent’ – as both a woman and a dissenter.⁸

Anna Barbauld (1743-1825) was born Anna Laetitia Aikin, daughter of Dr John Aikin and his wife, Jane Jennings. Both her parents were well educated and came from rational dissenting families. Until she was fifteen and her brother eleven her father ran a boys’ school for the sons of dissenters at Kibworth. When a new dissenting academy was formed at Warrington, John Aikin was appointed Tutor in Languages and Belles Lettres. Three years later he became Tutor in Divinity in succession to Dr John Taylor of Norwich, while Joseph Priestley was chosen to fill his former post. Priestley was already known for his knowledge of natural philosophy, though he had not begun his experiments with electricity nor yet made his discovery of oxygen. Other residents included men and women who shone in literature, science and theology, and whose liberal humanism and wide learning were outstanding. Anna Barbauld’s niece Lucy Aikin wrote later,

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could boast of brighter names in literature or science than several of these dissenting tutors – humbly content in an obscure town, and on a scanty pittance … They and theirs lived together like one large family, and in the facility of their intercourse they found large compensation for its deficiency in luxury and splendour.⁹

The history of liberal social progress from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century is, in a large part, the history of Rational Dissent, later known as Unitarianism. The causes of women’s emancipation¹⁰ and education¹¹, science and technology, the alleviation of urban poverty, political reform and the abolition of slavery¹² were all promoted by a handful of enlightened Unitarian families connected by this particular form of dissenting Christianity. All Dissenters denounced the privileges of the established church and objected to its episcopalian traditions and rituals. However, unlike Methodists and the ranks of so-called ‘New Dissent’, Rational Dissenters embraced a radical theology, denying the doctrines of the Trinity and original sin, and therefore of Christ’s separate act of redemption for the sins of humankind. The worship of Christ as part of God seemed unnecessary as well as blasphemous to them because they did not believe that humankind was estranged from God. Their democratic and liberal approach to the scriptures – based on the view that all people could read and interpret them, and that all had access to salvation – thus denied the hierarchical ecclesiology of the Book of Common Prayer.

The very conditions of their existence as religious communities made Rational Dissenters alert to the threat which the state, including the Church of England, always posed to their autonomy.¹³ Their belief that the independent action of rational individuals should be left to regulate matters in everyday life, and that individuals should be free to read and write, to worship at any religious gathering, and to educate their children however they wished, showed their deep tolerance for difference and diversity. Central to this belief in diversity and freedom was education. Priestley wrote on the essential breadth of liberal education:

By natural philosophy we mean the knowledge of the external world, but by moral philosophy we mean the knowledge of the structure of our own minds, and its various affections and operations, of which it must be acknowledged that very little is yet known, but into which we begin to get some light, especially from the observations of Mr Hobbes, Mr Locke, and, above all, Dr Hartley. This knowledge of human nature is the proper groundwork of every thing that is called political knowledge, or a knowledge of the interests and conduct of men as connected in society ….¹⁴

Anna Barbauld’s association with Joseph Priestley and his wife was early, adoring, and for her critically influential. He had arrived at Warrington Academy when she was eighteen, encouraged her to write and publish her first poetry, and contributed to the open, rational and affectionate intellectual exchange that she had already experienced with her father, a colleague and friend of Priestley. Priestley was always a contentious figure. His History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786) became notorious as assaults upon received religion. He was a prominent intellectual of Rational Dissent, experimenting and teaching across a broad front in the confident belief that the natural sciences provided evidence of the unfolding of divine purpose. Anna Aikin (as she was then) was deeply aware of his radical sympathies and devotion to natural philosophy, both of which are ironically juxtaposed in her early poem, The Mouse’s Petition to Doctor Priestley having been Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night by Dr Priestley, For the Sake of Making Experiments with Different Kinds of Air (1773):

If e’er thy breast with freedom glowed,
And spumed a tyrant’s chain
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain …

The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.¹⁵

Her witty poem about his study – Tapers and books, a strange mixed olio,/From shilling touch to pompous folio’ – was tragically prophetic in that, twenty years later, his study was to be ransacked by a hostile ‘King and Country’ mob, his books and instruments destroyed.

Like all Rational Dissenting academies, Warrington was deeply committed to the works of Locke. Locke’s writings had covered a wide range of subjects, but it was the overall intellectual scheme explicated in his Two Treatises of Government that gave Rational Dissent its moral and political justification and placed his philosophy firmly on the dissenting academy curriculum. It was written towards the end of the seventeenth century in opposition to Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Filmer, a hierarchical Anglican, had argued that humans were by biological and theological necessity born into a state of helpless physical and legal impotence, that they live their lives as the property of a sovereign power whose authority had been conferred on Adam, the first father, directly by God, and that all subsequent fathers had enjoyed a similar authority over their children, as kings had over their subjects. To Locke the idea of such absolute power over other humans, particularly such total despotism over children, was blasphemous. Locke held that the legitimacy of the legal order which existed among mankind was derived solely from their acceptance of it. For Locke (as for Rational Dissenters), authority works upwards as humans confront each other in a social world created by the intricate patterns of their own compulsions. Thoughtless servility carries a moral burden, so that, when civil or religious liberty is threatened, there is an individual responsibility to make explicit dignified but total dissent. As John Dunn writes regarding Locke’s ideas,

Even the stupid have souls and hence cannot escape from their responsibility for the cognition of their elementary duties, both religious and political… In the relationship with God in which, through the mediation of grace, they come to know the truths of religion, all men are equal.¹⁶

That Anna Barbauld absorbed these philosophical lessons is clear from several of the treatises she wrote. Civic Sermons to the People (1792) and Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1791) are model statements of Lockean principle on the proper basis of civic consent and the imperative of dignified dissent, while in her sermon Reasons for National Penitence (1793) she wrote,

The energy of laws is instrumental, and secondary only; and they derive their sanction and authority from the will of the people. I have reverted to the origin of civil government, that it might clearly appear to you, that every one of you is involved in the guilt of public and national offences.¹⁷

Indeed, like other Rational Dissenters, she was politically active in several Opposition campaigns of the 1770s and 1780s. She condemned the British war against the American colonies and spoke out against the slave trade. Her famous poem Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) on the rejection of his bill for the abolition of the slave trade showed again her commitment to civil rights and the freedom of the individual. It has a modern radical reson...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: The Emergence of Progressive Women Educators
• PART TWO: The Struggle for Better Education for Middle-Class Women
• PART THREE: Work and Professional Life for Lower Middle-Class Women
• PART FOUR: The Poor Child – Women and the Progressive Challenge to the Elementary System
• PART FIVE: Women Theorists in the Early Twentieth Century
• Select Bibliography
• Index