Related Papers
History of Education
'"Young Ladies' Institutions": the development of secondary schools for girls in Scotland, 1833-c. 1870', History of Education, 32 (3), May 2003, pp. 249-272.
Lindy Moore
This article looks at the development of ‘Young Ladies’ Institutions’, a term often used by contemporaries for a select group of influential Scottish day schools for middle-class girls, mostly based in Edinburgh or Glasgow, which were in existence between 1833 and about 1870. The schools were established to counter the prevailing practice by middle-class pupils of moving between different teachers in different locations for different subjects, and arbitrarily selecting subjects to study in a ‘cafeteria’ mode. The characteristics of the YLIs were: 1) their large size, ranging from 64 or 80 pupils in 1836 to 170 or even over 300 in the 1840s and 1850s. 2) That they saw themselves as part of the public educational provision of urban education. The teachers and directors courted public attention and provided information about their pedagogy and facilities and provided access to the classes. 3) The schools were taught and managed by leading male teachers, either as propriety institutions or partnerships. Women provided support, generally as supervisory governesses, and more rarely as designated teachers of subjects such as dancing or music. The post of ‘lady superintendent’ was however extremely important, as the woman permanently on site, who managed the overall arrangements that had been laid down by the male directors. In 1834 the directors of the Scottish Institution for the Education of Young Ladies (Edinburgh) paid their lady superintendent a salary of 150 guineas. The directors encouraged pupils to follow a comprehensive and rounded curriculum by offering an all-in package of subjects for a slump fee, although they too, had to make single subjects available to gain sufficient pupils. Most of the schools offered various types of science, some of it taught innovatively and some also provided mathematics. Competitive learning was also a feature of the class teaching. By the 1860s the schools were losing their dynamism and could not compete with the creation of the huge endowed girls’ day schools, the first initiated by the Merchant Company of Edinburgh in 1871 with 1200 pupils on its roll. Nevertheless in the early nineteenth century the YLIs had an influence out of proportion to their numbers or size. Many of the teachers and directors emphasised the value of an intellectual education for girls, and some made more feminist statements. But the fact that the management and teaching of these prestigious schools was by men also gave out contradictory messages about the opportunities available for women and the relative status of female teachers. Furthermore the existence of the schools encouraged Scottish complacency about educational standards for girls into the twentieth century.
Educating for the women's sphere: domestic training versus intellectual discipline' in: Breitenbach, E. and Gordon, E. (eds), Out of Bounds: Women in the Public Domain in Scotland 1830-1950 (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 10-41.
1992 •
Lindy Moore
This chapter provides a detailed account of the campaign to ensure that all Scottish girls took sewing as a school subject, followed by pressure to ensure that other domestic economy subjects such as cookery, laundry and hygiene were introduced into the girls’ curriculum. The working-class family was seen as the basic socialising unit, centred around the wife and mother who had received a moral, religious and domestic training, preferably in separate ‘female schools of industry’, where they learnt needlework and where possible, cookery, laundry work and cleaning, under the management of upper and upper-middle class women. Throughout the century there was also considerable opposition to this educational development. This was partly due to a belief that intellectual discipline was the best means of developing an intelligent, moral and cultured individual, but it also resulted from the inertia of custom, opposition of teachers and initial shortage of female teachers, lack of funding and the tradition of mixed elementary schools. The ensuing debate involved members of the nobility, gentry, school inspectors, civil servants, educationalists, the Churches, parents and middle-class women. The conflict between demands for a better intellectual education for girls and demands for a specifically domestic training for them led to ambiguities and inconsistencies on the part of both individuals and institutions. It was a subject women were prepared to speak out about and while conservative women wished to maintain the existing social and gender hierarchy at a time of political unrest, the movement was also supported towards the end of the century by middle-class feminists who wanted to raise the overall status of women’s domestic role. A campaign to introduce sewing into girls’ schooling began in the 1820s and in the 1850s an influential ladies’ society was formed for this purpose. Financial pressure was put on the denominational teacher training colleges by the London-based Privy Council. Two-year supplementary courses for pupils who remained at elementary schools after the age of 12 were introduced in 1903 and these finally achieved a syllabus in which the girls spent most of every afternoon in domestic economy. These various schemes impacted on the academic curriculum of both female pupils and female teachers and the appointment of female teachers was part of the feminisation of the girls’ curriculum, rather than a perception of school mistresses as equal academic and professional colleagues.
Twentieth Century British History
Women, Mobility, and Education in Twentieth-century England and Wales: A New Analytical Approach
2021 •
Stanley Ulijaszek
The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women’s intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education. This article develops a historically informed gauge of educational attainment—the Educational Cohort Code (ECC). Applying that gauge to the experiences of women in twentieth-century UK, we make two key claims: first, that despite the prevalence of narratives of progress and mobility in individual and collective accounts of women’s education, there were considerable intergenerational continuities in women’s educational status across the period. Second, that the expansion of educational opportunities across the twentieth century had a differential impact for women and for men and that this differentiation destabilizes categorizations of class solely based on male occupational hierarchies. By appl...
The role of women in education of the working classes - 1870-1904
1992 •
Jane Martin
Focusing upon the twenty-nine female members of the London School Board, this thesis examines the position of women Involved with the institution of elementary education in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. It is usually assumed that the responsibility for mass schooling mostly lay with men working within both central and local government, I have gone beyond this perspective in order to examine the problem of class and gender as competing power structures in the development of an English school system. The Issue of gender Is addressed by investigating both gender relations on the various School Boards for London, and the relationship between contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity and elementary education between 1870 and 1904. In exploring the ways in which the social inequalities of gender shaped and influenced women's experience of public office, the study goes some way towards correcting the emphasis upon predominantly male agents in existing historical accoun...
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
2014 •
Rosalind Carr
Reviews in History
The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women in Civic Life in Scotland c.1870–1914 (Reviews in History)
2010 •
Malcolm Noble
With Katie Barclay, ‘Rewriting the Scottish Canon: the Contribution of Women’s and Gender History to a Redefinition of Social Classes’, Etudes écossaises, 16 (2013), pp. 11-28.
Rosalind Carr
THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH GIRLS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORKING CLASSES
1988 •
Deborah Simonton
Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education
The Edinburgh history of education in Scotland, edited by Robert Anderson, Mark Freeman, and Lindsay Paterson, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, 384 pp., ISBN 978-0-74867-915-7
2018 •
Pieter Dhondt
A Monstrous Regiment of Women? (introduction to Women in Scotland)
Elizabeth Ewan
