Feminists and Bureaucrats: A Study in the Development of Girls' Education in the Nineteenth Century

257 Pages·1980·4.112 MB·English

by  Sheila Fletcher

Feminists and Bureaucrats
To Ralph, who was both
FeminiasntdBs u reaucrats
A study in the development of girls' education
in the nineteenth century
SHEILA FLETCHER
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
LONDON NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE
MELBOURNE SYDNEY
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
FletchSehre,i la.
Feminiasntdsb ureaucrats.
Bibliography: p.
Includiensd ex.
1.E ducatioofwn o men- Englan-dH isto2r.yP .u blsicch ools,
Endowe(dG reBarti ta3i.nE )d ucatiaonnds ta-teEn glan-d
HistoIr.yT .i tle.
LC2052.F5367 6'.94729 -20630
ISBN9 78-0-521-22h8a8r0d-b0a ck
ISBN9 78-0-521-08p0a4p8e-r4b ack
Contents
Prif a ce
vn
Introduction: The Endowed Schools Act 1
1 The shaping of Section 12 12
2 The men who rejected the dead hand 30
3 The money problem 53
4 Opponents 70
5 Supporters 86
6 What was achieved 103
7 The changeover of 1874 119
8 The long haul 133
9 The Charity Commission spirit 151
IO The women's movement in the later years 171
Appendices
Schemes approved by 31 December 1874 which provided
for the secondary education of girls 192
2 Schemes submitted to the Education Department by
31 December 1874 (but approved after that date) which
provided for the secondary education of girls 199
3 Schools for girls established by Schemes made 1869-1903 203
4 Schemes approved 1875-1903 which provided for the
secondary education of girls 204
Notes 218
Select bibliography 238
Index 243

Preface
This is a study of the relative commitment of two groups ofV ictorian
administrators, the Endowed Schools Commissioners and the
Charity Commissioners, to promoting the education of girls under
the Endowed Schools Act, 1869. It is based on a thesis which was
supervised by Professor 0. R. McGregor of London University (now
Lord McGregor) and the sources used come largely from the Public
Record Office.
The selection of data needs a word of explanation. The Record
Office holds, in its Ed. 27 class, several thousand files which record
the work of both sets of Commissioners in making Schemes under
the Endowed Schools Acts to reorganise the grammar schools. Only
some of these Schemes include provision for girls and it is this group
which has been scrutinised, leaving unmapped a very large hinter­
land which must contain a number of cases where the Commissioners
did their best to provide for girls but were unsuccessful. Ideally, of
course, the whole field of their endeavour should be surveyed as the
essential context of what they achieved in this particular area, but
an enquiry of such magnitude lies beyond the individual researcher.
It seems, in any case, unlikely that the whole corpus of material
would reveal attitudes quite at variance with those which emerge
from the 'successful' sample; and this view is confirmed by the pilot
study of the West Riding of Yorkshire which forms the basis of
chapter 2 and rests on a scrutiny of every Scheme establishing a
secondary school in that area, whether it provided for girls or not.
I am obliged to the Comptroller of Her Majesty's Stationery
Office for permission to make use of Crown Copyright material. I
would also like to express my thanks to Jeffrey Ede, who was Keeper
of the Public Record Office, and to Tom Donovan and Derek Steer,
who were in charge of the Ashridge Repository at the time my
research was undertaken. I am indebted to the Trustees of the
British Library, to the Mistress and Fellows of Girton College,
Vlll PREFACE
Cambridge, the Governors of the North London Collegiate School,
the Yorkshire Ladies' Council of Education, the Trustees of the
Chatsworth Settlement, the Goodwood Estate Company Ltd, the
National Trust, the Girls' Public Day School Trust, the Governors
of Berkhamsted School, the Governors of Nottingham High School
and the Secondary Heads Association for permission to make use of
archive material.
Over a period of several years, during the preparation of the thesis
and of the book, I have had encouragement and critical advice from
Dr Gillian Sutherland of Newnham College, Cambridge. To her
more than anyone my thanks are due; it would indeed be hard to
assess what I owe to her scholarship and generosity.
Many friends have put themselves out to discuss this work or help
in other ways and I am most grateful to Barney Blackley, Cecily
Blackley, Margaret Bottomley, Margaret Gardner, Pamela Hawker,
Dick and Sylvia Wheeler, Emily White and Eric Wightman. Par­
ticular thanks are due to my friend and colleague Trevor May for his
meticulous scrutiny of the final text. I am also indebted to Pat
Bromley, Pauline Hughes and Doreen Jones for their co-operative
and expert typing.
Finally, I must say I owe a great deal to the interest and judgement
of my son-in-law, Robert Green, over a long period, and (over an
even longer period) to the forbearance of my daughters.
January 1979 S.F.
Introduction: The Endowed Schools Act
The result of all this movement .•.w as one of the best measures in the history of
this government of good measures.
John Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 1903
It is not fashionable these days, either for historians of education or
for those interested in women's history, to dwell on the importance of
Acts of Parliament. For one thing, we have learnt that there is more
to life than ever appears in the statute book; that it will not do to
pursue Education Acts 'like mountain goats, jumping from peak to
peak'1 nor to subsume the complex progress of women towards eman­
cipation into little more than the campaign for the vote. To devote
much time, then, to a minor statute largely concerned with the for­
mal schooling of the Victorian middle classes calls for some sort of
justification. And broadly this must rest upon the interest which
should attach to the Endowed Schools Act, 1869, as an early essay in
social engineering and one which unusually, if not uniquely, singled
out girls as beneficiaries.
It is important to understand the bureaucratic pretensions of this
measure. If, in the nineties, our education system could be likened by
Morant to a house built by someone 'working spasmodically on odd
portions of the structure on quite isolated plans . . . his very best
efforts . . . r endered abortive by the fact that . . . h e possesses no
clearly thought-out plan of the structure as a whole', 2 it can only be
said that this Act was not to blame. Its purpose was to provide
machinery to operate a very well-thought-out plan: namely, the
methodical reorganisation of the old grammar schools so as to ensure
that everywhere in England middle-class parents, from clerks to
country gentlemen, would find their wants supplied. It is actually the
case that, in point of time, power was taken here to give them secon­
dary schools before it was taken to give them elementary schools, or
even drains. When the work was attempted the man put in charge of
it, Lord Lyttelton, averred that he and his colleagues 'never meant to
2 THE ENDOWED SCHOOLS ACT
introduce that phalansterian system, as it may be called, that has
been imputed to us . . . t o cut up the country into so many squares,
and have so many schools in each square'.3 They may not
have meant to; but if they had, they would have done no more
than work to the drawings prepared for them by the Taunton
Commission, that great inquiry into secondary education whose
very drastic recommendations they had been appointed to carry
out.
Had all gone as planned, then, Robert Morant would have inherited
an education building with a well-ordered secondary wing where the
superstructure really matched the foundations. The fact that the plan
failed should not distract us either from the boldness of the conception
or from the importance of what was possibly its most original com­
ponent: that endowment should be taken from the old foundations to
establish grammar schools for girls. At a time when, to all intents and
purposes, secondary schools for girls did not exist, when hardly anyone
wished them to exist, this Act created them.
It has not been much praised for it. Admiration attaches more
readily to individuals than to Acts of Parliament. Although the cli­
mate of apathy and prejudice in which this pioneering measure was
administered was precisely that in which those pioneering women -
Frances Buss, Maria Grey and Emily Davies -also laboured for girls'
education, they are more acclaimed in the standard histories. There,
legislation is essentially bloodless and we read of what was done under
an Act as if it was done by no human agency.
The Endowed Schools Act of 1869 is well fitted to dispel this illu­
sion. A good deal of blood was spilt over it at one time; and even with
the passage of years, in the last decades of the nineteenth century
when it no longer attracted headlines, its operation was fiercely
opposed. This is not surprising since it authorised Commissioners
more or less completely to overturn the past in an endeavour to adapt
the endowed schools to the needs of contemporary society. They
could combine or divide endowments, alter governing bodies and
curricula, impose fees and abolish those restrictions which so often
had had the effect of making the grammar schools an Anglican pre­
serve. In the same innovatory spirit they could take money away from
boys' schools to benefit girls; an extraordinary provision, but of a
piece with the rest of the Act which in its every clause seemed
meddling, destructive, even sacrilegious to many people. For it broke
with the practice of administering charities in conformity with the