Women and Education, 1800–1980

223 Pages·2004·1.016 MB·English

by  Jane Martin, Joyce Goodman (auth.)

Women and
Education,
1800–1980
Jane Martin
Joyce Goodman
WOMEN AND EDUCATION, 1800–1980
Women and
Education, 1800–1980
Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman
© Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman 2004
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First published 2004 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-94722-7 ISBN 978-1-4039-4407-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4039-4407-8
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin,Jane,1959–
Women and education,1800–1980 / Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-333-94721-0 (cloth)
1.Women in education—Great Britain—History—19th century.
2.Women in education—Great Britain—History—20th century.3.Women
educators—Great Britain—Biography. I.Goodman,Joyce,1946– II.Title.
LC2042.M37 2003
370(cid:2).82(cid:2)0941—dc21 2003051442
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Changing Lives? Women,
Educational Reform and Personal Identities, 1800–1980 1
1 Individual Lives and Social Histories 7
Auto/biography and situated knowledges 13
Professions, communities, citizenship and the state 16
Group biography and friendship networks 23
2 Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) and the
‘Plan of Pestalozzi’ 27
Edinburgh circles 34
Afemale romanticism? 37
National identities and professionalizing motherhood 39
A‘safe’ path? 43
3 Sarah Austin (1793–1867): ‘Voices of Authority’
and National Education 48
Early life and political strategies 50
The gendered politics of ‘voice’ 55
The politics and pedagogy of universal popular education 62
The politics and pedagogy of education for
working-class women and girls 65
The gendered politics of historical memory 70
4 Jane Chessar (1835–80): From ‘Surplus’Woman
to Professional Educator 72
Early life and social background 73
In search of status 78
Educational administration 88
5 Mary Dendy (1855–1933) and Pedagogies of Care 97
Mary Dendy and eugenics 101
Auto/biographical practices and family histories 105
Community and pedagogy at Sandlebridge 110
Post-script 116
v
vi Contents
6 Shena Simon (1883–1972) and the
‘Religion of Humanity’ 118
London youth: in public and in private 119
Manchester politician: in public and in private 123
Statutory woman: in public and in private 129
The comprehensive ideal 136
7 Margaret Cole (1893–1980): Following the Road of
Educational and Social Progress 141
Writing women’s lives: subjectivity,
representation, narrative 145
Introducing Margaret Cole: biographical notes 147
Ways of seeing I: auto/biographical spaces 152
Ways of seeing II: political spaces 160
Making connections between auto/biographical spaces 166
8 Conclusion: Individual Lives and
Educational Histories 169
Autobiographical starting points: Jane – chemistry
lessons and egalitarian projects 170
Autobiographical starting points: Joyce – illusions
and contradictions of female authority and
becoming a professor 171
Our autobiographical ‘turn’ 172
The ‘turn’ of the six auto/biographical women 173
Notes 184
Bibliography 187
Index 204
Acknowledgements
This book began life in the history of education network within the
European Educational Research Association. Travelling together to
the annual conference in Lahti, Finland, 1999, we pooled ideas and
hammered out themes for this joint project. We are grateful to
numerous people for many reasons, for example for enjoyable and
useful discussions on joint interests and although we can’t name
everyone thank you. We also want to thank each other!
Most of all, Jane owes a special debt of gratitude to the late
Brian Simon and his wife, Joan, for their warm support, advice and
encouragement during the research on Shena Simon. They were
unfailingly helpful and memorably hospitable at all times. Brian read
and commented on Chapter 6 in this book offering sound advice and
thoughtful discussion. Jane would also like to thank Christina
Hughes for her friendship, warm support and encouragement over
the long term. She also read and commented on parts of the book.
During the research Jane worked at University College Northampton
and London Metropolitan University and would like to thank both
institutions for their material support and her colleagues within
them for friendship and discussions. Special thanks go to Elizabeth
Burn and Chris Richards for useful suggestions on Chapter 4.
There is also a debt of gratitude to the staff at the following libraries
and archives: Girton College, the London School of Economics,
Manchester Central Reference Library, London Metropolitan Archive,
Newnham College, the North London Collegiate School, and the
TUC Library Collection at London Metropolitan University. Last, but
not least, Jane wants to thank her husband, Paul, who has been
unstinting in his support.
Joyce wishes to thank King Alfred’s College for the support that
made much of this research possible, particularly the small scale
research grant that facilitated research in the Cheshire Record Office
on the Sandlebridge archive and the travel grants that enabled ear-
lier versions of the work on Elizabeth Hamilton and Sarah Austin to
be presented at ANZHES in Auckland and Melbourne. Anumber of
people have been particularly encouraging: Kay Morris-Matthews,
whose commitment to the history of women’s education is inspir-
ing, Marjorie Theobald, who pointed out that Hamilton’s complete
vii
viii Acknowledgements
works had reached Australian libraries, Annemieke van Drenth for
sharing her early work in the gendered history of special education,
Ruth Watts, whose question about the compatibility of Dendy’s
hereditarian views with earlier Unitarian thinking framed the argu-
ment of one chapter and Bridget Egan, who read and commented in
a critically supportive way over a number of years on earlier ver-
sions of Hamilton, Austin and Dendy. Thanks are due to librarians
and archivists at the Cheshire Record Office, Melbourne University
archives and to Liz Fletcher in King Alfred’s Library, whose help in
tracking down articles and books at busy moments was invaluable.
Particular thanks must also be given to the East Cheshire National
Health Care Trust for granting permission to view the closed records
of the Mary Dendy Hospital, Great Warford, Alderley Edge,
Cheshire and to Dr John Dendy for help in the fruitless quest to track
down Mary Dendy’s diary. While the book was in press, Lily Rusby,
Joyce’s much loved aunt died. Joyce would like to acknowledge her
debt of gratitude to Lily, whose stories were important to the devel-
opment of her ideas about women’s education, employment and
family lives.
Introduction: Changing
Lives? Women, Educational
Reform and Personal
Identities, 1800–1980
In 1873, 38-year-old Jane Agnes Chessar was elected to serve on the
new single-purpose educational authority called the London School
Board. She had already won for herself considerable standing in the
metropolis, where she spent most of her adult life, and was returned
with the support of some among the leadership of the nineteenth-
century women’s movement. Her successful election illustrates the
tenacity of the social relationships that underlay feminist organi-
zations due to her close connections with the Langham Place group,
established in the 1850s and named after its cultural centre in
London’s West End. Employment in teacher education meant she
shared professional concerns with the headmistress, Frances Buss,
and with Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge,
who were both equally dedicated to the foundation of new educa-
tional opportunities for women. Emily Davies was a very close
friend of the pioneer doctor, Elizabeth Garrett, another prominent
member of the Langham Place Circle. This forum served as a con-
duit for political patronage in the school board division of
Marylebone, where Jane Chessar took over the Garrett seat. Jane was
forced to retire from public life on grounds of ill-health but contin-
ued to demonstrate a political will and strength of purpose in her
approach to education. The circumstances surrounding her death
tell their own story. In August 1880, Jane Chessar and Frances Buss
travelled to Brussels for an educational congress. Jane was never to
return. She died there of cerebral apoplexy less than a month later.
All but written out of history, Jane Chessar was an educated
woman who had both a career and a fulfilling personal life. She
questioned the dominant discourses of her time by crossing the line
between the public and private spheres: turning her back on tradi-
tional sources of identity, such as wifehood and motherhood, and
1
2 Women and Education, 1800–1980
defining herself in terms of her profession. Her highly visible
location as a member of the London School Board prompted much
speculation, focus and interest regarding the impact of the female
presence and her story highlights the dilemmas that women face
in educational leadership. Female leaders complicate and partly
contradict the general connection of authority with masculinity.
This association remains relatively intact in the field of educational
leadership, where the voices and actions of female leaders are often
confined to patrolling the margins, ubiquitous but largely
unrecorded. Indeed, you could be forgiven if you failed to question
the presumption of male domination over women and unequal
power relations that characterize the gendering of educational
work in orthodox accounts. All too frequently, it seemed women
were only present as ‘victims’ of educational gender differentiation:
the principle of male-as-norm positioned the female pupil as the
‘Other’; discourses of masculinity and femininity positioned the
waged female worker as teacher, rather than leader.
Beginning in the late 1980s, we have collected data on British
women educators, feminists and leaders in the period 1800–1980.
We were motivated by the absence of women in orthodox accounts
of British education generally, as well as the exemplar of feminist
revisionism. To read Carol Dyhouse’s Girls Growing Up in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England, first published in 1981, was inspi-
rational, moving issues of gender from the margins to the centre
without losing sight of the interacting dynamics of social class.
Dyhouse’s primary focus is on experiences of growing up, but she
also pursues the links between feminism and girls’ education
through the period studied. In so doing, she discusses the contribu-
tion of leading female educationists in the development of state
schooling and the new girls’ high schools and university colleges for
women. This whole process of revision throws doubt upon the
orthodoxy that neglects the role women have played as political
actors in the establishment of state education. It amply illustrates
the exceptional woman who penetrates particular powerful groups
of white, male elites. Patricia Hollis’s Ladies Elect. Women in English
Local Government, 1865–1914 (1987) has become a classic, and a few
other histories focus upon the gender/power relations in educa-
tional administration (Turnbull, 1983; Dyhouse, 1987; Hunt, 1991;
Martin, 1999; Goodman and Harrop, 2000). While not discounting
the centrality and influence of class in this context, feminist scholar-
ship has served to illuminate and explicate gender differentials and