WOMENS SOURCE LIBRARY
WOMENS SOURCE LIBRARY
VOLUME I
The Education Papers
Edited by Dale Spender
VOLUME II
The Radical Womens Press of the 1850s
Edited by Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae
VOLUME III
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group
Edited by Candida Ann Lacey
VOLUME IV
The Revolution in Words
Edited by Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae
VOLUME V
Before the Vote was Won
Edited by Jane Lewis
VOLUME VI
The Sexuality Debates
Edited by Sheila Jeffreys
VOLUME VII
Womens Fabian Tracts
Edited by Sally Alexander
VOLUME VIII
Suffrage and the Pankhursts
Edited by Jane Marcus
VOLUME IX
The Non-Violent Militant
Edited by Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald
Womens Source Library
VOLUME I
The Education Papers
Womens Quest for Equality in Britain, 18501912
Edited by
Dale Spender
First published 1987 by Routledge
This edition first published 2001
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
First issued in paperback 2010
Editorial material and selection 1987, 2001 Dale Spender; individual owners retain copyright in their own material.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 978-0-415-25669-8 (Set)
ISBN 978-0-415-25686-5 (hbk) (Volume 1)
ISBN 978-0-415-60636-3 (pbk) (Volume 1)
Publishers note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original book may be apparent.
Acknowledgments
Without the great generosity of David Doughan, the competent typing of Glynis Wood, the excellent research skills of Kelley Atkinson and the organisational aptitude of Candida Lacey, this volume would not exist.
Introduction
In 1792, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the classic analysis of educational inequality, Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that there could be no sexual equality without educational equality. In stating her case Mary Wollstonecraft made it clear that she not only believed sexual equality to be desirable and attainable and inextricably linked with learning she also set some of the terms for the sexual educational debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when she insisted that both sexes be educated equally.
Does equal education mean that girls and boys should have the same education? And if so, what sort of same education should they be given? Should girls receive the same education that boys have had for centuries, or should the needs and interests of girls be taken into account and the education of boys modified so that it is equally appropriate for girls? Or does equal education mean equal educational opportunity? And what does this mean, anyway?
Or perhaps equal education may mean different education but of equal duration, or equal status. For there have been those who have argued that as the two sexes have different roles to play in society they therefore have very different needs and that these should be reflected in very different educational provision. But while the education of girls might be different it would still be equal in that it was an equally useful, viable or appropriate education for their sex.
As can be seen, there were (and are) many interpretations of equal education and they can lead to very different outcomes. This is why the question of what an equal education might be dominated the debates of the nineteenth century and continues to be a controversial and crucial concern even today. And when Mary Wollstonecraft raised the issue of equal education and the consequences it would have for the sexes and society she was by no means the first to formulate the framework.
It comes as something of a surprise because such information has been suppressed and this is itself another aspect of educational inequality to find that there were critiques of sex role conditioning even before Mary Wollstonecrafts protest. In 1790, Catherine Macaulay, who was acutely aware of the role education played in the construction of male supremacy, had also taken the stand that there was no need to resort to biological explanations to account for the ostensible supremacy of the male sex. Wherever and whenever significant intellectual sex differences emerged, she argued in Letters on Education, they could be readily explained in terms of differences in education. And so too did Catherine Macaulay contend that when the two sexes received an equal education the outcome would be intellectual equality.
The principles were much the same in the eighteenth century as they are today. The apparent intellectual supremacy of men was used as a justification for the greater power and authority of men, and while there were some who saw the advantages enjoyed by men as inevitable and natural there were others who saw such advantages as man-made and who sought to end the preferential educational treatment males provided for their own sex.
But if the principles were much the same in the eighteenth century the context certainly was not. For while today, theoretically, women have the same access as men to education, this was not the case in the eighteenth century when there was a stark contrast between the educational opportunities available to women and those available to men.
Quite simply men were allowed formal education and women were not. In such a context there was little need for educational debate. The issue was primarily one of quantity rather than quality. The undisputed strategy for those who were interested in the welfare of women and justice in society was to call for educational provision for women which was equal to that provided for men.
That in the eighteenth century men were allowed learning and women were not was demonstrable: that this was a relatively recent development was also evident. For again, what is not widely recognised nor fully appreciated is that there was a decline in the education of women after the sixteenth century and there is more than one reason for this deterioration.
Firstly there was a shift in attitude towards learned ladies after the sixteenth century with a marked increase in hostility to women who would be educated. So only the brave like Mary Wollstonecraft could take the taunts and torments that were directed against the intellectual woman, and it is therefore understandable that the number of educated females should be very small. Such antagonism towards intellectual women, however, had not always prevailed. In the sixteenth century, while it had by no means been common, it had certainly been possible for a woman to be educated without causing undue offence. Sir Thomas More, for example, was just one father who believed that learning could agree equally with both sexes and that his daughter should be as well-educated as any son (see Antonia Fraser, 1984: 122).
