The reform of female education was one of the many campaigns of the nineteenth-century women's movement that gathered momentum during the 1860s. The education of
middle-class girls throughout the Victorian period was non-standardized and took place mainly at home, being administered by family members or governesses. Often their education also included some years at a private school.1 The traditional understanding of the emergence of the education movement is one of a "female rebellion"
against an intellectually deficient education that was directed solely at making middle-class girls
marriageable. Hence Ray Strachey, in her classical account of the nineteenth century women's movement, entitled her chapter dealing with girls' education "The Revelation of Ignorance" and characterized the common attitude towards female education at the time of the formation of the women's movement as : "girls must be
^Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Groom Helm, 1982), p. 20; June Purvis, A History of Women's Education in England (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), p. 65; M.Jeanne Peterson, Family. Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian
Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chapter 2.
prepared to achieve matrimony in a difficult and
overcrowded market; and how would arithmetic do this? Girls' education was non-vocational in terms of paid employment, and focused on the training in
"accomplishments". But rather than assuming that the inevitable outcome of this education was ignorance, more recently, historians have stressed that the main features of this education were its non-standardization and its variability of form and content.^ The argument that girls' education need not necessarily have been shallow and was not exclusively aimed at making them marriageable has been most forcibly put forward by M. Jeanne Peterson in her study of three generations of women of an upper- middle-class family, the Pagets/ Their education, according to Peterson, was
serious and thorough. In this respect they
differed little from the leisured gentlemen who pursued a liberal education in philosophy or biology with no need to make a profession or career of such interest. Similarly, their lives demonstrate that the education of Victorian gentlewomen was not necessarily oriented toward the marriage market. If typical, the experience of the Paget women suggests that a fine
education, whether formally or informally
^Ray Strachey, "The Cause": A Short History of the Women's Movement in Britain (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1928), p. 125. For more recent arguments about the intellectually deficient nature of middle-class girls' education before the 1860s see, for example, Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood
(London: Groom Helm, 1980), part, chapter 2.
^See, for example, Gorham, The Victorian G i r l , pp. 21-24; Purvis, A History, chapter four.
'*M. Jeanne Peterson, "No Angels in the House: The Victorian Myth and the Paget Women", American Historical Review. 89 (1984), pp. 677-708.
obtained, was part of the cultural equipage of the new urban gentry of both sexes.^
Female training in "accomplishments" could encompass a development of thorough artistic and musical skills; knowledge of modern languages, sometimes of ancient
languages, and of scientific subjects.^ That the character of female education in the mid-Victorian period did not necessarily result in women's "ignorance" is, of course, also manifest in the sophistication of the writings of feminists who had grown up in this period. What did characterize female education was its non-vocational outlook and the non-standardized, mainly private, form.
Changes towards the institutionalization of middle- class women's education took place from the mid-century onwards. In 1848 Queen's College was founded in London by the Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice and the Governesses' Benevolent Institution, which had been
established in 1841 to assist gentlewomen in "temporary distress". The college was conceived with the primary intent of raising the educational training of
governesses. The following year, 1849, another college for women was founded in Bedford Square by the Unitarian Mrs Elizabeth Reid, aiming to give women a liberal
education. Unlike Queen's, Bedford College had a mixed governing board. Both colleges admitted girls from the age of twelve, but had many students of a relatively
^ibid., pp. 693-694.
advanced age.^ In 1850 and 1854 Mary Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale opened secondary schools for girls, the North London Collegiate School and the Cheltenham
Ladies's College. Both offered more academically oriented curricula than conventional girls' schools.® The Schools Inquiry Commission (Taunton Commission), which was set up in 1864 and published its reports in 1868, included
girls' schools in the inquiry on the instigation of Emily Davies.® The sisters Emily Shirreff and Maria Grey in 1871 founded the National Union for the Education of Girls of All Classes, which became known as the Women's Education Union. In 1872 the Union set up the Girls' Public Day
School Company to finance the establishment of girls' schools.
®Many women who subsequently became involved in the women's movement attended these colleges. Frances Buss, Dorothea Beale, and Sophia Jex-Blake, for example,
attended Queen's. Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes, for example, attended Bedford. For Queen's and Bedford College see Strachey, "The Cause". pp. 60-63; Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism. 1850-1900
(Tallahassee; Florida State University Press, 1987), pp. 32-33; Purvis, A History, pp. 107-109; Linda Bentley, Educating Women: A Pictorial History of Bedford College, University of London. 1849-1985 (London: Alma Publishers, 1991) .
®Strachey, "The Cause". pp. 126-129; Levine,
Victorian Feminism, pp.33-34; Purvis, A History, pp. 77- 80; Edward W. Ellsworth, Liberators of the Female Mind: The Shirreff Sisters. Educational Reform, and the Women's Movement (Westprot, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 133-139.
®Sheila Fletcher, Feminists and Bureaucrats : A Study in the Development of Girls' Education in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 19-25; Gorham, The Victorian Gir l , pp. 24-25. For the Report see Parliamentary Papers (Session 19 Nov. 1867 - 31 July 1868).
^For the involvement of the sisters in educational reform see Ellsworth, Liberators.
Before the Taunton Commission was set up Emily
Davies had started a campaign to open the Cambridge Local Examinations to women. Oxford and Cambridge examinations had been introduced in the 1850s with the aim of
providing middle-class secondary boys' schools with a standard. In 1863 Cambridge held girls' local examination experimentally, installing them officially in 1865.
Oxford was to follow suit in 1870. The Universities of Durham and Edinburgh opened their local examinations to girls in 1866, The University of London, after having rejected attempts by Jessie Mertion White in 1856 and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in 1862 to be admitted to the matriculation examination, in 1868 established special
examinations for women which were comparable to the local examinations.“ In 1867 the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women was set up with Josephine Butler as its President and Anne Jemina Clough as Secretary, arranging university extension lectures.
University education became available to women when the first women's college was established by Emily Davies in 1869 at Hitchin, Herts. It was moved a few years later to Girton village, in close proximity to Cambridge
University. In the meantime the reforming Cambridge professor, Henry Sidgwick, asked Anne Jemina Clough to
“ Emily Davies, Women in the Universities of England and Scotland (Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1896), pp. 6-14; Levine, Victorian Feminism, pp. 34-36.
“ strachey, "The Cause", pp. 151-153; Purvis, A History, pp. 109-111.
become the residential head of a residence he had rented, and established what was to become Newnham College. The different approaches to women's higher education of Davies and Sidgwick have been well-documented. Davies rejected all ideas of treating women students differently to prove that they were capable of undergoing the same intellectual education as men. Accordingly, she insisted that Girton students should follow exactly the same
curricula as men at Cambridge. They were also required to take the preliminary classics examinations and the degree examinations within the three years and a term as was the case at the male colleges. Sidgwick, on the other hand, believed that most women students did not have the necessary previous preparation for the traditional Cambridge education, which he thought to be outdated anyway. He favoured a more flexible approach, adaptable to the needs of individual women students. At Newnham, students were encouraged to favour courses in the sciences and modern languages over classics, and they were allowed to spend as much or as little time at the
college as they liked. Their different points of view remained a point of friction between Davies and Sidgwick in years to come.
^Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women. 1850-1920 (London: Virago Press, 1985), pp. 125-126; Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men's University - Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975); idem, "Women and Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862-1897", in
Martha Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 117-145; Sara Delamont, "The
In Oxford, women's colleges were established in 1879 with the opening of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College. During the 1880s there was much pressure from the Cambridge women's colleges for the University to award degrees to women. However, in 1881 Cambridge gave permission to women only to sit the examinations and a year later to issue certificates stating the class of the Tripos obtained without granting official degrees. It made these attainable for women in 1922, two years after Oxford University. However, by the 1890s it was widely perceived that higher education was obtainable for women. Although not receiving official degrees, women could
attend colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, and degrees were available at a growing number of universities across
Britain.
At the same time that higher education became available, women gradually entered the medical
profession. The precedent was set when in 1858 Elizabeth
Contradictions in Ladies' Education", in
Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (eds), The Nineteenth- Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (London : Croom Helm, 1978), p. 156ff; Barbara Stephen, Girton College. 1869-1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933)/ Daphne Bennett, Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women (1830-1921) (London: André Deutsch, 1990) .
^^In 1880 the co-educational Victoria University was founded in Manchester; in 1882 Westfield Colleges was founded; in 1890 at Queen Margaret College, Glasgow, a school of medicine for women was opened; and in 1892 the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and
Aberdeen admitted women to degrees. See McWilliams- Tullberg, Women at Cambridge ; Carol Dyhouse, No
Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities. 1870- 1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995) for social histories of women at British universities.
Blackwell was placed on the first British Medical
Register. The British-born Blackwell had emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of eleven. In 1847 she enrolled at medical school at Geneva College in New York, from which she graduated two years later.
During the next twenty years she often visited Great Britain, occasionally giving lectures on the role of women in medicine, until she settled there in 1869. One of her lectures was attended by Elizabeth Garrett (later Garrett Anderson), a friend of Emily Davies, who
thereupon decided also to become a physician. As a first step she trained at the Middlesex Hospital as a nurse in 1860, but was subsequently refused entry to the medical schools of the universities of London, Edinburgh and St. Andrews. She then prepared in private study for the
licentiate of the Apothecaries Society, which she
received in 1865. In the following year she became the second woman to be put on the British Medical Register.^
The next move came in 1869 when Sophia Jex-Blake and four other women were provisionally admitted by the
University of Edinburgh. One of them, Edith Pechey, soon won a distinction in chemistry, the Hope Scholarship. The prize, however, was awarded to a male student on the
^For Blackwell's autobiography until she settled in Britain see Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in the Opening of the Medical Profession: Autobiographical Sketches (London and New York: Longman's Green and Co., 1895). For biographies of Garrett Anderson see Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London: Faber and Faber, 1939); Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London: Methuen & Co., 1965).
grounds that the women were not full members of the class. When in 1870 the women were to start their practical training, male students organized a "riot" against the women. Jex-Blake alleged that the assistant of one of the professors had organized the disturbance. The assistant promptly sued Jex-Blake for libel. Matters worsened when in 1872 the Faculty refused to grant the women degrees. After prolonged legal battles, the
University won a ruling that the admission of the women had been illegal and the University had no responsibility to them.
Jex-Blake now moved to London where in 1874 she established the London School of Medicine for Women with the support of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the scientist T.H. Huxley and Dr. David Anstie, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Blackwell and Garrett Anderson had both initially shown
reservations to the scheme, fearing that a separate school for women would lead to women doctors being considered as subordinate and inferior to male physicians, but ultimately decided to support the
project. The London School of Medicine, however, could neither offer clinical training, nor confer degrees. The turning point for women's medical qualification came when
^For a biography of Jex-Blake see Shirley Roberts, Sophia Jex-Blake: A Woman Pioneer in Nineteenth-Century Medical Reform (London: Routledge, 1993).
^Jex-Blake later, in 1886, also founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine.
the Irish College of Physicians and the Queen's University of Ireland agreed to admit women to
examinations in 1876. The following year, in 1877, the Royal Free Hospital in London admitted women students to its wards.
These institutional developments were accompanied by fierce debates on the nature of the sexes and how it
related to their social roles. Notions of similarity and difference between men and women were brought into
discussions about whether women as individuals should have the same right as men to education; whether they should receive a more thorough education precisely because of their difference; or whether women were naturally so different that they did not have the
aptitude for such an education and a professional career.
^®There is an extensive literature on women's entry to the medical profession. See, for example, E. Moberly Bell, Storming the Citadel : The Rise of the Woman Doctor
(London: Constable & Co., 1953); Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted - No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the
Medical Profession. 1835-1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the World: Women's Search for Education in Medicine
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) ; Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols: Women's Entry in the Medical Profession (London: The Women's Press, 1990); Johanna Geyer-Kordesch and Rona Ferguson, Blue Stockings. Black Gowns and White Coats (1995). For women's
involvement in the medical profession in the United States see Virginia G. Drachman, "Women Doctors and the Women's Medical Movement; Feminism and Medicine, 1850-
1895" (Ph.D. dissertation. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1976); Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Women Physicians in American Medicine: Sympathy and Science
The Emergence of the Women's Movement
Concerns about the rights of woman had been spurred by Enlightenment ideas about the rights of man. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, was a key text to be identified with
the cause of women's rights.^ The political, economic and social changes brought about by industrial capitalism advanced the debate and led to the appearance of an organized women's movement around the mid-nineteenth century. The move towards an individualistic and
^^There exists an extensive historiography on women and the Enlightenment, the complexities of which go beyond this thesis. See, for example, Sylvana Tomaselli,
"The Enlightenment Debate on Women", History Workshop Journal. 20 (1985), pp. 101-124; idem, "Reflections on the History of the Science of Woman", History of Science. 29 (1991), pp. 185-205; Moira Gatens, "'The Opressed State of My Sex' : Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality", in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman
(eds), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 112-128; Melissa A. Butler, "Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy", in Shanley and Pateman (eds). Feminist Interpretations, pp. 74-94; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988); Alice
Brown, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hemel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origin of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); idem, Nature's Bo d v : Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science
(Glasgow: Pandora, 1994); Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain. France and the United States. 1780-1860 (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Women and the
Enlightenment", in Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
egalitarian philosophy opened the way for women to join the challenge of authority by other traditionally
insubordinate groups.^ Hence Ray Strachey in "The Cause" declared :
It seems clear that this impulse [for the emergence of the women's movement] came from the doctrines and philosophies that inspired the French Revolution, and that it received a further impulse from the economic changes of the Industrial Revolution. The Women's Revolt was, in fact, a by-product of these two
upheavals, and although it took more than half a century for anything deliberate to become manifest, the real date for the beginning of the movement is 1792.^
Giving rise to liberalism, the Enlightenment was important for the emergence of the women's movement. The movement, hence, is understood to be an offshoot of the emancipatory claims of liberalism. It was an application of the demand for enfranchisement of formally
disfranchised groups. The movement sought to establish women's rightful position as free and equal individuals and achieve rights formerly denied, including property rights, access to educational institutions and the professions and the right to vote.^^
Up to the mid-nineteenth century under the law of coverture, married women were legally covered (or
^°Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain. 1860-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p p . 2 6-27.
^Strachey, "The Cause", p. 12.
^For a postmodern criticism of this "liberal" view of feminism see Susan J. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge : Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 47ff.
represented) by their husbands. They became non-existent in the eyes of the law. This supposed that the rights over a married woman's property at marriage, and property acquired during marriage, passed to her husband. Equally,