Women, Education, and Agency, 1600-2000

Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle, Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135855833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

This collection of essays brings together an international roster of contributors to provide historical insight into women's agency and activism in education throughout from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Topics discussed range from the strategies adopted by individual women to achieve a personal education and the influence of educated women upon their social environment, to the organized efforts of groups of women to pursue broader feminist goals in an educational context.

The collection is designed to recover the variety of the voices of women inhabiting different geographical and social contexts while highlighting commonality and continuity with reference to creativity, achievement, and the management and transgression of structures of gender inequality.

1
Women, Education and Agency, 1600–2000

An Historical Perspective

Sarah Jane Aiston

There they go, our brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administrating justice, practising medicine, transacting business, making money. It is a solemn sight always—a procession … For we have to ask ourselves here and now, do we wish to join the procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?

Virginia Woolf¹

This edited collection is a history of those women who wanted to join that procession. It is the history of both individual and groups of women, who despite the obstacles facing them, through their agency made significant contributions to female education. Working within the second-wave feminist tradition of reclaiming our history, we seek through the chapters included in this collection to bring a more nuanced understanding to that agenda. For the research reveals, that it is not always the case that women have been simply “written out” of history. Rather, the very nature of their own activism has served to reinforce their invisibility. Women across the centuries have been defined by the “private” sphere and denied equal access to “public” life. In this sense, women historically have inhabited what might be referred to as a “third” sphere, as they push boundaries and attempt to accommodate their public and private worlds. When incorporated into the historical record, the contributions in this sphere have remained unrecognised, or at best allocated a marginal and “secondary” status within educational hierarchies. Since the boundaries between the private and the public in women’s lives have been so fluid, their history of education includes the private and the personal. It can therefore only be inclusive if biographical material and women’s own perspectives are included. Within this collection these sources play a fundamental role in articulating a specifically female history of education. This introductory chapter explores some of the central themes that appear to be pertinent, which have universal relevance to the educational experience of girls and women across various international contexts and different temporal locations and which suggest an integral relationship between the quest for education and reflexivity about the status and condition of women’s lives.

The construction of a “feminine” identity and the consequential positioning of women as “other”² has had serious historical ramifications for the “thinking” woman. The work of Ruth Watts and Claire Jones particularly highlights the equation of science with “masculinity” and the binary opposites in operation (e.g. mind/body, reason/instinct, rational/ emotional), which have served to position women as incapable of being successful in the male disciplines of the sciences. Watts considers how a group of women in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to a scientific culture (Chapter 4), whilst Jones explores the experiences of women mathematicians at Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century (Chapter 9). In Chapter 6, Marianna Muravyeva notes how conceptions about femininity and female roles led to women being denied their right to an education and also being banned from universities in nineteenth-century Russia, forcing them to seek a higher education outside their mother country. Male scholars have consistently questioned the ability of the female mind to conceive science and the physical ability of women to undertake extensive research. The notion that women were not only intellectually, but physically not capable of high achievement meant that the female mathematicians in Cambridge, unlike their male counterparts, did not take part in the strenuous physical drill that was regarded as an important aspect of mathematical training. In contrast, they undertook gentle physical exercise amidst fears that the combination of the mental and physical energy required to become a great mathematician could actually threaten their fertility.³

Ironically, whilst it was seen as important for women not to overly exert themselves in any intellectual or physical sense, women have been allocated public roles in the world of education which constitutes them as “doers” rather than “thinkers”. In Chapter 7, Stephanie Spencer notes how the reputation of Charlotte Mason, who (amongst many claims to fame) spearheaded the Parents National Educational Union, is based on the practical application of her methods as opposed to her philosophy of education. When women have been given recognition for their intellectual capacity, this has been at the expense of their femininity: they were not praised as “thinking” women, rather they were no longer considered female. Anne Logan, in charting the contribution women made to the discipline of criminology in the twentieth century (Chapter 12), notes how Barbara Wootton, academic and justice of the peace, recalls in her memoir being patronisingly complimented as been in possession of a “masculine brain”. In her discussion of Anna Maria van Schurman, one of the most impressive female humanists of the Renaissance and early modern period, Barbara Bulckaert (Chapter 2) highlights the ambiguity towards the female intellectual:

A woman ought to be chaste and abandon her femininity and certainly her sexuality if she was to be considered learned. Having achieved such a status, she was no longer to be considered a learned “woman”, since being learned and being a woman were in principle incompatible labels. She had evolved into an exceptional phenomenon, a wondrous creation to God, but she was still inferior to men.

The reference to God in the above quotation is indicative of the key role religion has had to play in the construction of women as “other”.⁴ Religious faith and religious institutions, however, have also afforded women the opportunity to develop their educational ideals and intellectual capacities. In her discussion of the role of

ükufe Nihal in the development of new views of womanhood in the construction of the Turkish State (Chapter 8), Aynur Soydan suggests the links between freedom, and a public role for women and secularisation. Meanwhile, Barnita Bagchi reveals the centrality of religious belief, discourse and positioning in the educational achievements of Ramabai and Rokeya in nineteenth-century India (Chapter 5), whilst it is clear that van Schurman’s intellectual development was inscribed completely within a religious world view, culminating in her withdrawal from public intellectual life into an entirely religious order. Religion has also been central to the foundation and development of educational institutions and progressive education, including the ideal of equality for women which has been pursued within non-conformist faith groups. In the West, as noted particularly in the chapters by Katherine Storr (Chapter 10) and Watts, the Quakers and the Unitarians emerge as particularly significant in relation to the question of equal educational access for women.

Women’s educational agency has in itself challenged dualistic thinking, however, constructions of femininity and the positioning of women as “other” has marginalised female advocates in a variety of ways, not least because of the way in which they have, or have not been recorded in the historical narrative. Such marginalisation could manifest itself in a very physical way. Anna Maria van Schurman, the first woman to attend a European University in the seventeenth century, had to sit hidden behind a panel with holes in the front so that she could follow lectures, without being seen or heard by male students. Mary Somerville, a highly regarded scientific writer, who despite having the respect of male scientists of the day and being an elected Fellow of the Royal Society, was barred in virtue of her sex from presenting her own research findings to the Society.

Entry to the most prestigious institutions has been problematic both in relation to professional societies and also to institutions of higher education;⁵ Russian women who travelled abroad in their quest for a university education particularly found solace in the University of Zurich, at that time a “new” university that needed to be liberal in its outlook (and admit women) in order to develop.⁶ This raises a significant point, namely that women have often been able to make a contribution at the onset of new institutions or disciplines. Watts comments that in the eighteenth century “natural philosophy was not yet a high status pursuit” indicating that it was within this context that women were able to have an input. Similarly, Logan notes, “criminology was still in a state of flux and educated women were able to play a part in its intellectual development, albeit mainly from outside the academy”. The point at which developments provided status in the public sphere and enabled the emergence of professionalism was the point at which women were “kept out” of public institutions. Thus women’s educational agency is often practiced in informal and marginal circumstances, outside of mainstream, formal institutions. Within formal institutions, as Sylvia Ellis and Helen Mitchell demonstrate in their discussions of University Women’s Centres in the USA (Chapter 14), women’s activism and agency often finds a home on the physical margins and in these circumstances straddles the institution and the community, encompassing a far broader range of educational concerns than might otherwise be formally accommodated within the institution.

The notion of women always being on the outside looking in, is picked up in Linda Eisenmann’s chapter, which explores the views of Betty Friedan and the U.S. President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1963 (Chapter 13). On the question of whether women should compete with men, two divergent viewpoints appeared. On the one hand, Mary Bunting (Chair of the Education Subcommittee) suggested that women could find intellectual freedom in less familiar areas, and on the other, Friedan focused on what seemed to be the consignment of women “to the fringes”. However, the work of Jones indicates that when women have begun to make significant inroads, in this instance, by winning high places on the Order of Merit for their mathematical ability, the goal posts change. The examination became indicative of hard work and dull minds, a characterisation particularly aimed at women. Moreover, as male students increasingly began to enter the natural sciences, mathematics began to be seen at the turn of the century as more appropriate for women; mathematics was clean, sedentary, safe (unlike the laboratory) and removed from the real world.

This book is about the history of individuals and groups of women who wanted, via education, to make a valuable contribution to society—a contribution that went beyond the structures that situated them outside such possibilities. Their struggle to achieve their aims inevitably raised questions about their status as citizens. In Chapter 11, Jane Martin addresses the issue of claiming citizenship, defined as a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed. Writing in the seventeenth century, Wollstonecraft regards female education as fundamental to improving the mind, rather than for ornamental accomplishments and posits education as key to “women’s maternal role as a form of public service, which in turn underwrote women’s claims to citizen rights and duties” (Chapter 3). The hundreds of women, who crossed the Russian border in the nineteenth century to fulfill their right to a university education, did so in order to one day “serve” their country in a professional capacity, whilst

ükufe Nihal championed the ideal of the modern Turkish woman and the contribution women could make to the creation of a Turkish state. Storr discusses how a number of organisations, including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, took the concept of citizenship one step further to embrace the notion of world citizenship and the role education could play as the basis for a new human civilization built upon “respect for human life”.

What each of the chapters demonstrates is a contribution to improving the conditions of women and the centrality of education within this aim. So to what extent, might we call this a “feminist” history? On many levels we might conceive this as a problematic question. First, there is the issue of how we might define the concept. Today, we acknowledge plurality and talk about feminisms based on a range of traditions. The feminisms apparent in this book reveal a multiplicity of perceptions, but all are concerned with questioning the received and inferior status of women. Second, we might seek evidence of the influence of feminism and the extent to which the women themselves identified with the notion. Yet Charlotte Mason would not have considered herself a feminist and has traditionally been overlooked in feminist history, despite the fact that she put forward arguments in the late nineteenth century that were central to inter-war feminism. Third, and very much linked to the point just raised, the meaning of feminism shifts and changes with time and place. The western, twentieth-century view of feminism and the standard model of “first wave and second wave” seems somewhat anachronistic with reference to Wollstonecraft who is often identified as the “mother” of modern European feminism and yet whose work predated what has come to be termed as first-wave. Reference to the circumstances explored by Bagchi, with respect to India and to those addressed by Soydan in relation to Turkey, suggest different inflections of feminist meaning. The feminism of the women teachers discussed by Martin is combined with, and inseparable from, the trade unionism and socialism of those involved. Second-wave feminism is frequently dated as emerging with the publication of Friedan’s The Feminin...