History of Education

Themes and Perspectives

Deirdre Raftery,David Crook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134915699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

Specially commissioned to mark the 40th Anniversary of History of Education, and containing articles from leading international scholars, this is a unique and important volume. Over the past forty years, scholars working in the history of education have engaged with histories of religion, gender, science and culture, and have developed comparative research on areas such as education, race and class. This volume demonstrates the richness of such work, bringing together some of the leading international scholars writing in the field of history of education today, and providing readers with original and theoretically informed research. Each author draws on the wealth of material that has appeared in the leading SSCI-indexed journal History of Education, over the past forty years, providing readers with not only incisive studies of major themes, but delivering invaluable research bibliographies. A 'must have' for university libraries and a 'must own' for historians.

This book was originally published as a special issue of History of Education.

Part One

Major Themes

The gendered politics of historical writing in History of Education

Joyce Goodman

Centre for the History of Women’s Education, University of Winchester, Winchester, SO22 4NR, UK

This article looks through the lens of the gendered politics of historical writing at the main forms and direction of scholarship on gender in History of Education since its publication. It discusses how social, women’s, feminist and gender history has been treated in the journal and how developing approaches around the body, space, materiality, and the construction of the archive, are informing the production of new knowledge around gender. The article argues that History of Education has contributed to ways in which gender has been imagined in historical reconstruction and analysis. As the gendered politics of history has been treated in the journal, gender analysis has contributed to the development of history of education as discipline. The article concludes that in re-writing and re-theorising traditional educational history, the radical openness of the future of gender analysis lies in the continuing transformation of gender analysis itself.

Introduction

In ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’ Ruth Watts explored the historiography of women’s and gender studies represented in History of Education from 1976 to the end of 2004.¹ Watts identified a number of key areas of scholarship: relationships of gender and power; challenging the masculine Whig view of progress; making women visible; examining the sexual division of labour; disqualification from the professions of educationally qualified women by virtue of their sex; negative effects of concepts of femininity and feminisation; social construction of masculinities and sexualities; languages, and linguist understandings; separate spheres; public-private divide; class; family; negotiating a gendered political and educational world; networks; spheres of influence; experience of hidden groups; knowledge of material forces; lived experience; active contributions; divergent experiences of individual women; biographical approaches; autobiography; the intersection of social structure with individual lives; and debates on interdisciplinary crossings and poststructural and postcolonial theory. There was a preponderance of nineteenth and twentieth century histories and English history but there was little work on masculinities (with the exception of Christine Heward’s analysis of men, women and the rise of professional society),² on minorities, or on the education of working class women. Watts concluded that few historians of education now totally ignored gender but more work was needed in these areas as well as comparative or transnational research, on women as knowledge-makers and knowledge-bearers, and on the kind of knowledge that counted in the past. Since Watts’ overview, scholarship on working class women, minorities and masculinities continues to remain sparse; but visual, spatial, material and transnational methodologies are being adopted by researchers with an interest in gender.

In this article, I complement Watts’ overview by looking through the ‘lens of the gendered politics of historical writing’³ at the main forms and direction of scholarship on gender in the journal. I select articles that highlight theoretical and methodological developments rather than for their representativeness.⁴ The (over)-representation of masculinity in this discussion is prompted by its function in History of Education largely as ‘unmarked’ and not gendered.⁵ I look at how social, women’s, feminist and gender history have developed out and consider how evolving approaches around the body, space, materiality, and the archive, are informing the production of new knowledge around gender. I end with an afterword, rather than a conclusion, to indicate the productive ‘work-in-progress’, as gender analysis continues to bring to History of Education new insights and innovative scholarship.

Gender as a category of analysis

I am involved in the ‘politics’ I describe in that I have written largely on the history of women’s and girls’ education and have an interest in methodology.⁶ Developing my approaches to the history of women’s education in the 1980s I was influenced by texts in the journal by Joan Burstyn, Carol Dyhouse, Felicity Hunt, June Purvis, and Ruth Watts, who critiqued accounts based on the lives of ‘women worthies’ and access narratives underpinned by liberal Whiggish approaches. I grappled with the way that gender as a category of analysis was ‘a much contested concept’ and a ‘site of unease rather than of agreement’.⁷

Although scholars argue that approaches from gender, feminist and women’s history are not interchangeable,⁸ Watts noted that they have overlapped in the journal. While women’s history is defined by its subject matter, may be written by men, and does not necessarily invoke a feminist perspective, feminist history is defined by a theoretical agenda informed by the ideas and theories of feminism, and may include research on men, masculinity and the male world. Gender history focuses on the interdependence and relational nature of female and male identities.⁹ It draws on work dealing with women, but refers to socially constructed notions of femininity and masculinity, the gendering of concepts, institutions and social orders and new forms of association. Pavla Miller notes, ‘there is gender even where there are no women, due to the potency of different notions of manliness and of intense homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) attachments between comrades in arms, members of monastic communities, guilds or bureaucracies’; and ‘theorisations of gender involve relations of power, not just between women and men, but among more or less powerful females and males’.¹⁰ Although they have overlapped in the journal, there has been a tendency more generally to present these three approaches as a progressive narrative in which women’s and feminist history are displaced by gender history. Alongside lines of continuity, discontinuities and ruptures are also evident the journal – most notably between accounts that incorporate an Enlightenment notion of a subject with a fixed and stable identity, entering into social relations with its gender in place;¹¹ and accounts that theorise the subject as relational and contingent, where the subject is fluid and provisional and gender is seen to be constructed and in need of continuous maintenance.¹²

Social histories of education and women and girls

As social historians in History of Education placed women and girls in educational histories, they drew on details from everyday life and demography. David Cop-pock’s work on pupil teachers presented invaluable new information and insights into the position of women and girls in education to complement previous scholarship that often presented a false universalism while ostensibly describing the education of men and boys. Coppock provides evidence from pupil teachers employed in Birmingham between 1850 and 1900 to demonstrate the emergent feminisation of the teaching profession. While career opportunities differed for males and females and daughters of the lower middle class predominated within the elementary schools at the expense of the skilled artisans, the majority of the working class were hardly represented at all.¹³ In its descriptive usage within social history, as Coppock’s account illustrates, gender differences are explained within the existing frame of explanation; and categories of identity (male/female, girls/boys, men/women) are seen to reflect objective experience and identities, rather than gender being taken as a study in itself.¹⁴ But as Pavla Miller notes, adding women into the historical picture not only greatly improved the precision of the description, but also challenged and eventually altered the theoretical tool bag.¹⁵

Theorising patriarchy

Challenges to the theoretical toolbag became clear in History of Education, with arguments from feminist historians of education, who pursued an agenda to make women visible in histories of education, to constitute women as historical subjects and agents in the making of history and of education; to question the concepts and analyses of conventional educational histories; to examine the power relationships between men and women; and to find out about women’s day-to day educational experiences. In debating the politics of history-writing with Keith Flett, June Purvis argued that a focus on class in researching the working class had resulted in ‘the drama of working-class men being enacted’ and ‘a history of education identified with the history of working-class boys and men’. What was needed, maintained Purvis, was analysis of women’s position in education that included both a social class and gendered dimension. Purvis’ own work exemplified how working-class schoolgirls in nineteenth century England experienced the double burden of class and gender.¹⁶ Here, she mirrored arguments from socialist feminist historians that analysis should bring together the capitalist mode of production, the sexual division of labour and patriarchal authority.¹⁷ Purvis concluded that once feminist historians began to ask new questions of the historical data and examined sexual divisions within education, and the power relations between the sexes, different dimensions were brought into historical analysis.¹⁸

Feminist historians of education found the idea of patriarchy useful to connect gender to class and to theorise the reasons for women’s oppression in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction: Forty years of History of Education, 1972–2011
• Part One Major Themes
• Part Two International Perspectives
• Index