Girls learn about "femininity" from childhood onwards, first through their relationships in the family, and later from their teachers and peers. Using sources which vary from diaries to Inspector’s reports, this book studies the socialization of middle- and working-class girls in late Victorian and early-Edwardian England. It traces the ways in which schooling at all social levels at this time tended to reinforce lessons in the sexual division of labour and patterns of authority between men and women, which girls had already learned at home. Considering the social anxieties that helped to shape the curriculum offered to working-class girls through the period 1870-1920, the book goes on to focus on the emergence of a social psychology of adolescent girlhood in the early-twentieth century and finally, examines the relationship between feminism and girls’ education.

Girls learn about "femininity" from childhood onwards, first through their relationships in the family, and later from their teachers and peers. Using sources which vary from diaries to Inspector' s reports, this book studies the socialization of middle- and working-class girls in late Victorian and early-Edwardian England. It traces the ways in which schooling at all social levels at this time tended to reinforce lessons in the sexual division of labour and patterns of authority between men and women, which girls had already learned at home.

Women teachers were key players in twentieth century feminism. They fought for women's suffrage before the First World War and continued their vigorous campaigns for equal pay, equal promotion opportunities and abolition of the marriage bar into the less promising political environment of the 1920s and 1930s. This book is the first to offer a detailed assessment of why women teachers were so politically active, and makes an important contribution to the literature on women's politicisation. Drawing on interviews with women teachers (in state elementary and secondary schools) as well as the records of teachers' associations and central and local government, it explores the tensions in the relationship between their position at the workplace and their family lives and unravels the connections and dissonances between how they saw themselves as both women and professional teachers.

Considering the role of women as educational policy-makers, and in particular focusing on 29 women members of the London School Board, this book examines the link between private lives and public practice in Victorian and Edwardian England. These political activists were among the first women in England to be elected to positions of political responsibility. Key concerns in the book are issues such as gender and power, and gender and welfare.

This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in the period between 1600 and 1914.Using advice literature which set out developing ideologies of childhood, gender and parenting, the book explores the separate but complementary roles of mothers and fathers in raising their children. Male upbringing is discussed in terms of schooling, female through the moral and social context of a domestic schoolroom dominated by a governess. Boys were trained for the world, girls for society and marriage. Rare teenage diaries surviving from the Georgian and Victorian periods show teenagers speaking for themselves about education; relationships with parents, siblings and friends; and their social, class and gender identity.

The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects. The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure. Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.

What part has religion played in the history of child-rearing? How do we persuade children to behave rationally and how should we exercise adult authority? What use do we make of their innocence and how do we cope with their sexuality? Has history left us with ideas about the child which make no sense in the prevailing conditions of the late twentieth century? In Shaping Childhood these questions are explored through themes from the history of childhood. The myth of the repressive Puritan parent is explored by looking at Puritan ideals of child-rearing. Treating the child as if it were rational seemed to Locke the best way to approach child-rearing, but Rousseau was sceptical of adult manipulation and Romanticism could be subversive of both religion and reason as sources of discipline in child-rearing. The Victorians inherited many of the contradictions these approaches gave rise to, and they added a complication of their own through an aesthetic response to childhood's beauty. Currently, with instability in household formation and with the child exposed to ever more sophisticated means of communication, parents, teachers and others struggle to make sense of this ambiguous historical legacy. Shaping Childhood examines the ways in which broad cultural forces such as religion, literature and mass consumption influence contemporary parenting and locates child professionals, within the context of these forces.