Originally published in 1986. This book's focus is on English secondary schooling in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, during which the definition of a general ‘secondary’ education was itself negotiated and consolidated before the development of secondary modern and then comprehensive schools. In each chapter, a specialist contributor considers the changing ideology, shape and status of one of the seven traditional academic subjects, namely Classics, Modern Languages, English, History, Geography, Mathematics and Science. These seven school subjects have dominated the academic school curriculum since the nineteenth century and continue to exert a powerful influence upon the contemporary school curriculum today despite the emergence of various rivals and the growing status of ‘practical' subjects.

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.

First published in 1983, Gender, Class and Education is a collection of papers that formed presentations at the Westhill Sociology of Education Conference in January 1982, and is the fifth such collection to emerge from the annual conference. The conference theme, ‘Race, Class and Gender’, was not only chosen because of its topicality, but also to provide a framework for debate between educational researchers and teachers. The papers focus on the reproduction of gender relations through education and provide important insights into how this process works, how it is resisted in schools and colleges, and the possibilities for radical intervention. This volume includes three teaching bibliographies on gender and education which were not presented at the conference, but were compiled specially for the book.