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First published in 1987, this volume makes available key documents, giving the contemporary reader a valuble record of women's struggle for eduacation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of the women in this collection achieved significant reforms or struggled to change popular prejudices about women's education

An examination of women educationists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Working with new paradigms opened up by feminist scholarship, it reveals how women leaders were determined to transform education in the quest for a better society. Previous scholarship has either neglected the contributions of these women or has misplaced them. Consequently intellectual histories of education have come to seem almost exclusively masculine. This collection shows the important role which figures such as Mary Carpenter, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Edwards and Maria Montessori played in the struggle to provide greater educational opportunities for women. The contributors are: Anne Bloomfield, Kevin J. Brehony, Norma Clarke, Peter Cunningham, Mary Jane Drummond, Elizabeth Edwards, Mary Hilton, Pam Hirsch, Jane Miller, Hilary Minns, Wendy Robinson, Gillian Sutherland and Ruth Watts.

Researchers have neglected the cultural history of education and as a result women's educational works have been disparaged as narrowly didactic and redundant to the history of ideas. Mary Hilton's book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational writings of leading women moralists and activists including Sarah Fielding, Hester Mulso Chapone, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Catharine Cappe, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Carpenter, and Bertha von Marenholtz Bulow. Over a hundred-year period, from the rise of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of the kindergarten movement in Britain in the mid-nineteenth, a variety of women intellectuals, from strikingly different ideological and theological milieux, supported, embellished, critiqued, and challenged contemporary public doctrines by positioning themselves as educators of the nation's young citizens. Of particular interest are their varying constructions of childhood expressed in a wide variety of published texts, including tales, treatises, explanatory handbooks, and collections of letters. By explicitly and consistently connecting the worlds of the schoolroom, the family, and the local parish to wider social, religious, scientific, and political issues, these women's educational texts were far more influential in the public realm than has been previously represented. Written deliberately to change the public mind, these texts spurred their many readers to action and reform.

Letters, essays, stories, speeches and poems by women who were social reformers from 1776 to 1936.

This scholarly and penetrating study of eugenics is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relation between science, ideology and class.