Originally published in 1987, this title was first submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Completed just as the years of expansion in higher education were drawing to a close, it reflects the growing doubts of the period as to the ability of formal education provision alone to effect major changes in the distribution of socio-economic privilege at the group level, whether as between the sexes, classes, or ethnic groups. Reforms in women’s education had traditionally been dealt with as a small part of the women’s emancipation movement. This book approaches the education reforms in a different way and begins with the question of which social groups participated in the movement. Seen from this point of view, a primary interest of the reforms is the function they served in promoting a redefinition of the status and roles of a social elite.

Working and middle-class girls' education underwent significant reform in Victorian England. These reforms have been widely studied, with scholars divided into two broad historiographical schools: one that emerged in the late 1970s and places emphasis on the theory behind the reform to argue that little changed, and one that developed around 1990 and focuses on tangible practical change to demonstrate that a transformation did indeed occur. The purpose of this thesis is to bridge the gap between these two bodies of scholarship, examining the significance of girls' educational reform from the subjective positions of some working-class and middle-class girls, as expressed in their memoirs. It demonstrates that while conservative attitudes regarding both the fundamental purpose and overall utility of girls' education persisted (and indeed, remained prevalent) well into the late 19th century, major reforms within schools significantly altered the school experience for the majority of Victorian girls. These reforms drastically changed not only the educational but also the occupational landscape for young Victorian and Edwardian women. Thus this study concludes that girls' educational reform, while not completely transformative, did transform the lives of many individual women.

The Victorian era witnessed dramatic transformations in print culture, and this new anthology covers the exciting intellectual and social debates of the period. From first-person accounts of the lives of factory workers to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic theory, and from narratives of British travelers in Africa and Asia to Havelock Ellis’s theories of “sexual inversion,” the surprising diversity of nineteenth-century nonfiction writing is represented. Illustrations from Victorian periodicals provide a vivid sense of the original reading experience. The book’s thematic organization emphasizes the social and historical contexts of prose writings, as well as the way in which these writings address each other. In addition to a general critical introduction, the anthology features new thematic introductions by experts in the field.

How a nation educates its children tells us much about the values of its people. From the Salon to the Schoolroom examines the emerging secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. Rebecca Rogers explores the variety of schools--religious and lay--that existed for girls and paints portraits of the women who ran them and the girls who attended them. Drawing upon a wide array of public and private sources--school programs, prescriptive literature, inspection reports, diaries, and letters--she reveals the complexity of the female educational experience as the schoolroom gradually replaced the salon as the site of French women's special source of influence. From the Salon to the Schoolroom also shows how France as part of its civilizing mission transplanted its educational vision to other settings: the colonies in Africa as well as throughout the Western world, including England and the United States. Historians are aware of the widespread ramifications of Jesuit education, but Rogers shows how French education for girls played into the cross-cultural interactions of modern society, producing an image of the Frenchwoman that continues to tantalize and fascinate the Western world today.

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Martin Luther University (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Women in 18th and 19th Century Britain, language: English, abstract: Let your children be brought up together; let their sports and studies be the same; let them enjoy, in the constant presence of those who are set over them, all that freedom which innocence renders harmless, and in which Nature rejoices. (MACAULAY 1790: 32) Eighteenth Century England was a time in which women had little to say in society. They did not have the right to vote, they were not allowed to own properties, when married and as the husband was the chief breadwinner, they were not supposed to work. As they could not leave the house alone without being considered a prostitute, they were confined to the home where they would have to take care of the children and the household, "a subordinate role [...] in society" (AUGUSTIN 2005: 2). As a consequence, as girls did not need to go to school to learn their future tasks as housewives, they were educated at home by their mothers who acted as a role model. The entire eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century there was little change in how girls and women were educated. The old system of patriarchy was still well established but it began to crumble little by little. Women began to fight for their rights getting more and more supporters. This work is trying to shed light on this period's progression from girls being educated poorly to girls having the same education as their brothers. The fist chapter is going to show how gender differences were tried to be justified from a psyco-medical point of view, transferring the scientific findings to women's roles in society. The second chapter will show how important women were beginning to challenge the old system, disproving the validity of the scientific findings. Here a subdivision between the