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“Making Good Wives and Mothers”? The Transformation of Middle-Class Girls' Education in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ellen Jordan
Ellen Jordan*
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
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Extract

“The true end of the education of women,” said a writer in the Contemporary Review in 1866, “is making good wives and mothers,” and similar assertions can be found scattered through the writings and speeches of almost all the nineteenth-century commentators on the education of women. On the face of it, one would assume that those expressing this view were unequivocally committed to the definitions of femininity of their period, either the domestic ideology of the first half of the century or the social Darwinism of the period after 1870, and therefore belonged to a conservative wing of the movement for the education of women. Yet this statement of their aims can be found in the writings of the whole spectrum of those interested in educational change: protofeminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Davies, comparative conservatives like Hannah More and Dorothea Beale, those defined by Sara Delamont as separatists who wanted to develop a specifically female curriculum and academic structure, and those she calls uncompromising who wanted to make the girls' curriculum identical with the boys’.

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Articles
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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 439 - 462
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Copyright © 1991 by the History of Education Society 

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