The Educated Woman

The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.

‘But now, having travelled to the frontier of the world of sins, I no longer hesitated in trampling over the remnants of the goodness in my heart.’ Manada, Maani didi, Feroza Bibi, Miss Mukherjee – the jostling identities of our beguiling and charming protagonist as she glides through a life that can be seen as exploitative yet, also, curiously, empowering and honest. Manada’s fascinating life story takes her from her wealthy cossetted upbringing to a life of debauchery and prostitution after she elopes with her married lover when in her mid-teens. She is capable, attractive and doesn’t ask for pity as she struggles with illness, poverty and abandonment, but ensures that she emerges relatively unscathed and carves a niche for herself in her profession. Manada matures and settles into a life of prostitution, entertains barristers, doctors and other men of high society. She describes her colourful life with relish but is often introspective as she places her own position as a sex worker in the context of the times, calling out young sanctimonious patriotic men who maintain a high standing in society yet secretly fancy prostitutes. Rather tantalisingly she takes no names, only occasionally hinting at their identities, to avoid scandals and protect the double lives of men who are well-known in Calcutta in the 1920s. Weaving together multiple strands, looking beyond ideas of morality and accusations, we are presented a life of immense beauty and endurance, which is both grand in its scope and deeply intimate in its portrait.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

"From meetings and conversation with men, love affairs arise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter, and self-indulgence, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme. . . . Poor young girl, if you emerge from these encounters a captive prey! How much better it would have been to remain at home or to have broken a leg of the body rather than of the mind!" So wrote the sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives in a famous work dedicated to Henry VIII's daughter, Princess Mary, but intended for a wider audience interested in the education of women. Praised by Erasmus and Thomas More, Vives advocated education for all women, regardless of social class and ability. From childhood through adolescence to marriage and widowhood, this manual offers practical advice as well as philosophical meditation and was recognized soon after publication in 1524 as the most authoritative pronouncement on the universal education of women. Arguing that women were intellectually equal if not superior to men, Vives stressed intellectual companionship in marriage over procreation, and moved beyond the private sphere to show how women's progress was essential for the good of society and state.

For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future #1 International Bestseller Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school. Westover’s mother proved a marvel at concocting folk remedies for many ailments. As Tara developed her own coping mechanisms, little by little, she started to realize that what her family was offering didn’t have to be her only education. Her first day of university was her first day in school—ever—and she would eventually win an esteemed fellowship from Cambridge and graduate with a PhD in intellectual history and political thought.

From one of America's most respected critics comes an acclaimed biography of the controversial feminist. Here, Heilbrun illuminates the life and explores the many facets of Steinem's complex life, from her difficult childhood to the awakening that changed her into the most famous feminist in the world. Intimate and insightful, here is a biography that is as provocative as the woman who inspired it. Photos.

The interdisciplinary mix of sharp commentary and scholarship has the potential to invigorate and reawaken debate on why women aren t advancing faster in academia and the role of theoretical, social, and institutional bias in perpetuating this inequity. . . Undergraduate and graduate students of educational and workplace inequality, women s studies, and neoclassical theory will benefit from engaging in the dialogues raised in this book. Lois Joy, Feminist Economics . . . this book offers a contribution to debates and is a timely reminder that the woman question remains a compelling issue. The critical insights offered by scholars from across the disciplines of history, philosophy, psychology, sociology and economics is a unique aspect of this text. This is a thoughtful and scholarly contribution to the knowledge base. Tanya Fitzgerald, Journal of Educational Administration and History Detractors will find all the supporting data that they might fear to see, as the authors have done their homework/housework and it is spotless. The opening statement of the acknowledgements can stand for the remainder of us that in encouraging our academic interests, as a stimulus to creative energy, in making us laugh and in reminding us to hold on to that which we value most for women (and men) in higher education, there cannot be much improvement on this book. Julia Swindells, Times Higher Education . . . a particularly readable and interesting set of complementary essays. Education Economics These outstanding essays by eminent scholars provide sophisticated and highly readable analyses of the causes of women s exclusion from full participation in knowledge production today. From multiple disciplinary perspectives, the authors examine the roles of biology, institutional impediments, discrimination, and women s choices. A must read for all concerned with the role of women in contemporary higher education. Myra H. Strober, Stanford University, US These fascinating essays by scholars from a wide range of disciplines examine women s struggle since the nineteenth century for inclusion and voice in American higher education and the long, often grimly comic history of the arguments that men with authority to speak have used (and continue to use) to rationalize limiting women s role. Everyone interested in the history of women in American universities should read this book. Robert W. Dimand, Brock University, Canada These essays offer fresh insights on the question of the paucity of women in higher education and together form a thoughtful and contemporary response to Lawrence Summers and the Woman Question in the twenty-first century. This uniquely interdisciplinary study offers a provocative, contemporary look at the Woman Question in relation to higher education at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Leading feminist scholars from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, and economics evaluate the role of biology, discrimination, and choice in rationalizing women s exclusion from fully participating in the process of knowledge production, as well as examining institutional impediments. Contextualizing arguments against women s inclusion and including contemporary perspectives on gender, this book offers a rich, multi-layered examination and critical insights into understanding the near universal difficulties that women encounter as they seek to participate fully in the process of knowledge production. This book addresses one of the most compelling topics of our time and speaks to our need to understand the long struggle of women to gain an authoritative voice in higher education and the factors that underlie that struggle. Scholars and researchers of women s studies, higher education, and a range of humanities and social sciences will find this book a welcome addition to the literature.

Sallie Stockard (1869-1963), the first female graduate of the University of North Carolina, published three county histories between 1900 and 1904. Thereafter, she lived an obscure and difficult life that reveals much about the many challenges women of that time faced. Encouraged by New South educational mentors, she countered restrictions on women with diligence and self-promotion. Carole Troxler discloses Stockard's professional and personal hindrances, resourcefulness, failures, and triumph, following her to New England, the Southwest, and New York. Like her subject, Troxler lives in Alamance County, and her publications include its history.