Women Education And Agency 1600 2000

This collection of essays brings together an international roster of contributors to provide historical insight into women’s agency and activism in education throughout from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Topics discussed range from the strategies adopted by individual women to achieve a personal education and the influence of educated women upon their social environment, to the organized efforts of groups of women to pursue broader feminist goals in an educational context. The collection is designed to recover the variety of the voices of women inhabiting different geographical and social contexts while highlighting commonality and continuity with reference to creativity, achievement, and the management and transgression of structures of gender inequality.

This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.

This book covers new ground in its focus on the Anglican Church congresses 1861-1938 as a public space in which the views of notable women were widely disseminated. It celebrates the contribution made by women to public life and discourse on womanhood as platform speakers, and commemorates the presence of the large numbers of women who joined congresses as audience members. Original research draws on extensive primary sources from official records, diaries and the press to capture women's views and voices and to evoke congress as a communicative social space and a window into topical affairs. Women and the Anglican Church Congress 1861-1938 examines the roles of women in the Church and reflects on how women with a sense of vocation negotiated contemporary attitudes to their positions and spirituality. The book also explores how women's secular aspirations towards citizenship in the context of poverty, work, temperance, eugenics, class and suffrage played out at congress.

Global in reach, this innovative text offers a thematic examination of the unprecedented changes in the realms of politics, demography, economics, culture, knowledge, and kinship that women have brought about since 1900.

Approaches and methods in comparative education are of obvious importance, but do not always receive adequate attention. This second edition of a well-received book, containing thoroughly updated and additional material, contributes new insights within the longstanding traditions of the field. A particular feature is the focus on different units of analysis. Individual chapters compare places, systems, times, cultures, values, policies, curricula and other units. These chapters are contextualised within broader analytical frameworks which identify the purposes and strengths of the field. The book includes a focus on intra-national as well as cross-national comparisons, and highlights the value of approaching themes from different angles. As already demonstrated by the first edition of the book, the work will be of great value not only to producers of comparative education research but also to users who wish to understand more thoroughly the parameters and value of the field.

The founder and president of the Mothers' Union, one of the first and largest women's organisations, Mary Sumner (1828-1921) was an influential educator and a force to be reckoned with in the Church of England of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the analytical tools of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Sue Anderson-Faithful locates Mary Sumner's life and thought against social and religious networks in which she was restricted by gender yet privileged by class and proximity to distinguished individuals. This dichotomy is key to understanding the achievements of a woman who both replicated and shaped Victorian attitudes to women's roles in society. To Mary Sumner mission and education meant the propagation of religious knowledge through progressive pedagogy. Her activism was intended to promote social reform at home and nurture the growth of the British Empire with mothers wielding their political power as educators of future citizens. The symbiotic relationship between Church and State concentrated power in the hands of a ruling class with which Mary Sumner identified and which she supported. In her view the legitimacy of national and imperial rule was intertwined with the moral force of Anglicanism. SueAnderson-Faithful interprets Mary Sumner's lifelong work in the light of these relationships, contrasting her assertion of personal agency and an empowering discourse of motherhood with her simultaneous reinforcement of patriarchy and class privilege.

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.

This edited collection illustrates the way in which women’s experiences of academe could be both contextually diverse but historically and culturally similar. It looks at both the micro (individual women and universities) and macro-level (comparative analyses among regions and countries) within regional, national, trans-national, and international contexts. The contributors integrally advance knowledge about the university in history by exploring the intersections of the lived experiences of women students and professors, practices of co-education, and intellectual and academic cultures. They also raise important questions about the complementary and multidirectional flow and exchange of academic knowledge and information among gender groups across programmes, disciplines, and universities. Historical inquiry and interpretation serve as efficacious ways with which to understand contemporary events and discourses in higher education, and more broadly in community and society. This book will provide important historical contexts for current debates about the numerical dominance and significance of women in higher education, and the tensions embedded in the gendering of specific academic programs and disciplines, and university policies, missions, and mandates.