Working Class Girls In Nineteenth Century England

This book is concerned with the nineteenth-century education, family life and employment of working-class girls and women. Based on extensive local research, it also draws on evidence from social, labour and women's history in a wide-ranging analysis of the purposes and practices of girls' education within a variety of forms of schooling, both public and private.

This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.

The portrayal of Scotland as a particularly patriarchal society has traditionally had the effect of marginalizing Scottish women, both teachers and students, in both Scottish and British history. The Schooling of Working-Class Girls in Victorian Scotland examines and challenges this assumption and analyzes in detail the course of events which has led to a more enlightened system. Education was, and is, seen as integral to Scottish distinctiveness, but the Victorian period saw anxious debate about the impact of outside influences at a time when Scottish society seemed to be fracturing. This book examines the gender-blindness of the educational tradition, with its notion of the 'democratic intellect', testing the claim of superiority for the Scottish system, and questioning the assumption that Scottish women were either passive victims or willing dupes of a peculiarly patriarchal ideal. Considering the influences of the related ideologies of patriarchy and domesticity, and the crucial importance of the local and regional economic context, in focusing on female education, this book provides a much wider comparative study of Scottish society during a period of tremendous upheaval and a perceived crisis in national identity, in which women, as well as men, participated.

This study, first published in 1980, argues that higher education for women was accepted by the end of the nineteenth-century, and higher education was becoming a desirable preparation for teachers in girls¿ schools. By accepting the opponents¿ claim that higher education for women had the potential to revolutionise relations between the sexes, this fascinating book demonstrates how the relevance of the nineteenth-century serves to enhance our understanding of the contemporary women¿s movement. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Integrating analytical tools from feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology to illuminate detailed historical evidence, Sonya Rose argues that gender was a central organizing principle of the nineteenth-century industrial transformation in England. She elaborates a cultural theory of gender that suggests why it is an inherent aspect of all social and economic relations. Analysing employer strategies and state policies and the role of work in family life, she demonstrates that neither industrial transformation nor class relations can be understood when reduced to gender-neutral and abstract forces.

The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.

This book compares the formal education of the majority of girls in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Previous books about �Britain� invariably focus on England, and such �British� studies tend not to include Ireland despite its incorporation into the Union in 1801. The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1900 presents a comparative synthesis of the schooling of working and middle-class girls in the Victorian period, with the emphasis on the interaction of gender, social class, religion and nationality across the UK. It reveals similarities as well as differences between both the social classes and the constituent parts of the Union, including strikingly similar concerns about whether working-class girls could fulfill their domestic responsibilities. What they had in common with middle-class girls was that they were to be educated for the good of others. This study shows how middle-class women used educational reform to carve a public role for themselves on the basis of a domesticated life for their lower class �sisters�, confirming that Victorian feminism was both empowering and constraining by reinforcing conventional gender stereotypes.

This highly original synthesis is a clear and stimulating assessment of nineteenth-century British women. It aims to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the key historiographical debates and issues, placing particular emphasis upon recent, revisionist research. The book highlights not merely the ideologies and economic circumstances which shaped women's lives, but highlights the sheer diversity of women's own experiences and identities. In so doing, it presents a positive but nuanced interpretation of women's roles within their own families and communities, as well as stressing women's enormous contribution to the making of contemporary British culture and society.