Education, gender and social change in Victorian liberal feminist theory

EDUCATION,

GENDER AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN VICTORIAN LIBERAL FEMINIST THEORY * JOYCESENDERSPmmsmt

Education has been a key concern of English liberal reformers from Victorian times to the present. Whether narrowly conceived, as formal education, or broadly construed, as encompassing a wide range of socialising agencies, educational reform has figured prominently in liberal visions of progressive social change and liberals’ search for social justice. Feminists whose commitment to women’s rights is rooted in liberal principles have shared this concern and have assigned educational reform a pivotal role in promoting women’s interests. This essay examines liberal feminists’ assumptions as to the relations between education, gender and social change in Victorian England with an eye to understanding how ideological commitments have shaped this intellectual tradition.’ The body ofthepaper examines values and assumptions which guided Victorian liberal feminist thinking about women’s education. The epilogue suggests that similar ideas have informed much of the twentieth century historiography of women’s education in Victorian England and argues that this interpretive tradition has bequeathed to us a skewed perception of women’s educational past. Liberal feminist thought concerning education, gender and social change, it is contended, has been characterised by unresolved tensions between libertarian and feminist commitments, selective educational values and a highly optimistic model of social change that assumes an ultimate harmony of interests among women of different social strata and between the sexes.

VICTORIAN

LIBERAL

FEMINISM AND REFORM

WOMEN’S

EDUCATIONAL

Women’s educational reform was high on the agenda of Victorian liberal feminists, who viewed it as a precondition for further progressive social change. In an essay composed in the 1830s John Stuart Mill expressed his opinion that: The first and indispensable step.. towards the enfranchisement for woman, is that she be so educated, as not to be dependent either on her father or her husband for subsistence.’

Writing in the 1880s Frances Cobbe referred to the ‘enormous improvement.. . which has been made of late years in the education of women’ as the ‘safeguard

*The author would like to thank Karen Offen, David Nye and her husband Johannes Pedersen for helpful criticisms they offered of an earlier draft of this essay. tEnglish Department, Odense University, Campusvej 55,5230-Odense M, Denmark. 503

and basis of the whole women’s movement’ fitting women ‘to undertake all their tasks on equal terms with men’.3 In practice Victorian liberal feminist interest focused mainfy on reforming the secondary education given girls of the propertied classes and opening higher education to women4 In the early nineteenth century girls of the upper and middle classes were usually educated at home or in small private schools. The quality and content of the teaching varied, but in genera1 these private forms of education emphasised artistic and social accomplishments (such as music, drawing, modern languages and familiarity with the nicer points of etiquette) and offered a smattering ofinstruction in a wide range of other subjectsq5 Throughout the century, most middle and upper class girls continued to be educated privately. However, the latter half of the century saw the estabIishment of newmodel girls’ pubiic boarding and day schools, and the first women’s cofteges were opened. Catering mainly for the upper echefons of the propertied classes, the new secondary and higher educational institutions provided a more rigorous, competitive course of intellectual training than was common in private forms of female education and offered an education approximating that given in analogous male institutions. Victorian liberal feminists urged these reforms.6 They publicised the need for improving women’s education, lobbied for endowments for the new institutions, and in some cases took the initiative in founding new schools and colleges for giris. Other groups. including conservative-minded men and women and nonfeminist liberals were also active in the cause.’ However. liberal feminists differed from these other groups in their ultimate commitments~ In contrast to conservatives, Iiberal feminists’ interest in women’s educational reform was rooted in libertarian and individualist vaiues. In contrast to non-feminist liberals, they were committed to a general improvement in the status of women relative to men. John Stuart Mill was certainly the most distinguished representative of this intellectual tradition in Victorian England. However, most of the feminists active in the organised Victorian women’s movement fall within the category, including such figures as Bessie Rayner Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, Emily Davies, Josephine Butler and in their later years Emily Shirreff and her sister Maria Grey, all of whom promoted women’s educational reform.” Committed to peaceful, piecemeal change and a progressive view of history, Miff and other Iiberal feminists viewed women’s struggle for equal rights as but one facet of a broader change in social organisation whereby persona1 merit rather than birth determined an individual’s social position and Iibertarian values increasingiy prevailed. According to Mill: of the modern world, , . is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life.. but are fret to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.’

the peculiar character

subordination of women he considered ‘a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else’.‘* Simitarly, Maria Grey believed that: ‘the emancipation of women from artificially imposed shackles is a necessary part of the great movement of emancipation going on throughout the worfd’.“’

The social

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Theory

50.5

Liberal feminists viewed women’s educational reform, then, as akin to other liberal causes. Arguing for improvement in girls’ education, Bessie Parkes noted that ‘Women now appear to stand towards men much in the position that did once democracy towards the upper classes’.12 Frances Power Cobbe (who hoped that the ‘Divine Right of Husbands’ would soon follow the Divine Right of Kings into oblivion) demanded a ‘Free Trade in Knowledge’ between the sexes.13 Whereas conservatives considered women’s educational needs with reference to the part which women were to play as members of an organic, interdependent social collectivity, Victorian liberal feminists based their demands for educational reform directly on women’s rights as individuals and their potential for individual development. Josephine Butler criticised advocates of women’s educational reform who were concerned only to make women better companions for men and better mothers and who ignored women ‘as an independent human being’. I4 Urging higher education for women, Emily Davies queried: ‘Are they [women] to be regarded.. . primarily as children of God. . . and, secondarily, as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters ?‘I5 She thought they should be so regarded. Frances Cobbe, who wished woman to be considered ‘as a noun’, not as an ‘adjective’, viewed education as ‘the drawing out, of the powers of the individual’.16 Similarly, Emily Shirreff believed the purpose of education to be the harmonious development of all moral and intellectual powers of the individual.” At the heart of liberal feminists’ commitment to women’s educational reform was their conviction that progressive change depended upon the application of reason to the environment by individuals acting as free moral agents. The agent of progressive change whether at the individual or societal level was the rational individual acting in a free market setting. Through free competition, the relative merits of individuals, ideas, institutions, and so on, could be rationally assessed in light of individual experience and their improvement encouraged. Mill explained: freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it.. . Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths strong-armed men.” Liberty, according to this view, was a core value, enabling and obliging individuals to assume responsibility for the consequences of their actions. ‘The health of a moral being is in self-dependence.‘” Emily Shirreff and Maria Grey asserted. In Mill’s view: The main foundations

of the moral life of modern times must be justice and prudence; respect of each for the rights ofevery other, and the ability of each to take care of himself.20

Freedom as understood by Mill and other liberal feminists was closely associated with the rule of reason, which enabled individuals to master their passions, eschew prejudice, judge the likely outcome of their actions, and achieve selfcontrol. Intellectual education, which served to strengthen the reason, they considered, carried with it the promise of both moral and material freedom and improvement for women.

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Given their values and assumptions, it is not surprising that liberal feminists found little to admire in the conventional education given girls of the propertied classes, an education which emphasised social and artistic accomplishments rather than intellectual achievement, prized sociability more than individual distinction, appealed to individuals’ emotional sensibilities rather than imposing impersonal, public standards of excellence, and groomed girls for marriage and a dependent social role. Women’s education, Mill complained, aimed at ‘the sentiments rather than the understanding’.21 Women’s education, their whole socialisation, he thought, inculcated in them ‘the feeling that the individuals connected with them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty’and left them ignorant of any ‘larger interests or higher moral objects’.22 It further failed, he noted, to inculcate self-dependence.23 The type of education which Mill and other liberal feminists admired was rather directed to cultivating the ratiocinative faculties. Mill himself considered that the education most germane to ‘every rational being’ aimed at ‘the strengthening and enlarging of his own intellect and character’.24 The object of higher education, he believed, was: ‘to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth’.25 Similarly, Emily Shirreff, who deplored parents’ preference for ‘the showy to the solid’ in girls’ education, urged the merits of ‘intellectual education’ rather than an education centred on the accomplishments.26 And Frances Cobbe, who considered that women were pinched ‘in mental stays’ and trained to be ‘L)olfs not Women’ demanded an education aimed at training women’s ‘reasoning faculties’.27 Consistent with their view that competition was a spur to excellence, liberal feminists promoted the imposition of impersonal, competitive standards in women’s education. Urging the opening of university examinations to women, Frances Cobbe argued for ‘the right to such academical honours as would afford a sufficient motive and stimulus for thorough, accurate, and sustained work by young women.. able to acquire the higher branches ofknowledge’.‘x Similarly, Emily Davies promoted external examinations for girls at the secondary level, stating that: ‘great support and stimulus are afforded to a young student by the knowledge that her work will be submitted to an independent and impartial tribunal’.29 External examinations, she considered, were necessary to enable teachers to see the results of their teaching and students to have a measure of their attainments30 Whereas conservatives often asumed that existing differences in gender roles reflected innate differences in the mental and/or moral constitution of the sexes and dictated different educational ideals for men and women, liberal feminists emphasised that environmental influences played a major part in shaping gender traits and urged that men’s and women’s education be assimilated to one another. Some liberal feminists questioned the existence of any innate differences in the mental constitution or outlook of the sexes. Mill asserted: ‘it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all’.31 Emily Davies took the same view. 32 Other liberal feminists believed that differences did exist. Maria Grey, for example, wrote of different orientations arising from the maternal and paternal functions.33 Frances Cobbe considered that in women intuitive faculties preponderated over those of reason.‘4 However,

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whether or not they assumed innate differences to exist, liberal feminists considered education could shape mental and character traits. And, denying that there were sex-specific standards of moral and mental excellence,35 they argued against special systems of education for women.36 Frances Cobbe, for example, urged the opening of university examinations to women on the grounds that women’s relatively weaker reasoning faculties could and should be strengthened by a rigorous course of intellectual training.37 Emily Davies, on the other hand, argued that women’s education should be assimilated to that of men because the special intellectual characteristics of the sexes, if such existed, were unknown, and at present, she believed, male educational standards were, however imperfect, superior to those of women .3*Of course there were also very practical grounds for assimilating the education of the sexes to one another. If, as Frances Cobbe noted, women were to compete with men for an extended range of occupations, their educational achievement must be tested by common standard.39 In practice, assimilating the education of the sexes to one another usually meant introducing male academic practices and standards into women’s education. Given the low esteem in which liberal reformers held the education conventionally given girls there could be no question of looking to existing female educational models. A few liberal reformers, notably Henry Sidgwick and others associated with the founding of Newnham College, Cambridge, hoped to reform women’s studies along new lines which would then serve as a model for subsequent reforms in male education. 4o Some of the emphases which Sidgwick and his friends supported in women’s education (e.g. the promotion of modern studies and a reduced rule for the classical languages) eventually made themselves felt in male education, as well, and in at least one instance an examination originally designed for women was subsequently extended to men.41 However, in general the assimilation of women’s education to men’s proceeded not by the adoption of new academic norms and values for both sexes but rather by the introduction of existing male academic practices into female education. This, in turn, exacerbated the latent conflict which always existed between liberal feminists’ libertarian and individualist values and their egalitarian commitments. On the one hand, consistent with their libertarian, individualist ideals, they argued, as we have seen, that education should serve to maximise individual women’s opportunities for self-development. This suggested an education tailored to individual women’s tastes and needs. On the other hand, keenly aware of the superior status accorded males and their standards and pursuits, Emily Davies, Mill and other liberal feminists believed that women could prove their mettle only if they successfully competed with males on common terms.42 This required individual conformity to standard educational practice. The conflict was especially acute at the secondary level, where by the later Victorian years the preferred male academic model, the public school, had evolved into a highly authoritarian, anti-individualistic institution. The conflict between egalitarian and liberal individualist ends was seldom faced up to in theory. In practice, some liberal feminists (including Sidgwick and others influenced by Mill’s romantic individualism) tended to favour individual freedom of choice, while others (including the group associated with Emily Davies) were willing to sacrifice individuals’ educational liberty for the sake of furthering women’s interests as a group.43

In considering the benefits of ~du~ati~~~~ reform to j~d~~?~dua~ women, liberal feminists urged that such reforms would open ~~~~rt~~~~tj~~fkx intellectual d~~~l~~rn~nt to women who had heretafore unjustly been denied them. Arguing that university examinations should be opened to women, Frances Cobbe, for example, noted that while few women might have a love of abstract truth, there was no reason to deprive 011 women of the opportunity of pursuing it.j4 Liberal feminists also argued that improvement in women’s intellectual education would enhance their independence and opportunities for self-development in enabling them to take up an extended range of occupations in later life. Although most Victorian liberal feminists assumed, like Mill, that. exceptional cases apart, women wauld have to choose between marriage and its attendant domestic responsibilities and a career, they ~dued the free&m of choice which the possibility of economic ind~~nde~~cc offered ~ornen,~~ Were women educated so that they could in case ofchoice or need be setf-supporting they would be free from the temptation or necessity of marrying for material reasons.46 Women would thus be free from entering into what appeared to liberal feminists a degrading dependency relation but a step removed from prostitution.‘? Victorian liberal feminists agreed that an improved intellectual education would promote not only women’s material freedom and improvement but also their moral well-being. However, they differed in the relative emphasis they accorded women’s moral and material interests. While not uninterested in women’s material problems, Maria Crey and Emily ~~~irreffp~omotcd women’s educatio~~~~~ reform especially with an eye to the morai i~~ro~ern~l~t of the sex. Women, they argued, required an education which would provide them with that ‘mcntat discipline, which shoufd enlighten conscience and control the vivacity of feeling and iInaginat~on’.~~ ~nteI~~ct~ai education, they asserted, fostered moral development. It promoted control of the passions and a commitment to seek and apply the truth, and these, the sisters believed, were prerequisites for the moral lift.“” Emily Davies, though more concerned with the practical disabilities and problems facing women, also urged the moral benefits to be hoped for from intellectual reform. Higher education, she argued, fostered a ‘disciplined mind and character’, a ‘habit of impartiality and deliberation’, and an ability to look steadily at the whole facts of a case and to shape a course of action with a clear idea as to its probable colt3equenctS, “) ‘A C’ollege:f’, sbc declared, , . , ‘asserts the ciaims of the higher Iife’.5’ A more s~bstant~~~e education, liberal f~min~srs beiieved, would foster in women a more adequate conception of their enlightened self-interest and thus extend their moral horizons. Victorian liberal feminists differed as to the nature of the links they posited between individual development and the fulfillment of more general social or moral obligations. However, they were at one in their belief’that individuals’ enlightened self-interest encompassed the pursuit ofmore than mcrcly private, selfish ends. Frances Cobbe, for example, explained that simply seeking one’s private happiness was self-defeating and would lead to unhappiness, True self-realisation and happiness, she thought, were found in serving God.“’ Mill identified the greatest happiness with the intellectual and momI ~d~~~i~~~rne~~~ af mankind.“’ Intellectual cuitivatian, social morality and indi~~id~a~ liberty seemed to him destined to progress hand in hand:

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Theory

the communities in which the reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individuaP Davies hoped women’s educational reform would foster ‘a spirit of truth and of sacrifice’.55 It would, she and other liberal feminists contended, correct women’s tendency to take a petty, personal view of things.5h Perhaps influenced by the New Liberalism of the later Victorian years, Maria Grey placed far more emphasis on the welfare of society as compared to that of the individual in her last works than in her earlier ones. Although she continued to insist that women must retain their individuality and independence, in a major work written in 1889 she argued that women’s education must fit them for social service.57 Educational reform, liberal feminists contended, would benefit not only individual women but also the men with whom they associated. Whereas conservatives often argued that harmonious social relations between the sexes were most apt to be promoted if men and women cultivated complementary qualities of mind and character, liberal feminists believed that happiness was most likely to result from the association of like-minded individuals. Indeed, Emily Davies asserted that:

Emily

It is in fact as a means of bringing men and women together, intellectual gulf between them, that a more liberal education women are chiefly to be desired.‘*

and bridging over the and a larger scope for

Mill deplored ‘the broad line of difference between the education of a woman and that of a man’. ‘Nothing’, he continued, unfavourable to that union of thoughts and inclinations which married life.‘59 Maria Grey took a similar tack and urged the coeducation: The monastic system separating the sexes., later life.“”

[of education] has been one

and character ‘can be more is the ideal of advantages of

which has hitherto prevailed, unnaturally cause of‘the vitiation of their relations in

Coeducation would, she believed, eliminate young men’s and women’s ‘morbid excitement and curiosity’ about one another and their ‘exaggerated estimate’ of the opposite sex.61 No longer bound solely by sensual attraction or ties of material interest, welleducated men and women would, liberal feminists predicted, find a higher happiness together in the pursuit of common intellectual interests and other worthy causes. The happiest marriages, Mill considered, were those in which ‘two persons of cultivated faculties’ were joined in the pursuit of common objects.h2 At present Emily Davies explained, women were frequently unable to share their husband’s ‘highest thoughts and feelings’. Caught up in petty, personal, private concerns, wives were, she thought, wont to thwart their husband’s ‘generous.. . aspirations after perfection’.h” If women were better educated, she believed, they would be better able to sympathise with their husband’s disinterested ideals and pursuits and this would enrich the lives of both man and wife.@ An improved education for women would, liberal feminists

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argued, not elevate the intelIectua1 problem of

only improve the relations of husbands and wives but also generally social relations of the sexes. Maria Grey intimated that a common education for men and women might provide a solution to the prostitution:

the more objects of serious pursuit the sexes have in common, the more they are brought together by common intellectual and sexless interests, the better for society at large, the more chance we shall have of solving some of the darkest problems of social life.&”

Committed, then, to promoting individual rights but convinced that individuals’ enlightened self-interest had a social dimension, liberal feminists moved easily from a concern for the natural or God-given rights of individualP to a consideration of the general social utility of the reforms they promoted. Women’s educational reform, they contended. would conduce to the happiness and well-being not only of individual women but of all society. Were women better educated and able to take up an extended range of employments, they suggested, the pool of talent from which society could recruit would be expanded to the benefit of ~41.‘~ An improved education, they predicted, would enable women to take a larger, more rational view of public issues and act accordingly. It wouId. for example, serve to correct the ‘ill regulated kindness’, ‘the unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence’ which Emily Davies and John Stuart Mill considered currently characterised women’s philanthropic activity.68 Indirectly, liberal feminists hoped, women’s educational reform would improve the morals of the nation by improving the quality of family life which served as a school of- morality for its members. At present, given the unequal relations of the sexes, liberal feminists complained, domestic life too often fostered a low, selfish ethic amongst both men and women. Men were accustomed to enjoying unmerited privileges; women to training their sights solely on their liberal feminists hoped, women’s immediate familial interests. hV Gradually, educational reform would raise the moral vision of both sexes. Discussing the benefits which might flow from reforming women’s secondary education, Emily Davies, for example, demanded: should not our English homes be.. pervaded by an atmosphere. in which all thoughts and generous impulses should hvc and grow, all mcan and selfish ends be, by common consent, disowned.. What a change would then come over the whole aspect 01‘ our national liie!‘”

Why

Consistent individuals,

with liberal

their distinctive conception of society as a collectivity of feminists’ analyses of women’s education focused on the

rights or interests of individual women and their individual male associates or on the interests of society as a whole. They had little to say concerning the differing educational interests of different socio-economic groups. On the contrary, insofar as they touched upon the matter, their assumption was that educational reforms which benefited individual women of the propertied classes would work to the advantage of all. Emily Davies, for example, explained that reforms in women’s secondary education would eventually benefit not just the individual women in question and their families but the poor, as well:

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How naturally would they [the poor] share, [in the moral elevation which would result from women’s educationai reform] how inevitably would they be refined and civilised by the insensible influence.. . of the employing class, whose ideals, unconsciously communicated to their subordinants, gradually leaven all the classes below them.”

It would, Emily Davies considered, be particularly beneficial to bring ‘educated women of the employing class’ into the factories to supervise female workers. There was, she thought, no reason in the nature of things why the moral tone of a factory should be ‘less pure and elevating’ than that of the home. What was needed, she contended, was daily contact between ‘women to whom wealth has given the means of culture and refinement’ and Iabourers who would be elevated by the force of their example. 72According to this view, then, fueled by the power of individual example, beneficial social change filtered from the top of society down. If liberal feminists ignored potential conflicts of interests among women in different socioeconomic circumstances, neither did they devote much attention to potential conflicts of interest between men and women at the group level. Regardless of their theoretical commitment to a competitive individualistic ethic, many liberal feminists, it is evident, found competition between the sexes deeply distasteful. Some liberal feminists simply focused on the ultimate harmony of interests which they believed existed between the sexes. Writing in 188 1, Emily Shirreff, for example, argued that in cases where men enjoyed privileges of education and position their advantages should be shared by their ‘born equals of the other sex’ and that in general women’s culture and freedom should be no more limited than men’s But she also declared: ‘No good can arise from the spirit of rivalry between the sexes. It is to the free and full co-operation of men and women that alone we can look for real progress.‘73 Quite often at the same time liberal feminists promoted reforms aimed on one level at enabling women to compete with men for educational resources and employment opportunities they insisted that, on another level, the interests of the sexes were at one. Thus Josephine Butler, for example, in one breath urged the application of endowments to girls’ schools and the opening of professional and other employment opportunities to women and in another insisted that women’s cause was also men’s. Since, she argued, the oppression of one group of human beings by another injured the moral nature of the oppressors, the sexes had a common interest in ending women’s oppression. ‘Women’, she concluded, ‘are not men’s rivals, but their helpers’.74 Even when, as in the case of Mill, liberal feminists did address the issue that women’s educational reform might foster competition betwen the sexes, the competition which they envisaged was at the individual level and in a non-familial setting and in the final analysis, they insisted, worked to the benefit of all. Thus, Mill urged the beneficial stimulus that would be given to men’s intellect were they obliged to compete with women and emphasised the advantages to be anticipated from the ‘great accession to the intellectual power of the species’ which would result from a ‘better and more complete intellectual education’ for women.75 In the happy world envisioned by Victorian liberal feminists, there would, then, at least in the long run, be no losers as a result of women’s educational reform, only winners. Predicated upon an expanding economy of happiness and

intellectual and moral well-being, their analysis in effect denied the existence of any ulrimate conflict of interest either as between the sexes or different groupsof women. Improvements in women’s intellectual education and the material and moral improvement of the sexes seemed destined to progress hand in hand.

EPILOGUE The world of the Victorian liberal feminists is, of course, not our world, but their ideas continue to colour our perceptions of Victorian women’s educational history. Certainly much fine work has been done in the field in recent years, giving us a far more nuanced view of women’s educational past than we had before.7h However, in certain important respects, the history of Victorian women’s education continues to be informed by problematic assumptions inherited from our Victorian liberal feminists forebears. Ray Strachey’s classic account of The Cause, which first appeared in 1928, can be taken as a convenient point of departure for reviewing selected themes in twentieth-century liberal feminist historiography. Strachey’s history deals only with the reforms in women’s secondary and higher education. These, she believed, provided ‘the foundations upon which the whole breadth and force of the Women’s Movement were to depend’.77 Relying heavily and uncritically on evidence gathered by liberal-minded reformers, not least the findings of the Schools Inquiry Commission, Strachey condemned out of hand the ‘rotten state’ of girls’ education prior to the reforms’* and insisted that the reforms in women’s secondary and higher education had benefited women generally: with

the wide

towards way

I’rom

hcnefit

spread

01

sound

teaching

the ternale sex began to the

being.. whole

triumphant.. thing

t’or girls

change. The

primarily

but

the urdinarq

existed.

the whole attitude 01’society

Women’s wcrc‘

Movement avcragc

rapidly

was still

women,

moving

;t long

I‘or whose in

the

right

dirt2ction.“i

Men, she suggested, women:

had benefited

from the women’s

movement

no less than

They have found better comfort and joy in companions who have shared their own world, and neither sex would now, even if it could, turn back the hands of the clockX”

Whereas socialist scholars, convinced that a major transformation of gender roles must await a restructuring of property relations, have generally viewed women’s education as of peripheral interest, ” liberal feminist interest in women’s educational history has been sustained by the belief that education carries with it some hope, at least, of promoting women’s autonomy and opportunities for self-realisation and more equalitarian relations between the sexes. Thus, Joan Burstyn, for example, concludes that women’s higher education carried with it an implicit challenge to the structure of gender roles, and Carol Dyhouse credits the reformed schools and women’s colleges with playing a ‘crucial role’ in the history of the feminist movement.*? Recently, it is

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true, liberal feminist scholars, including Burstyn and Dyhouse, have increasingly questioned the capacity of formal educational institutions atone to effect major changes in the sexual distribution of social privilege. However, their reaction has been to extend their attention to additional educative agencies, especially the family, arguing that new patterns of family socialisation and a new division of labour within the family are necessary for such changes to be effected.83 Later work on Victorian women’s education has continued to focus disproportionately on the education given girls of thepropertied classesx4 While offering a far more discriminating account than Strachey’s of such girls’ educational experience, recent studies continue to concentrate mainly on dimensions of education especially valued by liberal feminists. Analyses have thus focused largely on the extent to which girls’ education fostered libertarian, individualist, competitive, rationalist values and approximated the education given men.@ Alternative educational traditions, informed by different values, have generally been given short shrift. For example, Sara Delamont, having carefully noted that the quality of the intellectual education given girls at home and in private schools varied, dismisses the education usually given girls of the propertied classes as ‘a form of conspicuous consumption and not really an education at all’.” Somewhat similarly, Deborah Gorham, remarks that private forms of education, however distinguished intellectually, failed to prepare girls for a life of competition and individual achievement. In short rather than being examined on their own terms, these forms of education have most often been judged by liberal feminist standards and found wanting.*’ In recent years, scholars, aware of the limited gains made by women in the wake of the Victorian reforms, have increasingly drawn attention to traditional conservative features of the reformed girls’ schoois and women’s colleges. However, the tendency has been to equate conservatism in girls’ education with deviation from male norms. Thus attention has been called, for example, to the conventional ladylike norms of behaviour enforced on staff and students at the new institutions, to curricular deviations from the male model, and to the fact that many of the new female institutions were controlled by members of the that in opposite sex. 88 Far less attention has been addressed to the circumstance many respects Victorian public girls’ schools were illiberal, anti-individualistic, anti-rational in orientation precisely to the extent that they approximated their male counterparts. More generally, the conflicts which existed between Victorian liberal feminists’ libertarian and equalitarian commitments has seldom been fully confronted. Sara Delamont, for example, has pointed to the dilemma faced by educational reformers and their students, obliged to conform both to norms of feminine propriety and those of male academic orthodoxy.89 In practice, she suggests, highly educated women were presented with two constricting models: the celibate career woman or the companionate wife. Delamont considers that the restraints imposed on women’s autonomy and opportunities for self-fulfillment were inevitable if feminist goals were to be achieved. Rigid conformity to male academic norms was essential, she believes, if women’s education was to win parity of esteem, and had reformers challenged conventional family roles by encouraging women to combine marriage and a career, she argues, the whole enterprise of educational reform might have been endangered. Delamont’s

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Pedersm

analysis may well be correct. However, this granted, it must also be said that to sacrifice one generation of individuals’ opportunities for liberty and selfrealisation in hopes of improving the status (and hence the opportunities for selffulfillment and liberty) of individuals of the next, is not consistent with the libertarian and individualist values which Delamont herself cites with approval.90 Most twentieth-century accounts of Victorian male education have assumed that class or other socioeconomic group interests played a major part in promoting educational change. 91Liberal feminist historians, however, persist in positing a fundamental community of interest among women in educational matters. In contrast to Strachey, recent works, to be sure, have been at pains to point out that only a minority of women directly benefited from the reforms introduced in women’s secondary and higher education. Dyhouse, for example, notes that the reforms benefited only a minority of girls even from the middle classes.92 Delamont has emphasised the exclusion of working class girls from the reformed institutions and the fact that the reformed institutions themselves catered to different groups within the propertied classes.93 However, these and other recent accounts seem to construe the problem in essentially static terms-that is, some women were ‘left out’ of the reforms. Little sustained consideration has been given the possibility that these reforms either benefited or were intended to benefit some women at the expense of other women. Yet, given the circumstance that the most prestigious Victorian female educational institutions were single-sex establishments and that most women who worked for pay were engaged in sex-segregated occupations, it would seem that insofar as the educational reforms enabled women to compete for an extended range of educational and employment opportunities, this mainly entailed competition with other women, not with men. Certainly contemporary accounts of Victorian women’s education give far greater emphasis to the actual and potential conflicts of interest which existed between men and women at the group level than Victorian liberal feminist reformers allowed. Joan Burstyn, for example, has documented the various male interests which considered themselves threatened by the admission of women to higher education. 94 However, the hope, expressed by Mill and other Victorian liberal feminists, lingers on that one and the same educational tradition can prepare individual men and women both for the competitive world of public affairs and the companionable realm of private relations. Deborah Corham’s recent work suggests, however, that the very notion of home and public life as quite separate spheres, each governed by distinctive values, may be rather a relic of Victorian romanticism than an accurate description of the past or any likely future.Y’ The critical comments offered here are not intended as a general attack on liberal feminist values. However, I think that certain central assumptions which inform this tradition must be reconsidered and either qualified or abandoned. The notion of a general community of interest amongst women, however attractive as an abstract ideal, seems to me untenable as a historical proposition in the context of Victorian England. Such a community of interest may have existed in certain limited spheres, but these need to be carefully delineated. Or either the equalitarian or the libertarianagain, one need not disparage

Victorian Liberal Feminist Theory

51.5

individualist commitments of the liberal feminist tradition, while recognising that these dual aspirations cannot be assumed to be consistent. Finally, unlike our we cannot be certain that libertarian and optimistic Victorian forebears, individualist values necessarily encompass broader social and moral aspirations or that reason inevitably promotes the good. Thus, one may admire liberal feminists’ efforts to impose meritocratic standards in women’s education and to encourage the values of rational inquiry and self-realisation without believing that these encompass all desirable educational ends. To achieve a more adequate appreciation of these manifold ends, it probably behooves us to examine alternative

female

educational

traditions

with a more

sympathetic

eye.

NOTES I _ For other approaches to the strand of feminist thinking here denoted ‘liberal feminist’ see Olive Banks’s discussion of ‘equal rights’ feminism in Faces of Feminism. A Study of Feminism us a Social Movement (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 198 1); Karen Offen’s delineation of an ‘individualist’ tradition of French feminism in ‘Depopulation, nationalism, and feminism in fin-de-siecle France’, American Historical Review 89 (1984), 654; and Pauline Marks’s discussion of the aims of the group of English feminists whom she terms ‘inst~mentalists’ in ‘Femininity in the classroom: an account of changing attitudes’, The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 185. I have preferred the term ‘liberal feminist’ because I do not think this strand of feminist thought can be understood apart from liberal theory generally in the context of Victorian England. Susan Moller Okin offers an excellent discussion of John Stuart Mill as a ‘liberal feminist’ in Women in Western Poiiticai Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 197-220, and Juliet Mitchell offers some useful distinctions between liberal and socialist feminist thought in ‘Women and equality’, TheRights and Wrongs of Women, pp. 379-99. As an interpretive tradition, liberal feminism can be viewed as a variant of that discussed in H. Butterfield’s celebrated study The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1959). 2. John Stuart Mill, ‘Early essays on marriage and divorce’, in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, ESSQYSon Sex Equality, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 74. 3. Frances Power Cobbe, The Duties of Women (London and Edinburgh: Williams & Norgate, 1881), pp. 148-9. An author and philanthropist, Cobbe (1822-1904) publicised demands for women’s educational reform, the suffrage and other causes. For details see Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself, 2 ~01s. (London: R. Bentley, 1894). 4. As Carol Dyhouse remarks, Victorian feminists envinced little interest in the education given working class girls, who usually attended elementary schools organised by the state and voluntary religious societies. Girls Growing up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England(London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 170-l. 5. For a discussion of the curricula and the values which informed this educational tradition see Joyce Senders Pedersen, ‘Schoolmistresses and headmistresses: elites and education in nineteenth-century England’ The Journaf of British Studies (Autumn 1975), pp. 135-62. 6. The best general account of the reforms remains Alice Zimmern, TheRenaissance of Girls’ Education in England. A Record of Fifty Years’ Progress (London: A.D. Innes,

516

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13,

Joyce Senders

Pedersen

1898). See also Josephine Kamm, Hope~eferred. Girls’ Educar~on in ~ngZish History (London: Methuen, 1965). Sheila Fletcher, Feminists and~ureau~rats. A study in the development of girls’ education in the nineteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) offers a good account of feminists’ (limited) contribution to the struggle to obtain endowments for girls’ schools. The non-feminist liberals include such figures as James Bryce, who urged reforms in girls’ secondary education and promoted women’s higher education at Cambridge, but opposed women’s suffrage. Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Libera/ism (London: Allen Lane, 1976) offers a good account of the educational aims of Bryce and other university liberals but has scarcely anything to say about their efforts on behalf of women’s education. For a discussion of some conservative reformers see .Joyce Senders Pedersen, ‘Some Victorian headmistresses: a conservative tradition of social reform’, ~i~turiun Studies 24 (19X I), 463-88. An early promoter of women’s educational reform, Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) edited the Eng/ish~~loman’.s Journa/, which publicised liberal feminist causes. Emily Davies (1830-1921) founded Girton College, Cambridge and spearheaded various campaigns aimed at securing equal educational rights for women, including the admission of girls to the so-called Local Examinations conducted bydelegacies of Oxford and Cambridge universities for secondary students. Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable, 1927) offers an excellent account of her life and work. Better known for her work to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, Josephine Butler (1828-1906) was also active in educational reform and served as President of the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education ofWomen, which organised lectures for ladies in various northern cities and provided the impetus for the foundation of Newnham College, Cambridge. See Glen Petrie, A Singufar iniquity: The Campaigns of.~osephine Butler (London: Macmillan. 197 1). Maria Grey (I8I6-1906) was the younger sister of Emily Shirreff (1814-97). In I871 Maria founded the National Union for the Improvement of the Education of Women of All Classes above the Elementary and its offshoot, the Girls’ Public Day School Company (later Trust), which established thirty-eight schools during the last decades of the century. Emily co-edited the Journal of the Women’s Educational CJnion, sat on the Company’s Council, and was active in the kindergarten movement. In their early years the sisters espoused liberal but not feminist views. For example in their joint work Thoughts on Self-culture Addressed to Women, 2nd edn (London, 1854), p. 18 they explicitly disclaimed any desire for the social (as opposed to moral) independence or equality of women. However, by the 1870s. both sisters were urging the emancipation of women from their legal and customary social disabilities. See Mrs. Wiiliam (Maria G.) Grey. ‘Men and women’ ~orzn~ght~~ Review 26 NL‘W Series (1879) 672-85 A sequel’. ~orini~~~r~~ &vim. 29 and Maria G. Grey, ‘Men and women. New Series (1881) 776-93. Emily A.E. Shirreff, The Work of the Narional Union (London: National Union for the Improvement of the Education of Women of All Classes. 1872) p. 37. Edward W. Ellsworth, Liberators of the Female Mind. The Shirreff Sisters, Educa:ional Reform, and the Women’s Movement (Westport, Corm.: Greenwood Press, 1979) offers an account of their thought and activities. John Stuart Mill, ‘On the subjection of women’, Essays on Sex Equality, pp. 142-3. Ibid.. p. 146. Grey, ‘Men and women. A sequel’, p. 789. [Bessie Rayner Parkes], Remarks on the Education of Girls (London, 1854), p, 5. Frances Power Cobbe, Female Education andHow it Would be Affected by Universit_y ~,~anlinat~o~~s. A Paper read at the Social Science Congress, London, 1862, 2nd edn (London: Emily Faithfull, 1862). p. 3. Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Celibacy v. marriage’,

Victorian Liberal Feminist Theory

517

Essays on Pursuits of Women (London: Emily Faithfull, 1863) p. 55. 14. Josephine E. Butler, The Education andEmployment of Women (London: Macmillan, 1868), p. 17. 15. Emily Davies, The Higher Education of Women (London and New York: Alexander Strahan, 1866), p. 36. 16. Cobbe, Female Education, p. 8. Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The final cause of woman’, in Josephine E. Butler, ed., Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. 6-8, 23. 17. Emily Shirreff, InteNectualEducation, anditsInfluenceon the CharacterandHappiness of Women (London, 1858), p. 7. 18. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 144. 19. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self-culture, p. 18. 20. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 224. 21. Ibid., p. 227. 22. Ibid., p. 214. 23. Ibid., p, 227. 24. John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilisation’, Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J.B. Schneewind (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 173. 25. Ibid., p. 179. 26. E.[mily] S.[hirreffl, ‘Home education and private governesses’, Journal of the Women’s Education Union III (1875) 66. Intellectual Education, pp. 51-77. 27. Cobbe, Female Education, pp. 10, 13. 28. Ibid., p. 16. 29. Emily Davies, ‘On the influence upon girls’ schools of external examinations’, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, 1860-1908 (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1910), p. 113. 30. Ibid., 110-11. 3 1.. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 202. 32. Davies, ‘The influence of university degrees on the education ofwomen’, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, pp. 48-9. 33. Grey, ‘Men and women. A sequel’, pp. 787-8. 34. Cobbe, Female Education, p. 13. 35. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self-culture, p. 163; Davies, Higher Education of Women, p. 130; Cobbe, Duties, p. 2 1. 36. Davies, ‘Special systems of education for women’, Thoughts on some Questions Relating to Women, pp. 120-3; See also E.[mily] S.[hirreffl, ‘University degrees for women’, Journal of the Women’s Education Union II (1874), 8 1. 37. Cobbe, Female Education, pp. 13, 16. 38. Davies, ‘Special systems of education for women’, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, pp. 120-3. 39. Cobbe, Female Education, pp. 16-17. 40. Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge. A Men’s University-Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975) offers a good account of Sidgwick and other Cambridge reformers. 41. This was the Cambridge Women’s Examination. Established in 1868 to test the attainments of women over the age of eighteen, it was redubbed the Higher Local Examination and opened to men in 1873. 42. Davies, ‘Special systems of education’, p. 125. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, pp. 229-30. 43. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, describes the issues dividing the different camps at Cambridge. 44. Cobbe, Female Education, p. 12.

518

Joyce

Senders

Pedersen

45. Mill, ‘Early essays’, pp. 118-19. 46. Butler, Women’s Work and Woman’s C’ulrure, pp. xiv, xxxi, xli. Davies. ‘The employment of women. Northumberland and Durham Branch of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, 1861’, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, p. 32. Maria G. Grey, OldMaids; A Lecture by Mrs. William G’rey,2nd edn (London, 1875) pp. 17-18. 47. Mill, ‘Early essays’, p. 74; Cobbe, Duties, pp. 445. 48. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self-culture, p. 37. 49. Ibid., pp. 106, 115. 50. Davies, Higher Education of Women, pp. 74-S. 51. Emily Davies, Home and the Higher Education (London, 1878). p. 10. 52. Cobbe, ‘Final cause’, pp. 23-4. 53. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, p. 209. 54. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 236. 55. Davies, ‘On secondary instruction as relating to girls’, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, p. 77. 56. Davies, Higher Education, pp. 75-6; Parkes. Remarks, p. 14; Mill, ‘Subjection’. pp. 226-8. 57. Maria Grey, Last Words to Girls on Life in School and after School (London and Edinburgh: Rivingtons, 1889). pp. 5-6, 10, 21, 56. 58. Davies, Higher Education, p. 123. 59. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 231. 60. Grey, ‘Men and women. A sequel,’ p. 792. 61. Ibid., p. 793. 62. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 235. 63. Davies, ‘On secondary instruction’, p. 75. 64. Ibid, pp. 75-7; Davies, Higher Education. p. 37. See also Mill, ‘Subjection’, pp. 228-9; Parkes, Remarks, p. 14. 65. Maria G. Grey, ‘On the organisation of lectures and classes for women’, Journal of the Women’s Education Union I ( 1873). 202. 66. Shirreff and Grey. for example, appealed to ‘women’s indefeasible right to every privilege that belongs to man as a spiritual and immortal being’. Thoughts on Selfculture, p, 36. Elsewhere Grey recorded her opinion that religion was the only basis for asserting women’s natural rights: ‘Men and women. A sequel’. p. 792. 67. Mill, ‘Subjection’, pp.221-2; Grey, ‘Men and women. A sequel’, p. 788. E.[mily] Shirreff, ‘The work of the world and women’s share in it. No. II’, Journal of the Women’s Education Union IX (1881). 55. 68. Davies, ‘The influence of university degrees’, p. 52; Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 227. See also Butler, Woman’s Work, p. xxxvi. 69. Ibid., pp.218-21; Davies, ‘On secondary instruction’, pp.72-7; Grey, ‘Men and women’, p. 676. 70. Davies, ‘On secondary instruction’, p. 77. 71. Ibid., p. 77. 72. Davies, Higher Education of Women, pp. 92-5. 73. Shirreff, ‘Work of the world’, p. 55. 74. Butler, Woman’s Work, pp. viii, xiii, xiv, xx. 75. Mill, ‘Subjection’, p. 221. 76. Joan N. Burstyn, ‘Women’s education in England during the nineteenth century: a review of the literature’, History of Education 6 (1977) 11-19, surveys work done to that date. 77. Ray Strachey, The Cause. A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London: Virago, 1978) p. 124.

Victorian Liberal Feminist 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

Theory

519

Ibid.. p. 138. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 392. See, for example Sheila Rowbotham’s studies, Women, Resistance and Revolution (London Penguin, 1972) and Hidden from History 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against Zt (London: Pluto Press, 1973) written from a socialist feminist viewpoint. Brian Simon has virtually nothing to say about girls’ education in his wellknown studies The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780-1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974) and Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974). Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood(London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 167. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, pp. 172-5. Ibid., pp. 144, 150. Burstyn, Victorian Education, pp. 168-9, 172. Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 209-10, also concludes that the ‘idea of femininity’ which has been imposed on women by socialising agencies and shaped their personalities has been a key factor in perpetuating their subordination. Dyhouse’s Girls Growing Up is a notable exception. Burstyn, Victorian Education, pp. 11-12, 22-8, 36-41, chap. 8; Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, chap. 2 and pp. 172-5; Gorham, Victorian Girl, pp.22-7; Marks, ‘Femininity’. These values are not the sole concern of these works, but they receive the major emphasis. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women. Work and Community for Single Women: 1850-1920 (London: Virago Press, 1985), chaps. 4 and 5, takes a different tack, viewing girls’ schools and women’s colleges as communities. Sara Delamont, ‘The contradictions in ladies’ education’, The Nineteenth-Century Woman. Her Cultural and Physical World, ed. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1978) pp. 137-9. Gorham, Victorian Girl, pp.24-5. Burstyn, Victorian Education, chap. 8; Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, pp. 57-78. Delamont, ‘Contradictions’ and ‘The domestic ideology and women’s education’, The Nineteenth-Century Women, pp. 164-87. Delamont, ‘Domestic ideology’, pp. 177-8. See, for example, Brian Simon’s studies, cited above; J.R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, The Development of the English Public Schoolin the Nineteenth Century (New York: Quadrangle, 1977); T.W. Bamford, The Rise of the Public Schools (London: Nelson, 1967); Sheldon Rothblatt, TheRevolution of the Dons. CambridgeandSociety in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) for various approaches to the social history of Victorian male education. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, p. 55. Delamont, ‘Domestic ideology’, pp. 173-7. Burstyn, Victorian Education. Gorham, Victorian Girl, chap. 1 and pp.49-50, 68, 111-12.