After reading the assigned passages for our 9/10 class, Group 2 decided to zero-in on women’s education in Victorian England and found an article called “Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England” by Laura Schwartz. This article begins by asserting that the Victorian women’s rights movement did not spring up from one text or thinker, but rather was a conglomerate of many ideas, sometimes opposing ones, from many different people. According to Schwartz, feminists active in the second half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century “directly equated freedom with the acquisition of knowledge” (2). Activists such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme also chose to focus on sex education and suffrage, and even more radical feminists such as Josephine Butler focused on the rights and treatment of sex workers.
As the article begins to narrow its focus from the general women’s rights movement to education specifically, Schwartz asserts that altering the landscape of educating women did not come without its challenges: some women in higher education rejected more radical stances and opposed “female enfranchisement” (2). What’s more, women could not even read for degrees at Oxford until 1920 and at Cambridge until 1947. Interestingly, feminism during this time was often connected to religious movements and schools of thought, for in Christianity idleness is considered a great sin and it was decided that women needed to be kept busy in some way.
Despite major roadblocks to equal education between men and women, activists like Emily Davies and Frances Power Cobbe insisted that women receive an identical education to men, including competitive exams. In 1869, Griton College was established at Cambridge for the education of women, though the majority of the North of England Council for Higher Education for Women disapproved. Oxford followed suit soon after by establishing its own women’s centers for education, though they placed severe restriction on student’s dress, conduct, and interaction with men.
In conclusion, Schwartz surmises that the women’s education movement was shaped out of the larger “women question” (i.e., the questioning of women’s place in society) and by the “feminist re-thinking of gender roles, sexual difference, and the family” (10). Schwartz goes on to say that the feminist movement was very much rooted in politics of the time and, as stated before, influenced by religious aversion to idleness, “valuing work, dignity of economic independence, and individual self-improvement” (11). Though it was an often gruelingly slow road to female emancipation, the feminist campaign for women’s education developed in tandem with ideas and institutions, and so as England evolved and progressed, so did the movement.
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