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.

Sarah Jane Aiston is a lecturer in the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Research in Higher Education, School of Education, Durham University. She has an interest in the history of women in higher education and has recently published within this field in 20th Century British History, History of Education and Women's History Review.

Maureen Meikle is a senior lecturer in early modern history in the School of Arts, Design, Media & Culture, University of Sunderland. Her research interests include early modern Scottish Women and Queen Anna of Denmark (1574-1619). She edited, with Elizabeth Ewan, Women in Scotland, c. 1100-c, 1750 (2000).

Jean Spence is a lecturer in Community and Youth Work in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University. Her research interests include the history and practice of informal educational approaches, youth work with girls and young women, and gender relations in mining communities. She has recently published in these fields within Women’s History Review; Community, Work and Family, Sociological Research Online, and Youth and Policy. She is a co-editor and contributing author to a series of collected essays published by the National Youth Agency relating to the history of Youth and Community Work.

Foreword
By Carol Dyhouse

Preface


Chapter One: Women, Education and Agency, 1600-2000: An Historical Perspective
By Sarah Jane Aiston

Chapter Two: Self-Tutition and the Intellectual Achievement of Early Modern Women: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678)
By Barbara Bulckaert

Chapter Three: Women and Agency: The Educational Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft
By Joyce Senders Pedersen

Chapter Four: Scientific Women: Their Contribution to Culture in England in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
By Ruth Watts

Chapter Five: Ramabai and Rokeya: The History of Gendered Social Capital in India
By Barnita Bagchi

Chapter Six: Russian Women in European Universities, 1864-1900
By Marianna Muravyeva

Chapter Seven: ‘Knowledge as the Necessary Food of the Mind’: Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education
By Stephanie Spencer

Chapter Eight: A Woman’s Challenge: The Voice of Sukufe Nihal in the Modernisation of Turkey
By Aynur Soydan Erdemir

Chapter Nine: Femininity and Mathematics at Cambridge circa 1900
By Claire Jones

Chapter Ten: Thinking Women: International Education for Peace and Equality, 1918-1930
By Katherine Storr

Chapter Eleven: London’s Feminist Teachers and the Urban Political Landscape
By Jane Martin

Chapter Twelve: Feminist Criminology in Britain c.1920-1960: Education, Agency and Activism outside the Academy
By Anne Logan

Chapter Thirteen: Thinking Feminist in 1963: Challenges from Betty Friedan and the U.S. President’s Commission on the Status of Women
By Linda Eisenmann

Chapter Fourteen: ‘Enhancing the quality of the educational experience’: Female Activists and U.S. University and College Women’s Centres
By Sylvia Ellis and Helen Mitchell


About the Editors
About the Contributors
Index