Susan Hamilton – författare

Nineteenth Century British Women''s Education brings together key documents in the Victorian feminist campaign to establish and improve girls’ and women’s education. Drawing widely on articles from the feminist and established press, government papers, newspapers, professional and association journals, as well as memoirs, addresses, pamphlets and reviews, this collection gives researchers access to nineteenth-century debates on improving girls’ and women’s education and women’s work as educators.

The collection is divided overall into two sections, both of which incorporate materials that argue for the improvement of girls’ and women’s education as well as arguments made against education for girls and women. In examining the campaign to establish higher education for women, the first volumes include the writings of such primary figures as Emily Davies, Lydia Becker, Barbara Bodichon, Jessie Boucherett, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff in addition to illustrating the significance of institutions such as Girton and Newnham Colleges. Later volumes document women''s work as educators, and include writings by Mary Carpenter, Dorothea Beale, Frances Mary Buss, and the Shirreff sisters Maria and Emily, gifted educators of girls at the elementary and secondary levels, and women whose educational practice embodied the arguments they made on behalf of girls’ education. These volumes also chart the importance of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, the Schools Inquiry Commission and the Journal of Women’s Education Union in charting the increasing organization and professionalization of women teachers.

Edited and with new introductions by Susan Hamilton and Janice Schroeder, Nineteenth Century British Women''s Education is destined to be an invaluable reference resource to all future scholars of feminism and the history of education.

Nineteenth Century British Women''s Education brings together key documents in the Victorian feminist campaign to establish and improve girls’ and women’s education. Drawing widely on articles from the feminist and established press, government papers, newspapers, professional and association journals, as well as memoirs, addresses, pamphlets and reviews, this collection gives researchers access to nineteenth-century debates on improving girls’ and women’s education and women’s work as educators.

The collection is divided overall into two sections, both of which incorporate materials that argue for the improvement of girls’ and women’s education as well as arguments made against education for girls and women. In examining the campaign to establish higher education for women, the first volumes include the writings of such primary figures as Emily Davies, Lydia Becker, Barbara Bodichon, Jessie Boucherett, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff in addition to illustrating the significance of institutions such as Girton and Newnham Colleges. Later volumes document women''s work as educators, and include writings by Mary Carpenter, Dorothea Beale, Frances Mary Buss, and the Shirreff sisters Maria and Emily, gifted educators of girls at the elementary and secondary levels, and women whose educational practice embodied the arguments they made on behalf of girls’ education. These volumes also chart the importance of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, the Schools Inquiry Commission and the Journal of Women’s Education Union in charting the increasing organization and professionalization of women teachers.

Edited and with new introductions by Susan Hamilton and Janice Schroeder, Nineteenth Century British Women''s Education is destined to be an invaluable reference resource to all future scholars of feminism and the history of education.

“Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits Matrimony, dealt with alike by your law?”

So ends the “little allegory” in conversational form with which Frances Power Cobbe opens the 1868 essay that gives this collection its title. Cobbe was a widely read essayist of remarkable lucidity and power; her pieces display incisive wit and remarkable focus as she returns repeatedly to “the woman question,” but it was typical of the time that when Cobbe died she was described in the Wellesley Index to Victorian periodicals as a “miscellaneous writer.”

Cobbe was not alone; as much as 15 per cent of the essays in Victorian periodicals were written by women, yet even the best of these pieces were allowed by the male-dominated world of scholarship to disappear from print. This anthology makes available again some of the best Victorian writing by women.

The second edition has been revised and updated; additions include a chronology and an essay by Frances Power Cobbe on the education of women.