10 The Church of England and Women's Higher Education, c.1840–1914

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the Anglican contribution to women's education. In England the church had become a major provider of both public secondary and university education for girls and women by the turn of the last century. In the years after the Schools Inquiry Commission, the climate changed in some respects quite significantly. For women's higher education as a whole the change was entirely positive: the eleven years after the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 were the most productive period of the nineteenth-century in the creation of endowed and proprietary girls' schools and women's university colleges. For the church, however, this was a period of stress — of challenge to its monopoly of educational endowments, pressure for undenominational religious teaching and anxiety, in some quarters at least, about the post-Darwinian crisis of faith.