A Quiet Revolution: Women and Second-Level Education in Ireland, 1878–1930

Abstract

A Quiet Revolution: Women and Second-Level Education in Ireland, 1878–1930 Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh In 1902, the maverick politician Frank Hugh O’Donnell wrote The Ruin of Education in Ireland, in which he declared that female students were “fit for nothing under heaven except casting flowers before the Banner of the Sodality.”1 For many in Ireland, education was the avenue to economic independence. However, in both pre-and post-Independence Ireland, education beyond first level was constrained both by gender and by class, and particularly the latter. The vast majority of students who were educated after the age of fourteen were members of Ireland’s expanding middle class. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century, changes in the educational system began to facilitate the entry of professional women into the labor market. The census of 1881 noted that a “very decided advance in the superior [second-and third-level] education of females” had taken place in the last decade. The number of females studying Latin had increased from 292 to 770; in the case of Greek, from 35 to 122; and in mathematics from510 to 1,082.2 These subjects were critical for university entry.3 This quiet revolution in female education was most strongly felt in the area of employment. Educated females now sought access to jobs commensurate with their educational attainments. Several authors have noted the emphasis on “refinement” in female education in the nineteenth century.4 Yet, criticism of this focus by educational reformers, [End Page 36] combined with the need to provide for unemployed females who had enjoyed— or perhaps, endured—a “polite” education, gradually led to changes in the curriculum. As in the eighteenth century, Irish education in the closing decades of the nineteenth century still emphasized the alleged differences between male and female students. Such influential texts as Rousseau’s Emile had argued that women were dependent on men.5 The writer Frances Power Cobbe felt that “everything was taught in inverse ratio of its true importance.”6 Segregated gender education, particularly at second level, was the norm well into the nineteenth century. At national schools for first-level students, usually aged five to fourteen, the curriculum reflected the economic and cultural needs of the day, and domestic science was prominent in the curriculum for girls.7 The development of convent schools in the late nineteenth century meant that, as Caitriona Clear has noted, “a proportionately greater number of women were in a position of access to the education and training which led to white collar work.”8 However, Martha Vicinus’s study of independent women in Britain noted that the educated woman had “virtually no other option” other than teaching, which she describes as “a narrow staircase leading to more education as an ill-paid—but respected—teacher.”9 Other professions, such as accountancy, law, and medicine, remained male-dominated. It was the teacher who exerted the most profound educational influence on professional women. Mary Colum, writing of her school days at the St. Louis Convent in Monaghan town in the late nineteenth century, commented that “education turned out a considerable number of trained and scholarly minds, but the country was too small to use as many of them as were turned out.”10 This may in part be due to the focus on modern languages in women’s education, at the expense of science and business. Because many women did not study Latin or science, they were effectively excluded from many faculties at university. But Latin was not [End Page 37] required for the commerce faculty at the National University of Ireland, where, in the early twentieth century, women accounted for the majority of those studying commerce. A tracking of their later careers reveals that many opted for the Higher Diploma in Education, the professional preparation for a teaching career.11 Criticism of female education in Ireland persisted. Henrietta White, the principal of Alexandra College in Dublin, declared that the “cult of ignorance in woman did not lack adherents even in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.” 12 A Dr. Kirkpatrick, in a speech to the Queen’s Institute of female professional schools—established in 1861 to prepare women for...