An Experiment in the Development of Social Networks for Women: Women’s Colleges in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century1

Abstract

This article examines the network of women’s colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to women’s exclusion from the realm of the university and their desire to participate in higher education. These colleges, run largely along denominational lines, were situated in the major cities with the majority located in Dublin. The pioneering colleges for Protestant women were the Ladies’ Collegiate School (1859), later Victoria College Belfast (1887) and Alexandra College Dublin (1866). Colleges for Catholic women emerged from the 1880s, largely as a result of a perceived threat of proselytism, and as a result of the demands of middle‐class Catholic women to higher education within a Catholic setting. Run principally by the Dominican, Loreto and Ursuline orders, the most prominent Catholic women’s colleges were the Dominican College Eccles Street, Dublin (1882), St Angela’s College and High School, Cork (1887), St Mary’s University College, Dublin (1893) and Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin (1893). Whether Catholic or Protestant, these colleges were established with the sole objective of targeting the more prestigious and valuable domains of knowledge, allowing middle class women students access to a range of high prestige cultural and social capital. They offered teaching in the liberal arts, providing participating women students with exposure to a demanding academic curriculum and to participation in the public examination arena. They also promoted membership of college societies—literary, sporting, philanthropic and political, strengthening women’s capacity to fulfil a more public and active role in nineteenth‐century Irish society. 1 A version of this paper was presented at the European Educational Research Association Annual Conference in Dublin, September 2005. I am grateful to Gerry MacRuairc, University College Dublin and the anonymous reviewers at Paedagogica Historica for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.