Abstract
This article explores the various types of domestic education, particularly cookery, available in Manchester between 1870 and 1902. The work of the two local School Boards and the Manchester School of Domestic Economy are shown as part of a complicated network of provision – a mixed economy of welfare, including enthusiastic philanthropists and educational entrepreneurs offering a range of practical and academic classes for middle‐class ladies as well as working‐class schoolgirls. The campaigners for domestic education managed a dual vision of what it was to be domestically competent, insisting on the value of lessons from professionals, while arguing that domesticity was a natural, innate feminine talent. Likewise, although women’s education and/or employment could be blamed for a decline in domestic skills, re‐centring domestic education in schools and evening classes could make education a cure not just for a generation of inadequate mothers and wives, but also for racial degeneration.
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