Good Wives and Little Mothers: Social Anxieties and the Schoolgirl's Curriculum, 1890‐1920

Abstract

A hint of complacency could sometimes be detected in the attitude of those pioneers of women's educational reform who sat back, in the I89os, to take stock of their progress since mid-century. As early I88I Maria Grey had optimistically remarked to Frances Buss that there was no longer any need to distinguish a 'Women's Education Question' from educational issues in general.l But complacency was by no means universal. Mrs. Grey herself was to be strongly taken to task for her remark by Christina Bremner, whose survey, The Education of Girls and Women in Great Britain, was published in I897. Whilst giving due attention to all the more obvious disparities in institutional provision for the secondary, technical and higher education of the different sexes in Britain, this book included a particularly interesting section dealing with the public elementary schools. Here, the author complained, girls were offered a curriculum heavily weighted by an emphasis on needlework and domestic subjects; their proficiency in arithmetic, history and geography tended to be seen of less importance than that of the boys. The sight of small girls of eleven years or even younger learning cookery, housewifery and laundrywork was becoming common, as if little girls could not be too early pressed into a narrow mould.2