Lives, Networks and Topographies of Time and Place: New Turns in the History of Women and Education

Abstract

The late 1970s saw the start of significant growth in women’s history, particularly in Western Europe and North America where some universities acknowledged the burgeoning interest by opening women’s studies departments and research centers and academic publishers added publications in women’s history to their catalogues. The literature that emerged was often exciting, as scholars wrestled with the purpose of such history; should they write women into mainstream history, or should they develop new ways of writing history? On the one hand, concern with women’s issues’ marginalized women’s history, but on the other hand fitting women’s history into the ‘empty spaces’ in mainstream history was unsatisfactory to scholars who criticized the patriarchal nature of the predominant historical discourse’.1 Historians did important work in uncovering lost’ women, and identifying examples of women’s agency.2 Within the history of education, scholarship followed a similar pattern. Those interested in the history of female education mined the archives of universities, schools, philanthropic associations and education societies, to identify women and champion their initiative and industry.3 But dissatisfaction with such discourse led scholars to become weary of stories designed to celebrate women’s agency [which] began to seem predictable and repetitious … information gathering to prove a point that has already been made’.4