The construction of ‘female citizens’: a socio-historical analysis of girls’ education in Luxembourg

Abstract

Background: This paper will empirically investigate female education in Luxembourg from a historical perspective. A special focus will be laid on the question of how women in Luxembourgian society were constructed as female ‘citizens’, even though they were, rather, considered as a homogeneous category limited to a private sphere separated from the male citizens.Purpose: The primary purpose of this article is to reveal the narrative of a homogeneous femininity separated from a male sphere associated with citizenship, and the impact this division had on education. Secondly, through the example of Luxembourg, it will show how this narrative served to maintain traditional role allocations, while at the same time linking them to rhetorics of progress – for example, by adding a political dimension to the former ‘private sphere’. Thirdly, this article will demonstrate the heterogeneity which shaped female education, despite the rhetorical homogenization, showing how social and local/regional differences were as influential in determining female education as gender differences.Design and methods: This historical study is based on a longitudinal analysis (contained within a bigger project) of the Luxembourgian curriculum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The source corpus of this project includes 12,000 historical documents related to curricular negotiations in Luxembourg, which were analysed in a combined quantitative–qualitative analysis.Findings: The analysis demonstrated that public and professional discussions about female education undertook a rhetorical homogenization of women and their education, and that this served to conserve existing gender differences in the school system. By strategies of rhetorical scientification and politicization of domestic tasks, traditional role allocations were ascribed a political dimension and interpreted as progressive. However, though claiming universality, the plurality of concepts proves that this homogenization did not reflect reality. The pedagogical concept of ‘the female education’ shows only a few rudimentary features, mainly based on the introduction of obligatory handcraft and domestic education. A social differentiation was already given by the structure of the school system, which – given that there were no secondary schools for girls – meant education in Catholic private schools in the first place.Conclusions: The findings reveal that, by assuming a homogeneous concept of femininity, numerous codifications of female education – unlike those often perceived in literature and public discourse – were not necessarily understood as ‘modernizing’, but rather as conserving female role allocations. The results, however, suggest that female education was far more heterogeneous than rhetorically assumed in the educational debates, and that rather than gender differences, social and regional differences prevailed in determining schooling.