The Reform of Women's Secondary and Higher Education: Institutional Change and Social Values in Mid and Late Victorian England

Abstract

is of interest both in terms of its potential effects upon the school population and its broader social implications. As the sociologist Robert Dreeben has argued, analyzing the structural properties of the modern American public school, What is Learned in School derives not only from the curriculum but also from the institutional setting in which the activity occurs. (1) In structuring individuals' activities in regular ways, he has argued, the organizational properties of institutions are themselves educative, fostering an acceptance of norms congruent with the requirements of institutional life. These norms may then be applied to other life situations. (2) Thus changes in the institutional setting in which an activity such as education occurs may both reflect and promote broader changes in behavioral norms and social values. The development of new institutional forms in women's secondary and higher education in nineteenth century England offers the historian an opportunity to explore the relationship between institutional structures and social values in another age and cultural setting. The nineteenth century was, of course, a period of general social and institutional change in England. As the country continued its slow transformation from a traditional society organized largely around ties of kinship and other personal connections to an urban industrial culture in which bureaucratic