While one still finds the antifeminist pronouncements of Henry Maudsley and other late nineteenth-century medical men and scientists quoted as exemplary of attitudes towards the possibility of women being capable of, and benefiting from, higher education, one seldom finds these adequately contextualised as part of a much larger, and more contested, debate on women's minds and bodies; not to mention the fact that in spite of the diatribes as to their mental and physical unsuitedness to advanced studies and the deleterious effects of these on female health, women were nonetheless increasingly entering higher education during the later decades of the nineteenth century in Britain. Katharina Rowold has already performed the valuable service of producing an edited volume, Gender and Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), documenting these debates in the UK. In The Educated Woman she sets the British story within a wider European context, invoking, in comparison, the situations in Germany and in Spain, which provide particularly useful examples of differing traditions affecting how these debates were framed and how they played out in practice. Both these nations saw women admitted to university education a good deal later than they were in the UK (not until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century). This did not occur very substantially earlier in Germany than in Spain, in spite of the existence of an organised women's movement from the late nineteenth century in the former, and no such degree of collective organisation in the latter, although there was the emergence of a ‘woman question’, and individual voices arguing for some degree of female emancipation. However, as Rowold points out, when women were admitted to tertiary education in both countries, this was universally applicable across the institutions of higher education, whereas in the UK, although the University of London and the various emerging provincial universities, as well as those in Scotland and Wales, were open to women from the late nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge remained hold-outs for much longer in the grant of actual degrees. The differing systems for the provision of higher education – in the UK, a decentralised mixture of public and private, compared to, for example, the monolithic state system of Prussia – thus had a significant impact on their permeability for female students. Rowold's study focuses primarily upon the debates which proliferated about ‘women's minds and bodies, their natural aptitudes and limitations, and how these related to women's place in society’ (p.1), and their progress from unarticulated assumptions about women's capacities, to much more elaborated positions both for and against. In particular, she demonstrates that science, medicine, religion, and theories of gendered citizenship were neither neutral, nor inevitably associated with pro or anti views, but were subject to a constant process of renegotiation. Although a good deal of the agitation for improved female education in Spain was driven by the rationalist, secularist, modernising Krausist movement, Gimeno de Flaquer, for example, was a devout Catholic who argued on the basis of the equality of the sexes before God, while repudiating ‘the vulgar tradition’ of the inherited sin of Eve (p. 172). These debates were, perhaps inevitably, framed around the vexed problem of the relationship between women's individualistic mental development, and their role as mothers of the nation, increasingly inflected by Darwinism and developing notions of eugenics. It is clear from Rowold's nuanced account, however, that Darwinism was contested, problematised, and reworked in the interests of supporting female education, with reiterated arguments that apparent female intellectual inferiority was due to environmental and societal causes rather than an innate result of evolutionary processes. Lamarckian notions of the inheritance of acquired characteristics continued to exercise considerable influence. In England, by the early twentieth century, there was an intricate interweaving of feminist and eugenic ideas about the informed and free choice of partners by women, the value of education in motherhood, and the importance of intelligent women bearing offspring for the nation. In Germany, however, female higher education was seen as having a role primarily to provide career opportunities of social utility for unmarried women. The Educated Woman is a valuable and thoroughly researched study that illuminates the interaction of numerous different strands – the scientific, the medical, the religious, the political – within specific national contexts and particular historical moments on this important topic.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jan 1, 2014
惠琼 段 
