Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: A Historical Introduction

Abstract

Interest in comparative study of girls’ secondary education in Europe dates back at least to 1884, when Theodore Stanton published The Women Question in Europe, a series of essays by feminists from various countries, all of whom highlighted educational issues in their judgment of women’s status in their homelands. Two decades later, Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer also drew on numerous women, and some men, for chapters on individual countries in the volume of their five-volume Handbook of the Women’s Movement devoted to education. Shortly thereafter, Käthe Schirmacher similarly placed great stress on educational advances in her sweeping worldwide survey of The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement¹. Interest in the link between girls’ education and women’s emancipation continued into the interwar period. In 1934, a moderate feminist Hungarian teacher named Amélie Arato published a much more detailed but less historical comparative study of the current state of girls’ secondary education in Europe. In addition to providing the curricula and timetables for schools in many countries, Arato also discussed the widely differing practices with regard to coeducation and the role of men and women teachers in girls’ schools, themes echoed in many chapters of this volume.²