Schooling for Domesticity? The Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

There is a wealth of evidence available for this later period, allowing a much more extended analysis of school practices across the variety of educational provision available to girls and women, but the same questions — What were girls taught? What did they actually learn? — that provided the framework for Chapter 4 again lie at the heart of this chapter. And, though a limited availability of autobiographical material presents continuing difficulties in evaluation of the experiences of schooling from girls’ and women’s own perspectives, Inspectors’ reports (especially their criticisms of what they saw as the deficiencies of girls’ schools) and the evidence contained in school log-books¹ do provide some insights into the everyday realities of girls’ schooling. Some reference is made to the likely impact of schooling on the behaviour and attitudes of working-class girls, but overall conclusions are deferred to the next chapter, where the various developments in girls’ schooling and their causes and consequences are evaluated within the broad context of socio-economic and cultural developments over the whole period. The chapter ends, therefore, with an assessment of the standards of girls’ more ‘academic’ achievements, drawing also on evidence of standards of literacy to point to the very striking differences in male and female attainments within and between rural and urban Norfolk and Suffolk and industrial and rural Lancashire.