This study focuses on the emergence of the High Schools, initiating a new type of education for middle class girls. It traces their development to 1914. The study is based largely on the extant archives of the schools themselves and the two major organisations that nurtured them - the Girls Public Day School Trust and the Church Schools Company - and on diverse published primary sources and printed ephemera. By mid-century many had become convinced of the need for an intellectual education for middle class girls. However the establishment of the High Schools involved an adaptation of contemporary middle and upper class conventions and threatened established gender and class concepts, with the result that many middle class families strongly opposed the schools. The High Schools aimed to provide a curriculum that as far as possible matched that provided for middle class boys. The liberal curriculum and team games for girls produced outrage, challenging as they did, male superiority and accepted ideas of the place of middle class women. The schools recognised however that there were boundaries that the male elite would not allow to be crossed and the thesis considers the balance as well as the breaches involved. The high schools created an educated, easily identifiable, group of women with a definite place on the national stage. While the majority returned home to become educated wives and mothers, the schools developed also a group of women teachers, with trained professional status, whose ideas were to shape the grammar schools of the twentieth century. Finally, the stress on academic excellence ensured a flow of women to the university colleges, and thence to the professions where the battle for parity of opportunity would be continued.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:483643 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Thynne, Rosemary Annette |
| Publisher | Royal Holloway, University of London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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