Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England

This article examines some of the conversations that took place between women’s rights advocates on the subject of female education. The relationship between Victorian feminism and educational reform was a complex one, and historians have long argued over whether campaigns for women’s schools and colleges can be termed ‘feminist’. This article maintains, however, that it is possible to identify a current of feminist analyses, ideas and debates which formed an important part of the broader movement for women’s education. ‘Theory’ in this context was driven less by individual thinkers than by networks in dialogue with each other, responding to a clear practical agenda. Clusters of educational reformers were distinguished by their varying religious outlooks, attitudes to sexual difference, the kind of education they advocated, and their relationship to the wider movement for women’s emancipation. This article focuses primarily on higher education, and particularly on the Oxbridge women’s colleges, as arenas in which some of these themes and disagreements were most prominently and clearly articulated.