The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 by Jane McDermid, and: Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920 by Hilary Marland (review)

These two books on aspects of Victorian and post-Victorian girlhood (including so-called “college girls” and “working girls”), written by historians and based on extensive archival research, reveal the seriousness acquired by this topic in recent years. In The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900, Jane McDermid provides a comparative study of the United Kingdom (previous books have focused on England, with some references to Scotland but very little about Wales or Ireland). An introduction with background information is followed by chapters on the education of working-class girls, the education of young ladies, and the training of women teachers.

Since feminist influences have familiarized literary scholars with complaints about the devotion of young ladies’ education to accomplishments and social graces, McDermid’s chapter on working-class girls may be most useful. The book’s strength and complexity grow from the breadth of its scope: to compare and contrast the schooling in four separate countries. McDermid describes the resistance to statefunded education by church bodies: Anglican in England, Presbyterian in Scotland, Catholic in Ireland, and nonconformist in Wales. The latter preferred dissenting Sunday schools largely because they taught in Welsh. The question of what language should be used in the classroom was also controversial in Ireland and some parts of Scotland. Yet despite the wealth of evidence about the provisions in various education acts, there is very little about what actually happened in schools. Elementary school education—and student attendance or non-attendance—everywhere grew from the conditions of local employment. For girls, schools generally emphasized domestic skills; needlework, cookery, and housework functioned both as vocational training for domestic service and preparation for wives and mothers. Although this material and the research that supports it are important, readers in the U.S. who are not familiar with current schooling in the UK will not learn about the rest of the curriculum, or about what elementary schools were actually like. American students may want to know more about school buildings, classroom practices, religious instruction, fees, texts, teaching, or the length of the school day and year. Even the average age for elementary schooling and the degree of compulsion are not made explicit in the book.

The chapter on young ladies’ education covers more familiar ground: the weakness of showy education, whether accomplished by governesses or finishing schools; reformed boarding schools with headmistresses such as Dorothy Beale at Cheltenham Ladies’ College; and the struggle over university admission. A substantial section on the Taunton Commission, established by Parliament in 1864 to examine secondary schools, includes densely packed information about single-sex and mixed-sex schools in all four countries; the aims of education for boys and girls; the subjects taught; the presence or absence of co-educational schools and of domestic training; parental complaints about Catholic, Quaker, and continental schools; and the Commission’s criticism of both the expense of girls’ schools and the ignorance of many teachers.

After a chapter on the development of teacher training and the increased demand for teachers after the 1870 Education Act, which brought large numbers of girls and women into the profession, McDermid’s conclusion finally provides a narrative overview which would have helped guide readers with less expertise about the history of British education had it been provided earlier in the volume. The book’s strength is the depth of its research; there is a great deal of detail in 148 pages of small print, and the bibliography is an essential resource for people doing further work on any aspect of Victorian schooling—in all, almost twenty pages covering books, journal articles, edited collections, and archives, including not only Parliamentary papers but also the Catholic Archdiocese of Glasgow, minutes of...