Higher Education and Home Duties: The Morality of Self-Interest in the Periodical Press, 1880–1910

The decision to permit women entrance into Britain's universities came about slowly during the second half of the nineteenth century. As the debate raged about women's higher education, critics expressed concern for women's mental and physical health, as well as their ability to perform their duties as daughters, wives, and mothers. The discussion in the mainstream periodical press was highly divisive, with the feminist, pro-educational perspectives of the Englishwoman's Review and Women and Work appearing in sharp contrast to satirical sketches in Punch, Fun, and the Tomahawk. In the periodicals aimed at girls—the intended recipients of this improved access to education—the messages are equally complex. In fiction and correspondence, a middle-class girl's decision to pursue any education beyond that offered by governesses or parents is often presented as a choice between her self-interested desire to become more learned and her role as daughter and sister within the family. Yet even as girls were limited to a narrow set of options—either home duties or higher education—they nonetheless exercised their agency as modern liberal subjects. The act of making a choice was integral to nineteenth-century liberal individualism and the "liberal-existentialist predicament of choosing how one wishes to live."¹ John Stuart Mill explained how the "human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice."² Young women in girls' periodicals who chose to pursue higher education or to withdraw from academic circles to help at home were expressing their liberty and their responsibility as human beings.

British girls' periodicals in the 1880s and '90s demonstrate the extent to which girls continued to be constrained by mid-Victorian notions of the importance of the domestic sphere. Because of numerous changes in ideas about women's work, rights, and education during the nineteenth century, the Victorian feminine ideal can hardly be described as static, yet the dominant theme of femininity persisted throughout the century "in the ideas of service and self-sacrifice," where "women of all social groups were encouraged from childhood to consider it selfish to become wrapped up in their own interests, for the ideal was to serve others, and always to consider the interests of their menfolk first."³ Even as the century progressed and the need for women's paid employment became increasingly evident, the rhetoric of female service and self-sacrifice continued to prevail in girls' magazines. This was owing, in part, to the dominance of the "cult of domesticity" in middle-class households, which upheld the notion that women should remain at the centre of the domestic realm.⁴

The morality of the choice to pursue higher education was a frequent concern in the nineteenth-century debate about girls' learning. As early as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argued that improved education for women was not based on self-interest but was instead necessary for them to become better wives and mothers. Yet Wollstonecraft's arguments took a long time to flourish. Historian Carol Dyhouse explains that in the nineteenth century, the "goals of a home education were not primarily academic. The vast majority of middle-class parents had no interest whatsoever in cultivating scholarly qualities in their daughters."⁵ Given this lack of interest, middle-class girls had significant obstacles to overcome when deciding to pursue any course of serious study.

When Emily Davies revitalized the education debate in the 1850s and '60s, she similarly argued that the value of girls' education was not explicitly for the learning itself. Rather, in an era where girls could not necessarily depend on their male relations for financial assistance, they needed to be adequately educated in order to support themselves. Davies's success in establishing the first women's college (Hitchin College, later renamed Girton College) in 1869 was part of a greater shift in education for girls, which included the creation of numerous girls...