Educating Girls and Women: The Challenges of Respectability

When a society decides to establish formal schooling, there is no guarantee—or often even expectation—that it will include girls and women as students. A society may consider females simply not smart enough to manage the demands of schooling. Danger to their health represents a related concern, given the presumed primacy of their reproductive role. Even if a society grants their capabilities, however, it may question why females need education or how they would use its benefits; it generally restricts their professional opportunities and assumes that their very nature makes them best suited to marriage and motherhood.

Thus, a society may deem the education of females unimportant and insignificant in any given setting. Yet other more subtle reasons may limit the educational access of girls and women. Rather than being incapable of study, they may in fact prove to be very good at it—perhaps outperforming boys and men and claiming attention from both teachers and the job market. By putting themselves into the competitive school environment, females might "unsex" themselves, trying to resemble men in both actions and goals. Further, educated women might demand equal rights, citizenship, and opportunities; that is, expanded knowledge might argue for expanded horizons.

Even allowing for site-specific differences, the above arguments apply to most women in most educational settings, and extant historiography on female education has clarified their development. Over time, however, our historical inquiry has deepened to explore how race, class, and national developments change the educational calculus. Historians recognize how education can be used to confer prestige and to confirm race and class hierarchies, just as it can be used to limit opportunity. Recognizing education as a marker of class, groups might vie for improved opportunities, or they might find school doors closed or cracked open only slightly. Race and class often determine who is schooled, in what settings, with what curricula, and with which teachers and support; in addition, the effects of race and class may result in far different outcomes and expectations for the students.

These five disparate books engage those lines of inquiry with some strong results. Three of them advance the understanding of women's education in transnational terms, exploring settings with mixed populations and rejecting the nation-state as their unit of analysis. The other two, with tighter focus on single countries, nonetheless look comparatively at schools designed for different clientele with different purposes. All of them also explore curriculum as the organizing principle of schooling. In doing so, they demonstrate how the presumed purposes of education determine the offerings for different groups of girls and women: some are prepared for lives of work, others for motherhood, a few for citizenship. Thus, those curricula may be expansive or limited, emancipatory or determinative. Within the focus on curriculum, the assurance of women's "respectability" appears as a strong theme, whether the population is Chinese women living away from the mainland, free African Americans in segregated America, or kindergarten teachers seeking self-supporting careers. Several of these works show how schooling valued respectability as a key goal, by which education became a signifier of pure, modest women who matched the expectations of their...