Was There a Space for the Achieving Girl in the Eighteenth Century?

Pedagogy, wrote Robin Alexander, is ‘a window on the culture of which it is a part, and on that culture's underlying tensions and contradictions’. In the eighteenth century, a principal tension involving a real practice was the debate about classical vs. modern education. The debate pitted the pedagogy of Latin, the dominant classical subject, against the pedagogies of new instructional subjects such as geography, astronomy and botany. This distinction was mapped onto gender, and meant that male education was classical and women’s modern. At the same time, female education was considered superficial and inadequate. On what basis was this judgement made, and why has this perspective on female education persisted till today?  

The argument I propose is that the superficiality of female education is a discursive construction produced by the power struggle between classics pedagogy, which was claimed to provide the foundation for training the mind, and modern subjects which were thought inferior in educative capacity because they lacked this foundation. Using eighteenth-century schoolbooks, juvenile literature and personal experiences of instruction, this paper shows how this construction was forged, positioning women’s education as superficial and inadequate, and men’s education as superior and rigorous. 

Michèle Cohen is an eighteenth-century historian and Emeritus Professor at Richmond American International University. She has published widely on education, including Fashioning Masculinity, ‘a Habit of Healthy Idleness: Boys’ Underachievement in Historical Perspective’ and ‘The Pedagogy of Conversation in the Home: ‘Familiar Conversation’ as a pedagogical tool in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England’. Her latest book is Changing Pedagogies for Children in Eighteenth-Century England.

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