Considering the role of women as educational policy-makers, and in particular focusing on 29 women members of the London School Board, this book examines the link between private lives and public practice in Victorian and Edwardian England. These political activists were among the first women in England to be elected to positions of political responsibility. Key concerns in the book are issues such as gender and power, and gender and welfare.

This book considers the promise of women's and gender history for revolutionizing our understanding of the past while also acknowledging the current national political, financial, and other contextual realities that can (and do) constrain or promote the possibilities for researching and writing women's history. The editors assert that the promise of women's and gender history is a cutting edge field of research, "a revolutionary development in the politics of historical scholarship," essential for understanding the human past. Further, they argue for the inseparability of women's history and gendered analytical approaches. The contributors to the volume address questions including: what have been the achievements of women's and gender history over the past two decades? To what extent has it succeeded in making women's history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area? What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities, and men's gendered power had on our understanding of women's lives? What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters, and racialization? How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Women’s History Review.

This book takes a novel approach to the topic, combining biographical approaches and local history, a synthesis of sociological and historical literature, with new research to address a variety of themes and provide a comprehensive, rounded history demonstrating the entanglement of educational experience and the influence of different modes of discrimination and prejudice. Using the lens of gender, Jane Martin reassesses the gendered nature of the modern history of education and provides an overview of intertwined aspects of education, society, politics and power. Its organisation is user friendly, providing accessible information with regard to chronologies of legislation and key events to reflect constancy and change, whilst ‘mapping’ the larger political, economic, social and cultural contexts, making it ideal for use as a textbook or a resource for teachers and students.

Women and Education, 1800-1980 examines and celebrates the lives, aims, and achievements of six British women educational activists within nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: Elizabeth Hamilton, Sarah Austin, Jane Chessar, Mary Dendy, Shena Simon and Margaret Cole. Employing a biographical approach, Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman adopt existing feminist and historical models to explore how these women resisted gender roles and combined their public lives with private commitments. As individuals, these women were very different personalities: as a group they show how organised women made a substantial contribution to public life and changed philosophy, policy and practice. Women and Education is situated within the tradition of feminist engagements with recovering and reclaiming 'forgotten' female figures in history. By bringing the lives and actions of these female reformers to the forefront, Martin and Goodman not only offer fresh perspectives on the relation between theory and practice in education, but also give a critical new insight into the accomplishments of women in the past.

This book compares the formal education of the majority of girls in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Previous books about ‘Britain’ invariably focus on England, and such ‘British’ studies tend not to include Ireland despite its incorporation into the Union in 1801. The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1900 presents a comparative synthesis of the schooling of working and middle-class girls in the Victorian period, with the emphasis on the interaction of gender, social class, religion and nationality across the UK. It reveals similarities as well as differences between both the social classes and the constituent parts of the Union, including strikingly similar concerns about whether working-class girls could fulfill their domestic responsibilities. What they had in common with middle-class girls was that they were to be educated for the good of others. This study shows how middle-class women used educational reform to carve a public role for themselves on the basis of a domesticated life for their lower class ‘sisters’, confirming that Victorian feminism was both empowering and constraining by reinforcing conventional gender stereotypes.

The role of women in policy-making has been largely neglected in conventional social and political histories. This book opens up this field of study, taking the example of women in education as its focus. It examines the work, attitudes, actions and philosophies of women who played a part in policy-making and administration in education in England over two centuries, looking at women engaged at every level from the local school to the state. Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England traces women's involvement in the establishment and management of schools and teacher training; the foundation of the school boards; women's representation on educational commissions, and their rising professional profile in such roles as school inspector or minister of education. These activities highlight vital questions of gender, class, power and authority, and illuminate the increasingly diverse and prominent spectrum of political activity in which women have participated. Offering a new perspective on the professional and political role of women, this book represents essential reading for anybody with an interest in gender studies or the social and political history of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The fifth edition of the market-leading Education, Equality and Human Rights has been fully updated to reflect economic, political and cultural changes in the UK, including the impacts of Brexit and Covid-19. It considers the great changes we are witnessing in recent years, such as climate change emergency, pandemics, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and their interrelationships. Written by world experts in their respective fields, each of the five equality issues of gender, race, sexuality, disability and social class is covered in their own right as well as in relation to education. Key issues explored include: human rights, equality and education women and equality—historically and now gender, education and social change race and racism through history and today racism and education from Empire to Johnson sexualities, identities and equality challenges in teaching and learning about sexuality and homo- and trans-phobia in schools disability equality as the last Civil Right? developing inclusive education and governments’ resistance social class, neoliberal capitalism and the Marxist alternative selective schooling, mystifying social class, neoliberalism and alternatives With an uncompromising and rigorous analysis of equality issues and a foreword from Peter McLaren addressing challenges to democracy in the US, this new edition of Education, Equality and Human Rights is an essential and contemporary resource across a wide range of disciplines and for all those interested in education, social policy and human rights.

This book provides a valuable route map to the development of thinking in gender and education over the last fifteen years. It includes over thirty-five seminal articles from the journal Gender and Education, written by many of the leading authors in the field from the UK, the USA, Australia and Europe. Compiled by the current editors of the journal to show the development of the field, the book is divided into six sections: * Gender Identities * Theory and Method * Policy and Management * Sexuality * Ethnicity * Social Class. The specially written introduction by the editors contextualises the selection and introduces students to the main issues and current thinking in the field. Available in one easy-to-access place, this authoritative reference book provides a collection of articles that have lead the field. It should find a place in every library and on every departmental bookshelf.

Compiled by the current editors of the journal Gender & Education, this new book maps the development of thinking in gender and education over the last fifteen years, featuring groundbreaking articles from leading authors in the field.

The Kenney family grew up in Saddleworth, outside Oldham, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1905, three of the sisters met Christabel Pankhurst, a turning point which changed the rest of their lives. Annie Kenney became one of the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Jessie was an organiser at the heart of the organisation, and Nell campaigned outside the capital. Caroline and Jane used their connections within the suffrage movement as the springboard for careers in innovative education on both sides of the Atlantic. While working-class women are increasingly acknowledged in histories of the WSPU, this study is the first to make them the primary focus, and, in doing so, it opens up a new conversation around sex, class, and politics, and how these categories interacted in this period. This is a study of the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It identifies why these women became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicised, why they prioritised the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. Although this is a book about 'working-class suffragettes', Lyndsey Jenkins also reveals what it says about women as workers and teachers, religious believers and political thinkers, and friends and colleagues, as well as suffragettes. Above all, it is a study of sisterhood.