Despite three decades of national research on the subject of girls’ education in a range of countries, and despite an increasing interest in the internationalisation of education, no synthesis of the history of girls’ education in Europe yet exists. Phyllis Stock’s book, Better Than Rubies: A History of Women’s Education, published in 1978, remains the only publication with a European scope, despite being published well before the spate of studies with a national focus (e.g.Albisetti, 1988; de Bellaigue, 2007; Essen, 2006; Raftery and Parkes, 2007; Rogers, 1992, 2004; 2005; Rogers and Caspard, 2007; Rogers and van Essen, 2003; Soldani, 1989). No study exists that seeks to draw together the threads of the more specialised nationally oriented studies that have emerged since Stock’s text. While general textbooks on women’s history have sought to incorporate analysis of education in their studies of women’s changing place in European society they rarely trace continuity and change across three centuries. Furthermore, few national histories of girls’ schooling consider ways in which imperialism encouraged European countries to pursue their civilising mission to the ‘uncivilised world’ by setting up schools for girls throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia (Rogers, 2005; Goodman and Martin, 2002). This symposium moves to fill this lacuna in scholarship. Education has formed a critical element in determining women’s place within Europe and European colonial societies. It has acted both as a conservative force and as a force for change as learning assigned women to certain roles, notably in the family as mothers and wives, but also opened doors for them to acquire new roles and responsibilities within the public sphere. The history of girls’ secondary education offers a key to understanding the dialectic between education as both a conservative force and a force for change as it played out in both democratic and authoritarian political agendas across Europe and was reflected in the experience of pupils, teachers and administrators, with consequences for the cultural and economic life of women and of nations. Despite increasing opportunities for women in the twentieth century, scientific developments as well as sexist and racist ideologies combined at certain historical moments and within specific European countries to produce discourse about women’s place in society that harked back to earlier periods and impacted on the learning offered to girls and their experience of education. While domestic-oriented ideology for women had emerged throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century, the vision of the family in different political regimes and ways in which girls’ education was expected to serve regimes differed. As European countries moved towards reconstruction in the aftermath of the Second World War, reforms sought to ensure democratic values. Twentieth century co-education, the second-wave feminist movement and economic pragmatism did much to break down the existence of a distinctively feminine curriculum offered to girls across Europe and to change attitudes towards girls’ education. But enduring stereotypes remained and were often unconsciously reproduced within schools and European educational systems that officially espoused an egalitarian social and gender ethos. Single sex education also continued to exist within some subjects in a number of European countries. Furthermore, supposedly egalitarian educational systems led to a feminised teaching body, with women vastly under-represented as principals and school administrators (Rogers, 2004-this refers to a contribution by Cacouault-Bitard in this collection). The symposium will explore these issues through case studies of various countries:

The symposium will be structured around papers with a broadly national focus in a move to examine the broad similarities within Europe around the history of girls’ secondary education and to identify models for girls’ education appropriated from Germany, America and elsewhere. Papers will follow a similar pattern: a discussion of sources and historiography will be followed by an analysis of changes in educational offerings for girls and a discussion of models of girls’ education that circulated within the western world. A roughly chronological treatment will structure the analysis, focussing on the most important impetus for change. Each author will highlight significant schools, as well as important women educators and pedagogues, in order to offer cultural as well as more socio-economic explanations. Authors will address both public and private education, including the education provided in religious schools and within informal settings. The issue of the increasing convergence of girls’ and boys’ secondary education will be the object of specific analysis and will include a discussion of co-education. The persistence of specific forms of girls’ secondary education in certain countries will also be addressed. Presenters will consider to what extent their country contributed to the emergence of girls’ secondary education within the colonies. The symposium’s focus on girls’ secondary education, and hence the gendered cultural expectations of the middle classes and upper classes reflects the wealth of sources concerning secondary education, compared with primary education, in addition to the dearth of comparative analysis. Sources ranging from letters, diaries, petitions, and memoirs will be drawn on to demonstrate how individuals circumvented gendered cultural norms. They will also be used to balance sources generated by nation states as well as those produced by individual institutions. The inclusion of contributions from Eastern and Central Europe will make available in English hitherto little known sources on girls’ education as well as basic knowledge about the experiences of girls within secondary schools. Revisionist perspectives from women’s and gender history will be adopted along with approaches from social and cultural history.

While acknowledging women’s disadvantage compared to men in all spheres of society and activity, except motherhood, the symposium will demonstrate women’s agency and the choices made by women as they opened schools, taught girls, and communicated a vision of femininity that included an access to knowledge and the ability to reason. As well as highlighting what women have achieved in the past, a number of key concerns like social and intellectual networks, religion, gender and professionalism, shifting notions of the public and private in education, active citizenship, class and state formation, national identities, racism and ethnicity, will provide new insights into the relation of girls’ secondary education in Europe to wider social, economic and political relations of power. In addressing transatlantic models the symposium will add to the growing scholarship on ways in which ideas and practice crossing national borders were transformed in transit as they were re-interpreted in particular national contexts. In addition to adding to understandings surrounding the development of the ‘idea’ of the secondary school and the role of women in society, the symposium will generate knowledge about ways in which women contributed to the fabrication of the ‘idea’ of Europe itself.