Session Information
Session 8, Historical Perspectives on Educational Provision (2)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
11:00-12:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Helena Ribeiro de Castro
Contribution
The nineteenth-century female movement for higher education has been the focus of much scholarship, particularly since the 1960s when the new wave of feminism emerged in Western society. The role played by women's colleges in England and the United States has been comprehensively recorded and evaluated. The significance of the network of women's colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century has been largely overlooked by scholars, however. This paper examines the significance and legacy of the Irish women's colleges which emerged in response to women's collective desire to access higher education and their exclusion from universities. As educational policy and provision were shaped and coloured by religious contours, these colleges were essentially denominational, with colleges like Alexandra College, Dublin (1866) and Victoria College, Belfast (1887) catering to a largely Protestant cohort, and colleges like the Dominican College, Eccles Street, Dublin (1882), St. Angela's College, Cork (1887), St. Mary's Dominican College, Dublin (1893), and Loreto College, St. Stephen's Green, Dublin (1893) catering almost exclusively to a Catholic contingent. Acting on concessions granted women via such important legislative gains as the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act, 1878 and the University Education (Ireland) Act, 1879, these colleges provided for the first time systematic and rigorous instruction to women. As a result, they improved the standards of women's education generally, facilitated the broadening and deepening of curricula for women, and trained a body of competent women teachers in a diverse range of subjects. The societies and organisations which arose out of these colleges provided women for the first time with a legitimate space in which to engage in philanthropic work and political activism. This paper examines the origins of these single-sex colleges, the kind of education they afforded women, the type of women who attended them and the differences such an education made to women's career prospects. It examines the differences between Protestant and Catholic women's colleges and the rivalry which developed between them, spurred on by the public nature of the competitive examination process. It considers the ideological arguments behind providing women with an education in an exclusively female domain and affording women equal access to universities alongside men. It argues that these colleges were not only important in providing women with a scholastic education, but also in the fostering of a culture of organisation and agitation which allowed women to develop their own social networks. It further argues that despite their eventual demise, these colleges played a seminal role in the nineteenth-century female movement for higher education, affording women a legitimate space in which to consider, formalise and articulate their opinions and establish their own sense of identity.
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