EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

Voices calling for the education of girls and women had been a constant feature of public debate on the woman question since the late eighteenth century, although the early advocates of women's education did not, on the whole, see access to knowledge as the route to female independence and freedom.

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Otto-Peters' arguments are important as she attempted to straddle the gap between those who used the mother-educator argument and those who regarded education as a means of escape from female confinement. Of course Mary Wollstonecraft had already blazed this particular rhetorical trail, as we saw in Chapter 2, but by the second half of the century it was neces­sary for feminists to state the case again for education as a means to liberation and self-development, perhaps because the extended education received by most women in the intervening period was still what the French feminist writer Harlor (1871—1970) described as ‘light nourishment'.²⁶ The insubstantial education served up to women, she argued, was mere decora­tion for marriage and a husband's amusement, hardly sufficient to encourage self-development and self-knowledge. ‘Creatures of reason want to be the mistresses of their own destinies.'²⁷ Similarly, Madeleine Pelletier (1874— 1939), French feminist, physician and ardent promoter of education for women, argued in 1914 that ‘a woman must raise herself for her own sake and not for a man'.²⁸

Some of the earliest women's rights organisations were established as pressure groups to improve female access to education such as the General German Women's Association (founded 1865), the Lette Society founded in Leipzig in 1865 and in Berlin in 1866, and the English National Union for Improving the Education of Women of all Classes established in 1871 whose predecessor had been the Langham Place group which had started meeting in London in the 1850s. In addition, women's groups across Europe were already actively engaged in providing, on a small scale, training for girls beyond elementary school level and more especially to equip them to be teachers. In Britain, Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale became educational trailblazers in their founding of girls' private schools, but also in the Nether­lands, Germany, Spain and the Nordic countries activists founded training institutes and trade schools with the aim of equipping women for suitable employment.

The struggle to gain admission to higher education waged by feminists at the end of the century is somewhat curious in the light of the fact that some institutions had been willing to admit women to lectures as early as the end of the eighteenth century. In Italy, the University of Bologna could claim two female professors of distinction: Laura Bassi occupied the chair of physics and Maria Agnesi that of mathematics and moral philosophy. These were, of course, exceptional women. Yet elsewhere, notably in Glasgow and London, there were early attempts to open higher education institutions to a wider stratum of women from the middle classes. At Glasgow's Anderson's Institution, a new kind of university established in 1796 to offer vocational education for working men and women, courses of science-based lectures deliberately targeted women. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s the cur­riculum of the now Anderson's University expanded to include natural philosophy, geography, mathematics and logic, all of which attracted women students who were charged half of the normal course fee.

Once institutions of higher learning had opened up to the men of the middle classes they began to find justifications for women's exclusion. In all seriousness, learned scholars argued that a woman's reproductive capacity would be damaged by too much intellectual stimulation; that her brain was too small to cope with the rigours of academic study; that the presence of women in lectures would be distracting to male students or that female students' modesty would be compromised by exposure to the realities of a medical education.

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Feminists were easily able to counter these arguments and the criticisms of those who feared ‘bluestockings' (originally referring to women who frequented the early salons but by the middle of the century becoming a derogatory term for a woman who aspired to an education). Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836—1917), the second woman licensed to practise medicine in Britain in 1866 and an ally of Emily Davies (1830—1921), founder of Girton College, Cambridge, argued that both women and men were taxed by intellectual demands at university but

from the purely physiological point of view, it is difficult to believe that study much more serious than that usually pursued by young men would do a girl's health as much harm as a life directly calculated to over-stimulate the emotional and sexual instincts...

Women's supposed predisposition to nervousness, to fainting and languid­ness was directly attributable, according to Garrett Anderson, not merely to the wearing of corsets and the lack of fresh air and exercise but also to the absence of intellectual stimulation and interest. Others used separate spheres arguments to justify the need for trained female doctors when some con­sidered it unseemly for a woman to be examined by a male physician, especi­ally for ‘woman's diseases'.

By the later decades of the century, admission to higher education on an equal basis and the question of equal access to the university curriculum had become a pressing issue for feminists for a number of reasons. It was import­ant for women seeking professional careers not merely to attend university courses, but also to graduate with degrees, and it was arguably the threat posed to men in the professional marketplace that really fuelled opposition to female access to higher education on equal terms. It was no coincidence that the propagation of fears surrounding the notion of the atrophy of women's reproductive systems if they received too much education surfaced just as women began to argue for access to the medical schools in the 1860s and 1870s.

The first challenge was preparing girls to reach the standard required for university entry in order to counter the argument that girls were not quali­fied. In Germany, prospective students needed to pass the school-leaving examination, the Abitur, but since it was possible to sit the examination only if a girl had attended a Gymnasium (grammar school), and because there were no girls' Gymnasien, women activists had to set about establishing girls' schools. In France a similar situation prevailed in respect of the baccalaureat so that girls who aspired to university were forced to study privately, the route taken by Madeleine Pelletier who gained admission to medical school, one of the first women to do so. Yet, here in France, those who argued in favour of a secondary education for girls had some powerful supporters, notably those who wished to reduce the power of the church over educational provision. In 1870 the lawyer Jules Ferry, later minister of education and prime minis­ter, presented a cogent argument in favour of equal education as in his view, ‘in their present state of education, it is impossible to say that [women] could not be something else if they were raised differently.' Ferry, influenced by John Stuart Mill, believed that there was nothing natural about the subjection of women; that given equal opportunities women would find their own level.³⁵ In 1880, then, girls' secondary schools and colleges were established across France by the See Law and a year later the Ferry Law introduced free and secular education for girls and boys, but more as an attempt to counter clerical influence and bolster the Republic than in response to feminist campaigning. The deputy, Camille See, had explicitly denied suggestions that his law would facilitate women's access to university, believing that the pro­fessions were the preserve of men. His aim was ‘not to tear [women] away from their natural vocation but to render them more capable of fulfilling their obligations as wives, mothers, and mistresses of households.'³⁶ Some thirty years later, though, even the See Law was being criticised on the grounds that girls' secondary education was not geared to preparing students for their future destination. In her radical reform agenda for secondary education in 1911, the French teacher and writer Jeanne Crouzet-Benaben (c.1870—1961) argued that, ‘women's secondary education as currently organised is too feminine, and not secondary enough. It is not secondary enough because it does not lead anywhere and because it is not scientific enough, not prolonged enough... Women nowadays have need of diplo­mas that will open up careers.'³⁷ Nevertheless, the French state's commit­ment to public schooling for girls had a positive spin-off: thousands of new female teachers were required to teach the girls and two new teacher training institutions in Paris were founded for the purpose.³⁸ It was to be some time, though, before girls were educated to the same level as boys, and by 1914 just over 2500 girls had gained entry to the French higher education system by passing the baccalaureat exam.³⁹

By the 1860s, then, the focus of the education debate had shifted; there was little opposition to the view that women should receive some kind of education; it was the content and level of that education which were still at stake. Feminists were united in their aim to gain women access to a university education but they were divided over how to achieve it. Their ideological and strategic differences mirrored tensions within feminism as a whole, between those who pursued an equal rights agenda, making no allowance for any special or different qualities of women, and those who sought recognition of women's difference. Women were gaining a university education across Europe from the 1860s, though the numbers were tiny. The founding of women-only colleges such as Girton (1869) and Newnham (1874) at Cam­bridge signified a major step forward (separate colleges were required on account of residence requirements of the traditional universities) but also the two founders, Emily Davies and Anne Jemima Clough (1820—92), symbol­ised the different approaches adopted by those who sought to create a space for women within a male-dominated university system. Clough was the more pragmatic of the two. She argued for a continuation of the special lectures system as a stepping-stone to women's full and equal integration into the

university system once women had caught up with their male peers. Davies, on the other hand, was not willing to make allowances for women's special needs; indeed she argued that the route advocated by Clough would only allow detractors to call attention to women's inability to perform at the same level as men. ‘Is the improved education... to be identical with that of men, or is it to be as good as possible, but in some way or other specifically femin­ine?' asked Davies in 1868.40 Women students should take the same uni­versity entrance examinations as men, according to Davies, despite the fact that girls' secondary education was of an inferior quality, for no one would respect the achievements of a woman judged according to a separate stand­ard. ‘No one is the better for being told, on mere arbitrary authority, that he belongs to a weak and incapable class', she wrote; but ‘this, whatever may be the intention, is said in effect by the offer of any test of exclusively female character.' Women had to show they were as capable as men in order to prove they were worthy of emancipation. Many did just this. One of them Grace Chisholm Young (1868—1944), entered Girton in 1889 and gained the highest marks in the final examinations in mathematics, although of course she did not graduate with a degree, only an informal certificate. She was one of the first three women to be admitted to doctoral study at Gottingen University in Germany, and thereafter, although she never held an academic position she continued to practise and publish in pure mathematics.⁴¹

Equal access to medical school was a key campaigning issue for feminists of both equal rights and relationalist persuasions. Whether one believed that women should train to be doctors in order to meet the demand for female physicians from woman patients on account of concerns about modesty and propriety, or whether one regarded the ability to earn a medical degree a basic right, the obstacles were the same. The all-male medical profession was united in opposition to women entering the profession and they erected a number of spurious arguments to protect their privileged domain. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had to study privately to gain her medical qualification — the first licensed woman doctor in Britain, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821—1910) had trained in the United States — but such was the outrage amongst doctors that no more women were permitted to enter the profession by this means. Until 1877, when London University became the first British university to award medical degrees to women, all that was on offer were special courses for female students leading to a Licentiate qualification, less prestigious than a university degree. In Scotland, Sophia Jex Blake (1840—1912) had struggled to receive a medical training in Edinburgh, enrolling in separate ladies' classes in 1869, but after three years of study she and three others were refused permission to take the examinations. Queen Margaret College in Glasgow was the first Scottish institution to prepare female students for medical degrees in 1890, although Edinburgh had permitted women to study for the Licentiate since 1886. However, separate teaching was still the norm in many medical courses and this disadvantaged female students when they came to sit their examinations. Meanwhile, Zurich University admitted women to its medical faculty for a short time between 1863 and 1874, attracting more than 100 Russian women who sought both a scientific education and an immer­sion in radical ideas. In the 1870s, women who wished to receive a medical training were accepted in Ireland from 1877, London (1878) and Edinburgh (1886). France had permitted women to study in its medical faculties since the 1860s, but in Germany and Austria physicians remained intransigent in their opposition to female medical students until the end of the century. It was perhaps only the advent of war in 1914 and the need for female doctors, especially at the front, that convinced many that women's competence equalled that of male physicians. Outside medical training, Oxford and Cam­bridge admitted female students in the 1870s but they did not award them degrees. In Warsaw the so-called Flying University established in 1884 offered lectures in secret to noblewomen, and by the 1900s the University for All in Warsaw and the provincial People's Universities provided public lectures accessible to the working classes but these were not degree-awarding institutions.⁴² Cambridge did not grant women full university degrees until 1948. By 1900 the majority of European universities had opened their doors to women although not always on the same terms as male students. The last bastions of male-dominated learning were the Prussian and Austrian institu­tions, which held out until 1900 and much later in the case of the Austrian theological and law faculties.

By the end of the century the generation born in the 1860s and 1870s was emerging from secondary and higher education and changing the face of women's employment. Certainly, the old professions were not yet a level playing-field: female medical graduates encountered opposition in the pres­tigious hospitals so that they were forced to practise in the less prestigious and more poorly paid sectors such as asylums, poor law and women's hos­pitals, a situation that led many to leave the country to practise in the col- onies.⁴³ In other professional spheres such as social work, women took the lead. In Germany, where there was still opposition to female doctors and secondary school teachers, educated women created their own professional sphere of social work, a respectable form of female employment which could be portrayed as a maternal profession and an apparent extension of women's natural predisposition to service and self-sacrifice and thus not a threat to men. By 1914, a system of professional training in social work had been established in schools run by women like the feminist Alice Salomon in Berlin.⁴⁴ Salomon, one of the first women to gain a doctorate from a German university, opened the Women's School of Social Work in 1908, the culmina­tion of her efforts to improve girls' secondary education in order to encour­age in them a sense of social responsibility based on women's special understanding of social problems. For Salomon, the female social worker undertook ‘the assumption of duties for a wider circle which are usually performed by the mother at home.'⁴⁵ Similarly, in Belgium, women organised in the Christian women's movement moved into social work as an extension of ‘spiritual mothering'.⁴⁶

The professions were still the preserve of a tiny minority of educated women by the First World War, but many thousands of others did use their education as a stepping stone to jobs in the semi-professional and skilled white-collar sectors. It was acceptable for women with a decent secondary or higher education to take employment in a range of suitable occupations which included clerking in the civil service or private business, in banking and insurance, as well as teaching and nursing. Across Europe, female inspectors of girls' schools, women's prisons, reformatories for children and young women and in factories and workshops employing women, repre­sented an admission by the state that there was a way of combining ideals of femininity with a place for women in the public sphere. Such women were standard-bearers of the feminist doctrine which wished to see woman's special influence in society increased and her special role enhanced and protected. In France, Aldona Sochazewska Juillerat, the first female member of the labour inspectorate in Rouen, cautioned against women aspiring to professional equality in the more demanding professions such as medicine and the law on the grounds of their ‘natural' inclination to marriage and motherhood.⁴⁷

However, with the exception of medicine which, to some extent, was being redefined as a suitable area of work for women, women's access to the professions requiring a university degree and extensive training was, by 1918, extremely limited. Women were filling office and retail jobs, but not pro­fessional ones. In Britain, for example, between 1881 and 1911 there were significant increases in the numbers of women employed in the white-collar sector. In 1881, 3216 women constituted 12.6 per cent of officers and clerks in the civil service; by 1911 there were more than 22,000 of them, or 26.5 per cent. Amongst commercial clerks female employees increased from just over 3 per cent of employees in 1881 to 24.5 per cent in 1911. By 1911 more than half of telegraphy workers were women, almost 13 per cent of journalists and 30 per cent of photographers.⁴⁸ On the other hand, very few gains at all were made in law, dentistry, architecture, accountancy and engineering and in academic posts in universities. Before 1914 the number of female lecturers in British universities was miniscule and ‘professorial chairs, apparently, were designed to accommodate only the masculine frame'.⁴⁹ It was not until after the war that women would make significant progress in gaining positions in areas of professional work formerly the preserve of men, such as the more prestigious posts in the civil service and the law which was barred to women in Britain and Germany until 1919.