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Doing Feminist Educational Historical Research

Author: Jane Martin Jane Martin

Contents

Introduction

Historians make history through the production of knowledge, explanations and interpretations of what has gone before. As Carolyn Steedman (2001, p. 83) puts it, ‘The place where what is found may be put, is History. It is in this way, and outside the walls of the Archive, that History has become the place where quite ordinarily and by remembering, we can find things where we have already put them’. This is a useful place to start, for this resource is concerned with history-making about women and social movements whose histories have not been made, who remain hidden and invisible.

History had a privileged place within the British Women’s Liberation movement in the early 1970s. Feminist historians took the need to reclaim ‘herstory’ as axiomatic. There was a desire to explore interruption and silence in the historical record, to address the question of whether they were the first generation of women to feel and think as they did in a male-dominated society. Reclaiming the past was often deliberately intended to establish the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought. This development in historical thinking was closely linked to the consciousness raising groups set up to pool collective knowledge and begin to answer questions about the politics of women’s situation. Collective memory rooted in women’s understanding of past struggles was crucial, along with an appreciation of gender relations, theorized as a variable social organisation of sexual difference that must itself be explained, as a division of power.

The literature has now expanded greatly, challenging historians to shift the emphases of the ‘master’ narrative both to include women and to use gender as a lens through which to examine the past. Collecting women’s lives has become a staple of feminist scholarship, amid calls for the study of specific cases to investigate what it means to be a woman situated in a particular time and space. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the interaction of personal and historical pasts involves an engagement with the politics of history that operates on two levels. In the first place, it offers a challenge to mainstream accounts through recognition that those overlooked by posterity partook nonetheless in the making of history. In the second place, the task of recovering hidden female voices is to contribute to the project of making history through the production of gender knowledge.

The historical recovery of hidden lives remains an essential element of women’s’ history. Various claims have been made for the place of the personal in historical research but shifting the focus from the ‘great women’ school of history makes it possible to reinterpret existing stories and create a counter-image to challenge and reconstruct previous history-making. Individual life histories can be used to unpack the political meanings of everyday experience. Education historians can use biographical enquiry as a lens through which to explore the origins of ideas, to discover the existence of social possibilities and alternatives, to consider the relation between education and social change.

Some forty years ago, the sex/class binary supported an approach to the history of mass compulsory schooling that frequently subordinated questions of gender to questions of class. Among historians of women’s education this assumption manifested itself in a largely separate history of the education of elite and middle class girls. And yet, by the late-1970s feminist-inspired work had begun to redress the imbalance. Education, as Carol Dyhouse (1987, p. 23) points out, was a public arena where women achieved a measure of status and authority, making it a ‘good area in which to explore the social history of sexual politics and that of sex and gender generally.’ Beginning in the late 1980s, I have collected material on women’s place in the development of the English education system in the period 1870-1980. It was partly the absence of women mainstream historiography that motivated me, as well as the exemplar of feminist revisionism.

Gendering the educational archive

My work forms part of a recent trend which aims to take account of the motives for and outcomes of female involvement at various levels of education policy-making and administration. Taking London as a case study, I examine the careers of a group of women whose participation in English educational policy-making has only recently been recovered from historical obscurity: the women members of the London School Board (LSB) and the London County Council (LCC) Education Committee. I had three aims. First, I wanted to rediscover the voices and achievements of women. Second, I hoped to construct a narrative that would convey something of the new lines of interpretation especially the relation between the formal politics of public life and the informal politics of personal life. Third, I wanted to expose the need to rewrite the histories of policy-making in educational contexts. London was chosen because of the conspicuous strength of women in metropolitan politics, in terms of the numbers involved and the scope and power accorded them.

Feminist critics argue that the distribution of political power reflects a social bias that makes it easier for some individuals and groups to see their objectives come to fruition than others. They show also the positional, policy and organisational bias in favour of men. When considering the factors which have helped, or hindered, women’s public participation one has to take account of the gendered production of direct political power and leadership. Crucially, the structure of the British state provided limited space for women’s participation even when women were excluded from parliamentary politics.

Set up to administer the 1870 Education Act, the eligibility of women to be elected to the newly created School Boards was of great importance. Directly elected and independent of existing forms of local government, these bodies were responsible for the creation of something resembling a system of state-maintained elementary schools for working class children. By the end of the nineteenth century women also served as members of local technical instruction committees, educational commissions and central government committees. Nonetheless, the controversial 1902 Education Act, which replaced the school boards with the Education Committees of local authorities, dealt a severe blow to women’s political progress since they were no longer able to vote or participate as elected representatives. Yet the campaign and pressure exerted by the women’s movement was influential in securing the restoration of these rights in 1907. At the national level, women did not obtain the vote in general elections until 1918 and even then only at the age of thirty. Women finally achieved suffrage on the same terms as men in 1928, when the age limit was lowered to twenty-one.

In the competition for political office at Westminster, education was a likely portfolio, suggesting that prime ministers subscribed to conventional ideas about women’s domestic skills and interests. The implication of this valorization of essentialist views of sexual difference is evidenced in the fact that in the 1920s, two of the four female office-holders in the House of Commons were parliamentary secretary at Education and the only two women who reached the cabinet between 1945 and 1959 were also at Education. For Margaret Thatcher (born 1925) Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, Secretary of State for Education and Science in Edward Heath’s 1970 government, the post was part of her route to the top. But Thatcher’s precursors in local government had already made their mark in the years before the national suffrage grant in 1928.

Learning from Lives 1: School Board Women

The LSB was the world’s largest educational parliament and Britain’s most influential school board. By the mid-1880s it had 55 members and controlled nearly 400 schools. It was a pioneer in abolishing fees, providing pupils with free school meals and other health benefits, and broadening the curriculum for workers’ children. But what was the impact of the female presence? We turn first to the 29 women (out of 326 Londoners) who helped to form a network of new Board schools in the areas they served.

In terms of female representation, the breakthrough came in 1879 when women made up 18% of LSB members (Martin, 1999). Not until the Labour party introduced all-women short lists for the 1997 general election did parliamentary representation match this. Most LSB women were from middle-class backgrounds although their financial circumstances could vary considerably. The exception was Mary Bridges Adams (1855-1939) who came from a Welsh working-class background and trained as a pupil teacher, subsequently teaching in Birmingham, London and Newcastle. Most (26) represented London Progressivism, a broadly based constituency comprised of Liberals, Nonconformists, trade unionists and self-help organisations like working men’s clubs. They all participated in a rich metropolitan political life and many were active in the women’s suffrage movement.

Female networks worked as social capital for women candidates, especially in the West End division of Marylebone which had a 21-year record of continuous female representation starting with the pioneer doctor Elizabeth Garrett (1836-1917) who finished top of the poll in 1870. Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1934) was the youngest woman member, just 22 years old when she took her seat in 1876. Like Garrett before her, she married while serving but was exceptional in going through pregnancy and childbirth as an elected representative. Prevailing conventions have some bearing on the fact that Annie Besant (1847-1933) was the only divorcee and of the remaining 28, two were widowed when they first took office, 10 were married and 16 were single. Of the married women, I have been able to establish that eight were mothers. However, Besant lost custody of her daughter over her initiatives on the question of birth control.

The Board held open meetings every Wednesday, beginning at 3 pm and usually continuing until 6.30pm, although it was often much later. Their main purpose was to hear the recommendations set out in reports from the various committees that conducted the work of the Board; these were accepted, amended or referred back. Members had a right to propose alternate motions of policy, and debate them, before an open vote was taken, with each individual answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at the division. An accent on parliamentary tradition meant the male organisational bias was very apparent, so was a culture of male fraternity. Although the female presence complicated struggles over power and advantage, male and female territories and responsibilities show the impact of gender differentiation on political careers. For instance, whereas women dominated the Cookery, Laundry and Needlework Sub-Committee, they rarely served on the Finance Committee or the Works Committee responsible for the school building programme and the general care of Board properties.

Members often regarded their service on the Boards as important social work and the unpublished autobiography of Florence Fenwick Miller indicates the scale of their commitment. In the 1870s and 1880s she spent two or three days at the Board offices, while the rest of the week was taken up with constituency work. Miller was not a wealthy woman and she often went without food on Board days, thinking it a wild extravagance to lunch out, on top of the money spent on bus fares and a cup of tea at the Board’s tearoom.

Building up the political profile

Women’s claims to political power were based on the distinctive character of the female contribution. In particular, they were contingent upon a classed and gendered construction of special needs. Girls were regarded as having different requirements to boys (either physical, emotional or intellectual) and women candidates found it advantageous to campaign as being ready to champion the interests of girls and women teachers. A brief look at debate on curriculum and the interests of women teachers makes it possible to assess whether these female politicians made a distinctive stand on the interests of girls and women.

From 1862 onwards, failing to teach working-class girls needlework was one of the few offences for which a school could lose its government grant. By the 1890s there was a complete division of the sexes in practical subjects, though boys did not receive practical instruction equivalent to the girls’ sewing, cooking and cleaning. Nonetheless, the voting record of the 13 women elected in the 1870s and 1880s shows not all women supported these developments. Florence Fenwick Miller, Henrietta Muller (1845/6-1906), Helen Taylor (1831-1907) and Elizabeth Surr (born 1825/6) were vocal critics who managed to score some victories. For example, Muller secured a reduction in the number of stitches to the inch required in the needlework regulations, after women teachers reported that it was damaging the girls’ eyesight. When they took up the cudgels on behalf of women teachers they overturned proposals to exclude women from headships and bar the employment of mothers of infants under two years old.

In contrast, more socially conservative women like Rosamond Davenport Hill (1825-1902) accepted the assumptions of the domestic ideal. Hill promoted practical training in domesticity in the belief that domestic work and love of the home should be the focus of working-class girls’ lives: both in their own households and in the homes of others (as domestic servants). Born into a leading social reform family of the day (her father helped draft the first bill to attempt to win property rights for married women in 1854) for Hill, middle-class moral femininity was both a resource and a symbolically legitimate form of cultural capital.

Irrespective of ideological differences, women members were active in shaping the embryonic reform school system, developing alongside the board schools. Then, as now, school attendance was an issue and although girls were the more irregular attendees, there was a tendency for the system of rewards and punishment to focus on boys. The ultimate sanction was committal to a single-sex residential truant or industrial school, or a co-educational day industrial school. Early opponents of a separate curriculum for girls also took up the issue of child welfare in these institutions: exposing the cruel use of punishment not always officially sanctioned. They also addressed the issue of female exclusion by pressing for early years’ provision so schoolgirls would not be kept home to ‘mind baby’. In the 1890s, elected women tried to ban the use of public floggings meted out to boys re-admitted to a truant or industrial school. They wanted alternate sanctions to those they saw as dehumanising.

Overall, school board politics provided some white, educated, mainly middle-class women with a position of authority and a position of fulfilment. These women were a powerful force in their local communities and the preceding discussion highlights a distinct and vocal minority who resented party discipline and rigid allegiance to party.
This form of women’s politics became less viable on the LCC as the political party machines steadily increased their grip. As Council leader from 1934 to 1940 Herbert Morrison appointed a number of Labour women to committee chairmanships including Eveline Lowe (1869-1956) to Education.

Learning from Lives 2: Council Women

The daughter of a Congregational minister, Lowe was educated in fee-paying religious institutions that enabled the further acquisition of social and cultural capital. After a spell of teaching she returned to her alma mater, Homerton College, as lecturer; eventually becoming vice-principal, a position she held until she left to marry George Lowe, a veterinary surgeon who qualified as a doctor in 1911. He lived and worked in Bermondsey and the Lowes participated in charitable activity directed towards the local poor. This played a crucial role in propelling her toward municipal politics. She spent several years as a Poor Law Guardian and helped found the Bermondsey Independent Labour Party in 1908. Widowed in 1919, Lowe became even more committed to public life. The Labour group co-opted her to the LCC Education Committee and in 1922 she gained one of the two West Bermondsey seats at County Hall. In 1934 she became chair of the Education Committee having established herself as London Labour’s expert in this field.

Local authorities had been forced to make cuts in the economic crisis of the early 1930s and Labour’s three-year programme for London education had two priorities. These were to increase the level of secondary school provision and secure improvements in the standard of elementary schooling. Emphasis was also put on child welfare and the need to improve working-class access to secondary education by increasing the number of scholarships. Within days of Lowe taking office, Empire Day in the schools was renamed Commonwealth Day. Within weeks, the Council pressed national government to restore a 10% cut in teachers’ salaries and raise the school leaving age to 15. Within months, the Education Committee was asked to report on all aspects of post-primary education. It recommended the abolition of selection and a common schooling for each child up to the age of 14. Generally, Lowe was considered to have done a good job although she did not go far enough for some.

Helen Bentwich (1892-1972) was the next woman chair of the LCC Education Committee. She grew up in one of the interrelated banking and broking families who comprised the Anglo-Jewish elite. Both her parents were notable for their participation in charitable activity directed towards the capital’s poor and her mother, Caroline Franklin (1863-1935) also served on Buckinghamshire Education Committee. Her uncle Herbert Samuel (1870-1963) was the first practicing Jew appointed to the British Cabinet. Bentwich was well-educated but was not expected to take up paid employment. She spent the 1920s in Palestine where her husband was Attorney General, one of the most powerful posts in the British Mandated Territory. Here she combined voluntary work with a political hostess role and became involved in the feminist-inclined Palestine Council of Jewish Women. Soon after her return to London she joined the Labour Party and twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. However, in the spring of 1934 she received a late night phone call from Eveline Lowe, inviting her to become a co-opted member of the LCC Education Committee (Martin, 2008).

In various speeches reported in the 1930s and 1940s, Bentwich condemned the class inequalities in education, advocated the abolition of private education and called for equality of opportunity. In these years she was part of the Labour leadership that produced educational plans and policies in accord with the comprehensive ideal. Hence when the 1944 Education Act introduced free secondary for all and each authority was asked to make a school development plan the LCC already had its preparations in hand. Bentwich became chair of the Education Committee in 1947 and that same year the Labour Minister of Education accepted the London school plan for re-organising secondary education, which was drawn up on comprehensive principles. In 1949 the minister approved a proposal to build the capital’s first purpose-built comprehensive, Kidbrooke School, described as London’s pride when it opened in 1954. By the 1950s Bentwich was among those identified as part of an inner cabinet on the Council: a time when it was seen as prestigious to teach in LCC schools.

Histories and meaning making

This is not an argument for alternative heroines. It is, rather, an argument for new ways of seeing the same historical space. A majority of all teachers in Britain are women and yet there is a continuing tendency to overlook this significant fact and women’s presence in educational debates and decision making.

Nevertheless, what is interesting is that when we look beyond the activities and practices of the central state women do emerge as significant figures in the field of education politics. They may not have written what have come to be regarded as the central texts of inter-war social democracy, but this study reveals the impact of their hard work was two-fold. Firstly, they contributed to Labour’s advance to power in urban Britain and secondly, they carried forward a radical tradition that became an essential component of London’s education service. Crucially, it was women like Eveline Lowe writing in journals like the Bermondsey Labour Magazine and the London Labour Chronicle, who sought to involve the local community and more particularly, a community of women, in city politics. Political influence is notoriously hard to measure and it depends where one is looking. By profiling local government women we see the transformative aspects of female agency. They justified their social existence through civic activism. They were deeply concerned with questions of democracy and citizenship and looked to other women to continue the taste for contention through protest and political activity.

References

Dyhouse, C. “Miss Buss and Miss Beale: Gender and Authority in the History of Education.” In Lessons for Life. The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850-1950, edited by F. Hunt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987: 23.

Martin, J. (1999) Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England, Leicester, Leicester University Press.

Martin, J. (2008) ‘Engendering city politics and educational thought: elite women and the London Labour Party, 1914-1965′, Paedagogica Historica, XLIV, IV, 397-413.
Steedman, C. (2001) Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.