Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Endowed Schools Act
- 1 The shaping of Section 12
- 2 The men who rejected the dead hand
- 3 The money problem
- 4 Opponents
- 5 Supporters
- 6 What was achieved
- 7 The changeover of 1874
- 8 The long haul
- 9 The Charity Commission spirit
- 10 The women's movement in the later years
- Appendices
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Endowed Schools Act
- 1 The shaping of Section 12
- 2 The men who rejected the dead hand
- 3 The money problem
- 4 Opponents
- 5 Supporters
- 6 What was achieved
- 7 The changeover of 1874
- 8 The long haul
- 9 The Charity Commission spirit
- 10 The women's movement in the later years
- Appendices
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Hewers of wood and drawers of water would still be wanted, and in properly educating such to gain their living by their honest labour … Emanuel Hospital is fulfilling its proper function in the work of education.
Emanuel Hospital trustees, 1871No one denies that providing for the education of girls is a desirable object; but why is it to be done at the expense of the education of boys?
Unsigned pamphlet, 1873Robbing the poor
‘The state of strong prejudice in the public mind’ struck Maria Grey as a formidable obstacle to all the efforts made to get endowment for girls and the Commissioners themselves admitted that nothing met with less support from trustees. Amongst ‘disinterested persons,’ said Robinson, there was a strong conviction that more should be done for girls' education out of endowment; ‘but amongst those who have to manage individual endowments there is a feeling that their particular endowment ought to be exempted from the liability’. Trustees ‘seem to have a preference for boys,’ Roby said. And we shall see how they expressed it. But before that it is worth considering how girls were involved in a wider conflict arising from the operation of the Act: the struggle which accompanied middle-class encroachment on the rights of the poor in the old foundations.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not necessary to recall that Eton had been founded for ‘indigent’ scholars to see that grammar school endowment had a tendency to move in the direction of the better-off. The years just before the Endowed Schools Act was passed showed this plainly.
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- Information
- Feminists and BureaucratsA Study in the Development of Girls' Education in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 70 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980