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Note that this entry is a product of its time, and should be read in that context. Footnotes have been omitted to make the text easier to follow. Also note that scanning and editing may have introduced a few errors into the transcription. Because of these errors, if you need to use this information in an academic paper, please consult the original, available at many libraries.

This continues the entry under "Women" in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

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The whole idea of women's position in social life, and their ability to take their place, independently of any question of sex, in the work of the world, was radically changed in the English-speaking countries, and also in the more education progressive nations beyond their bounds, during the 19th century. This is due primarily to the movement for women's higher education and its results. To deal in detail with this movement in various countries would here be too intricate a matter; but in the English-speaking countries at all events the change is so complete that the only curious thing now is, not what spheres women may not enter, more or less equally with men, but the few from which they are still excluded.

Before the accession of Queen Victoria, there was no systematic education for English women, but as the first half of the 19th century drew to a close, broader views began to be held on the subject, while the humanitarian movement, as well as the rapidly increasing number of women, helped to put their education on a sounder basis. It became more thorough; its methods were better calculated to stimulate intellectual power; and the conviction that it was neither good, nor politic, for women to remain intellectually in their former state of ignorance, was gradually accepted by every one. The movement owed much to Frederick Denison Maurice. He was its pioneer; and Queen's College (1848), which he founded, was the first to give a wider scope to the training of its scholars. Out of its teaching, and that of its professors (including Charles Kingsley), grew nearly all the educational advantages which women enjoy to-day; and to the women who were trained at Queen's College we owe some of the best teaching in England. Bedford College, Cheltenham College, the North London Collegiate School for Girls, the Girls' Public Day School Company's schools, are some of those which sprang into life in different parts of England, and were filled, as rapidly as they were opened, by the girls of the middle and professional classes. From their teaching came the final stage which gave women the same academic advantages as men. Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge, Westfield College in London, St Hilda's College, St Hugh's Hall, Holloway College, Owens College, the Manchester and Birmingham and Victoria Universities, and other colleges for women in all parts of the United Kingdom, are some of the later but equally successful results of the movement. The necessity for testing the quality of the education of women, however, soon began to be felt. The University of Cambridge was the first to institute a special examination for women over eighteen, and its example was followed by Oxford; but while London, Dublin (Trinity College), Belfast (Queen's), Victoria, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews universities now grant degrees, Oxford and Cambridge still denied them. At the Catholic university in Ireland, it was provided that two members of the senate should be women; and Queen's University, Belfast, had three women in 1910 in its senate. Women may point with justifiable pride to the fact that within a very few years of their admission to university examinations, they provided at Cambridge both a senior classic and a senior wrangler. In America the movement has gone much farther than in Great Britain.

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More of this article: General | Mosaic Law, Ancient India | Roman Law | Christian Law  | Northern Europe Law | English Law | Husband and Wife | Criminal Law | Education | Professions | Nursing and Medicine | Government and Politics | Women Practicing Law | Women as Clergy | Women's Rights Agitation | Woman Suffrage | Woman Suffrage 1865-1906 | Woman Suffrage 1906-1910 | Woman Suffrage Societies | Woman Suffrage New Zealand and Australia | Woman Suffrage America | Woman Suffrage Europe | Woman Suffrage International | Sources

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Part of a collection of etexts on women's history produced by Jone Johnson Lewis. Editing and formatting © 1999-2003 Jone Johnson Lewis.