ABSTRACT

This collection of essays brings together an international roster of contributors to provide historical insight into women’s agency and activism in education throughout from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Topics discussed range from the strategies adopted by individual women to achieve a personal education and the influence of educated women upon their social environment, to the organized efforts of groups of women to pursue broader feminist goals in an educational context.

The collection is designed to recover the variety of the voices of women inhabiting different geographical and social contexts while highlighting commonality and continuity with reference to creativity, achievement, and the management and transgression of structures of gender inequality.

chapter 1|8 pages

Women, Education and Agency, 1600–2000

An Historical Perspective

chapter 2|18 pages

Self-Tuition and the Intellectual Achievement of Early Modern Women

Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678)

chapter 3|22 pages

Women and Agency

The Educational Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft

chapter 4|17 pages

Scientific Women

Their Contribution to Culture in England in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

chapter 5|17 pages

Ramabai and Rokeya

The History of Gendered Social Capital in India

chapter 7|21 pages

"Knowledge as the Necessary Food of the Mind"

Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education

chapter 8|21 pages

A Woman's Challenge

The Voice of şükufe Nihal in the Modernisation of Turkey

chapter 10|19 pages

Thinking Women

International Education for Peace and Equality, 1918–1930

chapter 12|19 pages

Feminist Criminology in Britain circa 1920–1960

Education, Agency, and Activism outside the Academy

chapter 13|18 pages

Thinking Feminist in 1963

Challenges from Betty Friedan and the U.S. President's Commission on the Status of Women

chapter 14|22 pages

"Enhancing the Quality of the Educational Experience"

Female Activists and U.S. University and College Women's Centres