ABSTRACT
When studying the history of women’s education several things become immediately apparent. As early as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft had pointed out that women’s exclusion from education was no accident, but part of a deliberate construction of women’s dependency. Once educational inequalities were removed, other gender inequalities would disappear. This argument was believed not only by the Victorian middle-class women who were struggling for educational equality, but also by the men who offered entrenched resistance. Indeed, the fear that women, when given the same education as men, would prove more-than-equal was precisely the fear which fed conservative resistance.
