ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that, owing to the status and other concerns, proposals for women's educational reform found anchor in the interests of specific social groups in the mid-Victorian period and that the reforms primarily served the interests of women of these groups, not those of women generally. It sketches some social and economic problems they experienced in the middle decades of the 19th century, and suggests how women's educational reform helped alleviate their economic worries and helped support their social claims. The boy's public schools (whose rise to prominence in the 19th century has been examined by T. W. Bamford) provided the institutional means for (in Best's words) preserving the quasi-hereditary social elite and satisfying the status ambitions of variously talented or wealthy professional and 'business' families. The chapter examines with an apparent lack of rewarding employments for ladies, certain demographic concerns were interpreted in a way that favored the cause of educational reform.
