ABSTRACT
This paper addresses four absences in those sections of the official histories of the girls’ schools that cover the years between 1918 and 1958. These absences are Freudianism, the great depression of 1929-39, the rise of fascism and the post-1945 cult of domesticity. The title comes from Winifred Holtby’s (1936) novel South Riding. The novel opens in 1932 in the depression with the heroine, Sarah Burton, appointed to be head of a small Yorkshire high school for girls. Her aims for the 53 day girls and 13 boarders are captured in the phrase ‘planning dignity, planning enlightenment’. The paper focuses on the goals and achievements of the private girls’ schools through the depression, the Second World War, and the Butskillite years of 1944-58. The main source material is the published histories of the girls’ schools from the whole United Kingdom. The school histories are supplemented with a discussion of the popular fiction read by the fee-paying parents, a mechanism for alerting the middle classes to fashionable ideas. Claud Cockburn (1975) explored ideas about religion, sex, race, class and the dangers of communism in 15 best-sellers published between 1903 and 1939, and the same strategy is deployed here.
