The Double Burden of Class and Gender in the Schooling of Working-Class Girls in Nineteenth Century England, 1800–1870

In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills (1959) claimed that ‘all sociology worthy of the name is ‘‘historical sociology’”. ¹ Yet within one of the main sub-disciplines of sociology, the sociology of education, there have been few historical studies. ² Since the Second World War, the sociology of education has been primarily concerned with issues such as social class inequalities in education, the social construction of educational knowledge, classroom interaction and the problematic relationship between the macro and micro levels of analysis. ³ Most of these studies have been ahistorical or, at best, offered what Mills has called ‘the dull little padding known as “sketching in the historical background’ ”. ⁴ The ahistorical nature of much sociology of education plus the emphasis upon social class inequalities has obscured other fundamental issues such as gender divisions: ⁵ after all, it was in the century prior to the twentieth that the origins of some of the greatest structural inequalities in access to education between girls and boys, men and women, are to be found. In this paper I wish to concentrate upon the schooling of working-class girls in England from 1800–1870 and, through such an exercise, I hope I might be able to show how historical study can be a part of the sociological imagination within sociology of education.