ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the schooling of working‐class girls in England from 1800‐1870 and, through such an exercise, shows how historical study can be a part of the sociological imagination within sociology of education. First, it shows how cenain aspects of bourgeois gender ideology, which became a pan of the dominant class ideology, pervaded the curriculum and content of cenain forms of schooling provided by the middle classes for working‐class girls. Secondly, the chapter illustrates, in those forms of schooling the author has considered, how working‐class girls experienced the double burden of class and gender. The schooling of working‐class girls from 1800‐1870 helped the social reproduction of sexual divisions within the labour market as well as the cultural reproduction of the sexual division of labour within the family. The chapter ends with a plea for more detailed historical work within the sociology of education.
