ABSTRACT
This is how Elizabeth Ham, looking back at her childhood in 1820 described her experience of education in the last years of the eighteenth century. For her, education had improved considerably in that short time. She reflects a popular conception, still held today, that many girls remained largely uneducated from 1700 to 1850. Indeed, historians of education appear only to have discovered girls around the middle of the nineteenth century. The historiography of female education owes much of its construction to the women’s movement of the nineteenth century and to a preoccupation with suffrage and the desire to understand the origins and underpinning social structures of the suffrage movement. Thus, much of the research has concentrated on the period from about 1840, focusing in particular on the achievement of women’s higher education, the impact of state intervention, and the implication of Victorian values on girls’ education. We are left with a virtual desert in the period before that: educational history for 1700 to 1850 is remarkably gender blind.
