ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three teacher training colleges – Homerton, Bishop Otter, and Avery Hill. It discusses how feminine ideology with its hegemonic domestic and familial values continued to form throughout our period the enveloping context of the work of these colleges. The two voluntary colleges – Homerton and Bishop Otter – had been training women teachers since the second half of the nineteenth century. Avery Hill, on the other hand, was a new maintained college founded by the London County Council in 1906. The chapter examines in closer detail three aspects of the culture of femininity in teacher training colleges: the translation to an institutional setting of the familial and domestic customs of the middle-class home; the widening cultural horizons which the experience of college afforded girls; and lastly the issue of sexuality which by the end of the period had become an increasingly contested arena.
