ABSTRACT
Recent research on women in eighteenth-century Scotland has provided us with nuanced analyses of the lived educational and cultural experiences of elite women, Highland gentry women, and women of the middling and gentry ranks working in Edinburgh.1 However, there is little information available about the educational system(s) they, and more particularly those towards the lower end of the multilayered middling ranks, might make use of in provincial Scottish towns at that time.2 Local gentry and small-town professionals, merchants and craftsmen might wish their daughters to contribute to the household economy and to reflect polite culture, but before the 1770s they were part of an elite (though expanding) minority if they wished them also to be fluent in writing, have numeracy skills or learn other academic subjects. In a sample of Scottish women during the period 1700 to 1760, a third of gentry women and nearly a fifth of those connected to professional families were unable even to write their own name, while in a sample for 1700 to 1770 a quarter of women from merchant families and four-fifths of
those connected to families in trades were unable to sign. In the Lowlands, at least, all girls of the middling ranks were expected to be able to read their Bible and recite the psalms and the catechism. If they were taught subjects such as writing, arithmetic or book-keeping, they would learn them either at home, in town lodgings, at the mixed-sex burgh-funded English and Writing schools or from private schoolmasters.
