ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the importance of higher education to nineteenth-century feminism, by raising some issues about comparative women's and gender history, and then by introducing the importance of ideas about the female mind and body to the higher education debates. Higher education was embraced as a key aim by the organized middle-class women’s movements that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, first in Western and Central Europe, and then in Southern, Northern, and Eastern Europe. In Britain, education, including higher education, was always one of the many foci of the organized women’s movement that emerged in the 1860s. The absence of a women’s movement in Spain begs the question of the use of the term ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. An extensive literature has established the actions and developments that led to women’s admission to the universities in Britain, Germany, and Spain.
