ABSTRACT
Those of you familiar with the first flurry of books on girls’ education that came out of the women’s movement of the 1970s might recognise the phrase ‘the Schooling Scandal’. It was the sub-title used by Dale Spender for her 1982 book Invisible Women in which she argued that it was men’s knowledge and understandings of the world that were taught in schools and it was male interests that dominated the curriculum and the classroom. Spender’s book was one of many that caught the consciousness of myriad, mainly women, teachers and academics, working in schools and universities at that time. A glance at our own bookshelves offers up an array of contributions on girls and schooling that began to appear in the 1970s. Feminists across the western world started to raise the issues that formed the ‘gender agenda’ for the coming years; in Britain, themajority of these followed the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975.1 Of course, feminist concerns with education were not unique to the UK and some of the earliest writings on girls’ schooling came from the USA2 (see, for example, Sexism and Schooling and Society by Frazier and Sadker, 1973; And Jill Came Tumbling After: Sexism in Education by Stacey, Bereaud and Daniels, 1974).
