ABSTRACT
For Mary Wollstonecraft, thought by many to be the first British feminist theorist, the road to emancipation and liberty for women was through education. Many liberal feminist campaigns have been centred on attempting to improve equality of access to education since that time. Until the nineteenth century, access to further and higher education was effectively denied women; since then there has been a slow but accelerating process of evolutionary change, gradually improving women’s opportunities. Gender is an enormously powerful determinant of type of course selected, in school, in youth training placements, and in further and higher education. Awareness of sex stereotyping in schools has clearly grown enormously over the last few decades, particularly since the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.
