ABSTRACT
The word governess appeared in English in the fifteenth century and referred to a person in charge of the children of the Royal family or the nobility. It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the governess became a proper teacher. In the eighteenth century, numerous learned women who were bachelors or widows worked as governesses, tutors or schoolmistresses. There was a hierarchy between those three types of educators. There were also huge differences in their wages depending on the family for whom they worked. As there was of course no census of the employment of women in the eighteenth century, we have little information on their numbers. Joseph Massie or Patrick Colquhoun do not mention the category of governesses. Nevertheless, if we take into account the number of noble families, we may suppose there were at least 10,000 governesses.
