ABSTRACT
Clergymen were among the most ardent supporters of the ideal of womanhood. In 1884 John William Burgon, one of the staunchest opponents of women students at Oxford, delivered a sermon that was rapidly published entitled: To Educate Young Women Like Young Men, and With Young Men—a Thing Inexpedient and Immodest. The opposition to women students of such churchmen as Burgon and Henry Liddon, and the ambivalent attitude of Christopher Wordsworth, has to be understood against the background of change within the universities. Clergymen who were outspoken on the dangers of this kind of educational change based their teachings on the scriptures. Writers argued that the separate duties of men and women were divinely ordained. Thus, the moral and religious arguments used against higher education for women not only reinforced the nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood, but denied women their individuality with all the power and influence wrought by the word of God.
