ABSTRACT
Opponents of higher education for women attempted to prove that the Victorian ideal of womanhood was based on sound moral, social, and intellectual principles, and that to go against these principles was to destroy the fabric of society. The ideal of urban middle-class life turned out to be different from the life of the aristocracy on which it was patterned. Nineteenth-century writers preached that women should find fulfillment in the home, thinking nostalgically of the homes of their parents and grandparents in the village sand small towns of pre-industrial England. A group of women reformers from headquarters at Langham Place in London began a journal and an employment society, in order to open to women of the middle classes jobs commensurate with their intelligence and their status in society. Reformers pressing for higher education for women were circumscribed by the beliefs and prejudices of society.
