ABSTRACT
The variation in emphasis according to class between social control and individual betterment applied particularly to men’s education. The movement for higher education for women was an attempt to break through the prescriptions of the ideal, to provide women of the upper and middle classes with the opportunity for individual betterment. Class in Victorian society was defined through a subtle combination of occupation, income, and values; hence the difficulty historians have in defining the limits of any one class. In theory people could become refined and respectable through their own efforts. Women’s activities varied with the status of the men in their families, not with their own aspirations to become a shopkeeper or a lawyer. Education for girls of the middle classes was unsystematic for most of the century. Until the 1870s those who could afford it employed governesses or sent their daughters to small private schools.
