Georgian women: dame schools and governesses Education became even more inaccessible for women during this period. Virginia Woolf wrote of her, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” 3. When she returned to England, she wrote plays for a living, which were often racy, and is now recognised as one of the finest playwrights of the time. Very little is known of her early life (her own stories of it are highly embroidered) but she managed to attract the attention of people in powerful places, such that Charles II employed her as a spy in Antwerp in 1666, during the time of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
One remarkable example of a highly educated woman in the early modern period is Aphra Behn, a playwright, poet, translator and spy. It’s not unusual in this time period to see merchants leaving their businesses to their wives in their wills, which demonstrates that women were well enough educated to fulfill these roles – and also that education in a wife might be an advantage.
A growing merchant class meant a growing number of people seeking to educate their daughters, so that they could help out in the family business. The early modern period was a time of two steps forward, when women enjoyed a greater measure of freedom and, by consequence, of education. It’s tempting to think of history as moving steadily forwards in the direction of progress, but in fact it was often a case of two steps forward, one step back. Early modern women: the freedom of an education Behn’s best-known works include Oroonoko and The Rover
#Best history programs 1890 full#
For instance, as the smallest denomination of coinage was worth a lot more than some of the purchases a woman might be expected to make, her life would be full of calculations of bartering and debts – which, without the knowledge or materials to make notes, would all have to be calculated in her head an impressive feat both of mental maths and of memory. We don’t know who the author was, but it makes sense to assume it was a woman like her choice of narrator.Įven uneducated peasant women wouldn’t have been stupid. There’s evidence of this literacy in the form of women’s writing from this time period, such as ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’, a fourteenth-century poem about a young woman whose father won’t let her enter a nunnery, although she dearly wishes to do so, because nunneries have become corrupt places of sin rather than the place of holy devotion that the writer would prefer. This didn’t amount to much among the peasantry when they had no education of their own, but middle-class women could be highly educated and would pass that knowledge onto their daughters, so that they would be better able to run their own households. However, teaching within the family home frequently included daughters as well as sons. Daughters were not usually included unless they were to become nuns themselves (though there were exceptions). Monks and nuns would usually be able to read and write in Latin, and they were paid to teach the sons of wealthy families. The Church was often the only source of education for Medieval familiesįor the vast majority of people, there were two sources of education: the Church and their immediate family.
For instance, King Alfred’s biographer wrote that Alfred only learned to read at the age of 12 while his biographer considered this to be negligent on the part of his parents and tutors, it was clearly not unthinkable even for the younger son of a king to lack this kind of ability. Medieval women: mental maths and life in the nunneryĮducational opportunities for most people in medieval England were slim, and educational priorities were different. In this article, we take a look at the education available for women over time in the UK, and how new education opportunities were fought for and won, up to the present day. This instead has to be reconstructed from evidence such as women leaving books in their wills, which excludes women who couldn’t afford anything as costly as a library of their own, but who may still have had some informal education. `Īt many times there was a shortage of formal education for either sex, which makes it hard for historians to assess levels of education such as literacy. It’s certainly the case that the quality of education available for women in the UK has generally been worse than the education available for men, there have nonetheless been some opportunities available through most of history, and intelligent women have grasped them whenever possible.
0 kommentar(er)
