Introduction: Young women in Europe in the era of ‘first-wave’ feminisms: analyses of generation and gender

Abstract

During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining ‘youth’, marking its beginning and its end, were becoming more precise and more institutionally defined for both girls and boys in Europe. More than any other phenomenon or institution, elementary schooling (and leaving school) contributed to a certain ‘normalization’ of the life cycle for young people. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age 12 or 13; at school-leaving a new phase of life began. Throughout much of Europe a select minority of middle-class and upper-class young women joined their brothers at universities, as higher education became first a possibility and then a routine for them in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century.