History of Education Quarterly: Volume 14 -

Noblesse, Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fénelon and Saint-Cyr
Carolyn C. Lougee
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

24 February 2017, pp. 87-114
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THE RECENT REVIVAL of interest in the history of education has inspired studies of the relationship of educational policy to social change, the social composition of elite educational institutions, and the function of instruction as an instrument of social control. (1) These issues, however, have scarcely been developed with reference to female education, and consequently historians have not seen that the debate over the education of girls is a key to understanding social conflict. The purpose of this essay is to confront these issues by studying girls' education in sociopolitical context, focusing on the most significant theoretical and institutional achievements of the seventeenth century in the domestic education of French girls: Fénelon's Treatise on the Education of Girls (1687) and the Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon in 1686.

History of Education Quarterly