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Schoolmistresses and Headmistresses: Elites and Education in Nineteenth-Century England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Joyce Senders Pedersen
Joyce Senders Pedersen*
Affiliation:
Washington University, St. Louis
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Extract

Ladies who kept private schools attended by young ladies are familiar figures in Regency and Victorian novels: ridiculous ladies, such as Miss Pinkerton, who kept a rather elegant establishment in Vanity Fair, sensible ladies like Mrs. Goddard, whose more modest school was attended by Jane Austen's Emma; scheming ladies such as Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who set her cap for Molly Gibson's father in Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Memorable mostly for their personal quirks, their qualities of character, these ladies all fit comfortably in the framework of the domestic drama.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1975 , pp. 135 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1975

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Footnotes

*

This essay is based on research done for an unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Reform of Women's Secondary and Higher Education in 19th Century England: A Study in Elite Groups,” University of California, Berkeley, June, 1974. I am much indebted to Sheldon Rothblatt for his generosity in sharing his ideas and kind encouragement. I am also grateful to the Association of Head Mistresses of Endowed and Proprietary Schools, the Girls' Public Day School Trust, and Girton College for permitting me to use their archives and to the University of California, Berkeley, which supported my research.

References

1. These include Hicks, Phyllis D., A Quest of Ladies, The Story of a Warwickshire School ([London], 1949)Google Scholar; Sewell, Eleanor L. (ed.), The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell (London, 1907)Google Scholar; and Stoddart, Anna M., Life and Letters of Hannah E. Pipe (London, 1908)Google Scholar. Miss Pipe was a transitional figure who participated in some aspects of the reform movement but remained rather conservative in her general outlook. Gerin's, WinifredCharlotte Bronte, The Evolution of Genius (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar includes information about the Misses Woolers' establishment, where Charlotte was a pupil and a teacher.

2. Butler, Reverend G., “Education considered as a Profession for Women” in Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, ed. Butler, Josephine E. (London, 1869), pp. 49–77Google Scholar; Davies, Emily, Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women, 1860-1908 (Cambridge, 1910)Google Scholar; [Parkes, Bessie Rayner], “The Profession of the Teacher. The Annual Reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution from 1843 to 1856,” The English Woman's Journal, I (1858), 1–13Google Scholar; [Sewell, Elizabeth], Principles of Education, drawn from Nature and Revelation, and applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes (New York, 1870)Google Scholar. Unlike the other reformers cited here, who had feminist sympathies, Miss Sewell was a conservative educational critic who wished girls to be given an improved education along traditional lines.

3. Schools Inquiry Commission Report in Parliamentary Papers, 1867-68 (Cd. 3966). (Hereafter SIC.)

4. Ibid., VII, 69.

5. The largest single body of data about the 19th-century reforms is that found in the Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education in Parliamentary Papers, 1895 (Cd. 7862). (Hereafter Bryce.) This includes some information about women's higher as well as secondary education. It may be noticed that “1894” appears later in this essay as the cutoff date for some other data gathered. The date was chosen so that the data would tally with those gathered by the Commission, which concluded its survey that year.

The best general account of the reforms remains Zimmern's, AliceThe Renaissance of Girls' Education in England, A Record of Fifty Years' Progress (London, 1898)Google Scholar.

6. The Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, formed in 1873, examined both girls' and boys' schools which gave evidence of providing an education of the highest grade. Also, students were sent in for public examinations conducted under the universities' auspices.

7. The biographies include Burstall, Sara A., Frances Mary Buss (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Kamm, Josephine, How Different from Us, A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale (London, 1959)Google Scholar; Ridley, Annie E., Frances Mary Buss and her Work for Education (London, 1895)Google Scholar; Raikes, Elizabeth, Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham (London, 1910)Google Scholar; Shillito, Elizabeth H., Dorothea Beale (London, 1920)Google Scholar; and Steadman, F. Cecily, In the Days of Miss Beale (London, [1931])Google Scholar.

Other early headmistresses for whom full-fledged biographies and autobiographies exist include Burstall, Sara A., Retrospect and Prospect (London, 1933)Google Scholar; Bowerman, Elsie, Stands there a School, Memories of Dame Frances Dove, D.B.E, Founder of Wycombe Abbey School (Brighton, [1966])Google Scholar; Faithfull, Lilian M., In the House of My Pilgrimage (London, 1924)Google Scholar; Gray, Frances R., And Gladly Wolde He Leme and Gladly Teche (London, 1931)Google Scholar; James, Mary E., Alice Ottley. First Head-Mistress of the Worcester High School for Girls, 1883-1912 (London, 1914)Google Scholar; and Paul, Agnes S., Some Memories of Mrs. Woodhouse, Sheffield High School 1878-98, Clapham High School 1898-1912 (London, 1924)Google Scholar.

8. Among them Young's, G. M.Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (London, 1936)Google Scholar and Ensor's, R. C. K.England 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1936)Google Scholar. But more often the movement in women's education has been ignored in social histories of the period.

Of the 202 women who joined the Association of Head Mistresses of Endowed and Proprietary Schools from 1874 through 1894, only two, Dorothea Beale and Dame Frances Dove (Headmistress first of St. Leonard's, then of Wycombe Abbey), found their way into the Dictionary of National Biography.

9. Peter Laslett discussed the components of gentle status in pre-industrial England in The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965)Google Scholar Ch. 2. Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England (New York, 1967), pp. 258–65Google Scholar; Burn, W. L., The Age of Equipoise (New York, 1964), pp. 253–67Google Scholar; and Best, Geoffrey, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-1871 (New York, 1971), pp. 245–56Google Scholar analyzed how the concept of gentility was modified in the mid-Victorian era, noting the new importance given a public school education and the inclusion of professional status as a hallmark of gentility.

10. Elliott, Philip in The Sociology of the Professions (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 20–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues plausibly that unlike modern professional groups, professional men in the pre-industrial period were accorded gentle status less because they performed a professional function or possessed a special expertise than because they associated with a high status clientele, could live a leisured, cultured life, and (since the professions provided some younger sons of the gentry with a living) fit into a society in which status was largely governed by family position and inherited wealth.

11. Only certain categories of private schoolmistresses concern us — those who kept boarding or mixed boarding and day schools, attended for the most part by the daughters of the gentry and upper middle class. Girls of the lower middle class — shopkeepers' and clerks' and farmers' daughters — were usually educated in private day schools. The women who kept these schools, which were not considered “genteel,” do not concern us. SIC, IX, 794, 821, 823, 826-27.

12. This section is very much indebted to Peterson's, M. Jeanne “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society,” Victorian Studies, XIV(1970), 7–26Google Scholar.

13. As Peterson observed, the association of high status with leisure lingered on longer in the case of women than with men, and a gentleman's own elite status was expressed in part in his ability to support his wife and daughters in a leisured state. Ibid., 9, 14.

14. Standards varied and were seldom carefully defined, but when contemporaries did draw the line of gentility in the mid-Victorian era, they seem most often to have placed tradesmen's daughters who kept day schools catering primarily to tradesmen's and farmers' daughters beyond the pale. See James Bryce's classification of schools and schoolmistresses, SIC, IX, 794, 821-27; [Eastlake, Elizabeth], “Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre and the Governesses' Benevolent Institution,” Quarterly Review, LXXXIX (1848), 153–185, 176, 180Google Scholar.

15. Such is the opinion of Carr-Saunders, A. M. and Wilson, P. A., The Professions (Oxford, 1933), p. 295Google Scholar.

16. When, for instance, a young lady noticed that Jane Eyre's accomplishments were unusual in an elementary schoolmistress, it was the social rather than the academic implications of the discovery that intrigued her. She thought Jane a “lusus naturae” as a village schoolmistress and decided Jane was “clever enough to be a governess in a high family.” It was not just Jane's accomplishments in their own right but also the fact that they indicated that she must be well-born which made her think Jane suited to teach the daughters of the upper classes. Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (New York, 1961), pp. 416–17Google Scholar.

17. “Most of them have been driven by misfortune … accidents of all kinds, more or less unexpected, into tuition.” SIC, VIII, 394. Parkes, , “Profession,” The English Woman's Journal, I, 1Google Scholar.

18. SIC, I, 561. The Misses Woolers' case seems to have been typical. When their father's death brought the sisters “greater independence,” they soon considered selling the goodwill of their school, although the eldest sister was then only in her mid-forties and the youngest in her early thirties. Gerin's Charlotte Bronte gives some details.

19. Unfortunately, no systematic information about the private schoolmistresses' incomes exists. The Taunton Commission was not empowered to compel the teachers to provide such information and was largely thwarted in its attempts to inquire into monetary matters. It was noted that differences in housekeeping expenditures among private boarding schools made any guesses highly unreliable, and the Commission did not venture estimates of the incomes of persons keeping such schools. SIC, IX, 683. The Commission's investigators and witnesses were, however, agreed in their impression that the overwhelming majority of private schoolmistresses were anything but prosperous. Ibid., IX, 819; VIII, 479; Emily Davies' Testimony, V, 246, 11363.

20. Fees in such schools might range from 120 to 150 guineas a year. Ibid., VII, 70. Such schools were small, usually with less than twenty pupils, and overhead costs were high. For their seven students, the Sewell sisters, for instance, kept a domestic staff of eight or nine, and in instructing the students the three sisters were assisted by two nieces who lived with them and by visiting masters. Mrs.Fraser, Hugh, A Diplomatist's Wife in Many Lands (London, 1911), I, 204Google Scholar gives the details. Further, it might take some years to establish such a school to run at a profit and meanwhile debts might be incurred. Such was the Byerly sisters' experience. It took them some thirteen years to establish their very successful school securely. Despite the fact that the eight sisters were the beneficiaries of one bequest of £800 and another of £200 apiece, they had to turn often to their cousin Josiah Wedgwood (son of the famous potter) for loans in the early years. Hicks, , Quest, pp. 55, 70–71Google Scholar. While all these circumstances limited profits, a woman with fifteen or twenty boarders paying from 120 to 150 guineas would have realized substantial profits, even with the most generous allowance for housekeeping and tuition expenses.

21. As one investigator reported to the Taunton Commission, “a lady may toil her whole life long in the service of the country gentry and clergy and yet her savings will be barely sufficient to secure for her, when she is too old to work, a small annuity.” SIC, VIII, 479.

22. Fees in the best provincial boarding schools, most of them mixed day and boarding establishments, averaged around £70 for boarders and £20 to £30 for day scholars. Ibid., IX, 800-01; VIII, 239. With twenty pupils, even the more exclusive of these schools would seldom have given a profit of much over £300, and many must have given less.

Fees in the cheaper day schools ranged from £3 to £10, which meant that a woman with twenty students would have had a gross income of from £60 to £200 from which she must deduct rent, repairs, taxes, and the cost of an assistant or two. Such schools would scarcely ever have yielded a profit of much over £100 and must often have given much less. Ibid., IX, 800; VIII, 239.

23. Banks, J. A., Prosperity and Parenthood (London, 1965), pp. 41-45, 115,Google Scholar cited contemporary discussions as to whether £300 per annum would suffice for a newly married couple to keep a genteel life-style in the mid-Victorian years, and noted the case of Anthony Trollope who, a bit earlier, in the period 1830-40, found it impossible to live like a gentleman in London on a salary ranging from £90 to £140 a year without going into debt. James Bryce classified “persons whose incomes range from £150 to £600 per annum (excluding the professional men)” as “lower” (as opposed to upper) middle class, SIC, IX, 823, 826-27. Best quoted a contemporary statistician who considered £500 an “upper middle class” income and concluded that “£300 did not carry a family man far up the slopes of gentility.” Mid-Victorian Britain, p. 90.

24. Parkes, , “Profession,” The English Woman's Journal, I, 10Google Scholar.

25. SIC, VIII, 480.

26. Girls' Public Day School Trust Archives, letter from Miss Clarke to Mrs. Grey, 29 Aug. [c. 1870].

27. SIC, VII, 211.

28. Fraser, , Diplomatist's Wife, I, 204–05Google Scholar.

29. This pattern of upward mobility is nicely illustrated by the case of Hannah Pipe, who began by opening a small day school with her widowed mother in their Manchester home in 1848. Gradually, the ladies acquired boarders who were charged thirty guineas a year. In 1856, the ladies moved their establishment to London. Here they accepted no day pupils and the boarders were charged eighty guineas per annum. In 1860, they moved to a grander London establishment, where it seems the fees were one hundred guineas. While highly successful, the school remained small, with twenty-five girls in 1862. Stoddart's Life of Pipe, gives the details.

30. Private girls' schools were estimated to average around twenty pupils. SIC, VII, 114; IX, 281, 794. Since it was doubtless easier to locate large schools than very small ones, the estimates may well be high.

31. Ibid., IX, 282. The Sewell sisters, for example, could evidently easily have enlarged their popular school, for parents put in their daughters' names for places years in advance. But during the forty years the sisters kept the school, the students numbered only from six to ten. Sewell, , Autobiography, p. 117Google Scholar; Fraser, , Diplomatist's Wife, I, 205Google Scholar.

32. The basic tuition fee generally covered only instruction in the English subjects and (in the more exclusive schools) French, while lessons in music drawing, dancing, and so on were charged as “extras.” It was especially on the “extras” that a mistress made her profits. The amount charged for the basic course of instruction was generally only about one-third or two-thirds of the amount parents paid for instruction in the accomplishments. SIC, IX, 282-83.

33. Information about the curricula in different sorts of girls' schools is sprinkled throughout the Taunton Report; see esp. Ibid., VII, 199-200; VIII, 507-08, 585-612; IX, 803. Music was especially emphasized: “At present music occupies pretty nearly as much of a girl's life as classics do of a boy's,” reported one investigator. Ibid., IX, 815.

34. Ibid., IX, 292.

35. The female teachers who did specialize seem most often to have done so in music or modern languages. Unfortunately, the Censuses are not as helpful as they might be in indicating the numbers. The 1851 Census listed four categories of female teachers: Music Mistress (2,296); Schoolmistress (39,619); Governess (20,058); and other Teachers (4,936). The 1861 Census listed eight categories, but music teacher was not among them. The largest group of female specialists listed in 1861 were the 982 language teachers.

36. Eastlake, , “Vanity Fair,” Quarterly Review, LXXXIX, 184–85Google Scholar. The author was criticizing a scheme being mooted by the founders of Queen's College, London (one of the first schools to be established along reformed lines for girls) to offer certificates to qualified governesses.

37. G. M. Young developed the idea that educated women were heirs to the Renaissance ideal in “The New Cortegiano”, in Victorian Essays, ed., Handcock, W. D. (London, 1962), pp. 202–16Google Scholar.

38. SIC, VII, 70, Sometimes the assistant mistresses in such schools did not teach either, and all instruction was left to visiting masters, but this was unusual. Generally, the male teachers would just visit a school once or twice a week to give special, advanced instruction in the accomplishments, always in the presence of a governess.

39. Cross, J. W., George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (Boston, 1884), I, 16Google Scholar gives an account of the friendship and their correspondence.

40. Sewell, , Principles, p. 386Google Scholar.

41. SIC, IX, 817.

42. Ibid., VII, 214.

43. One investigator observed that “the first noticeable fact in ladies' boarding schools is the subjection of the teacher's will in every instance to the wishes of the parents, in many instances to the whims of the pupils … in their anxiety to exclude from schools patronized by themselves all girls of an inferior class, [parents] exercise a control over schoolmistresses which is often very oppressive and tyrannical.” Ibid., VIII, 478-79.

A pupil of the Sewell sisters recalled that these ladies had circularized their students' parents (apparently gentry and professional people) before venturing to admit a businessman's daughter to their school. Fraser, , Diplomatist's Wife, I, 208Google Scholar.

44. Eastlake, , “Vanity Fair” Quarterly Review, LXXXIX, 180Google Scholar; SIC, VIII, 43-44; Sewell, , Principles, p. 439Google Scholar.

45. Histories of the College include Grylls, Rosalie Glynn, Queen's College 1848-1948 (London, 1948)Google Scholar; Kaye, Elaine, A History of Queen's College (Harley Street) (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Mrs. Alex Tweedie (ed.), The First College Open to Women. Queen's College, London. Memories and Records of Work Done 1848-1898 [n.p., n.d.].

46. Rev. Maurice, Frederick Denison, “Queen's College, London: its Objects and Method,” in Introductory Lectures Delivered at Queen's College London (London, 1849), p. 5Google Scholar.

47. These were Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall (both 1879), St. Hugh's Hall (1886), and St. Hilda's (1893) at Oxford; Westfield (1882) and Royal Holloway (1886) in London.

48. Victoria University consisted of Owen's College, Manchester; Yorkshire College, Leeds; and University College, Liverpool.

49. The universities' reluctance to grant, degrees to qualified women stemmed partly from the fact that degrees carried with them the privileges attendant upon full membership in the universities, such as eligibility for participation in university administration. Oxford granted qualified women degrees in 1920. Cambridge granted them the titles of degrees in 1921, denying them degrees until 1948.

50. The Preliminary, Junior, and Senior Local Examinations (for students under the ages of fourteen, sixteen, and nineteen) had been established by Oxford and Cambridge in 1857 and 1858 respectively. Each university appointed a special syndicate which supervised the examinations, held at various local centers where students might present themselves.

51. The largest of these were the Girls' Public Day School Company and the Church Schools Company. Guaranteed local support in the form of shares taken locally, these companies would assist in founding and administering schools. Bell, E. Moberly, A History of the Church Schools Company 1883-1958 (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Magnus, Laurie, The Jubilee Book of the Girls' Public Day School Trust 1873-1923 (Cambridge, 1923)Google Scholar; and Littlewood, Kathleen D. B., Some Account of the History of the Girls' Public Day School Trust [London, 1960]Google Scholar.

52. Most notable of these private schoolmistresses were Frances Mary Buss, whose North London Collegiate School was widely used as a model by later public schools, and the Lawrence sisters, whose Rodean School rose to great prominence, but remained under private ownership until the 20th century. For the latter, see de Zouche, Dorothy E., Rodean School 1883-1955 (Brighton, 1955)Google Scholar.

53. “A Public School is a school … not carried on for private profit. This is the primary … meaning of the name, but it has come to be applied only to schools which lead on their pupils directly to University.” Gray, , And Gladly, pp. 77–78Google Scholar.

“We [the Girls' Public Day School Company schools] claim to correspond to … Eton … and schools of that sort … inasmuch as there is no other class of public school which gives a higher education than we do.” Bryce, W. H. Stone's Testimony, II, 171, 1684.

54. Thus Zimmern, Alice, Renaissance, pp. 161–62Google Scholar, thought that “true” public schools were those in which students helped administer the school's government.

55. Beale, Dorothea, Soulsby, Lucy H. M., Dove, Jane Frances, Work and Play in Girls' Schools by Three Headmistresses (London, 1898), p. 22Google Scholar.

56. Quoted in Carter, Olive, History of the Gateshead High School, 1876-1907 and Central Newcastle High School 1895-1955 [n.p., n.d.], p. 43Google Scholar.

57. Zimmern, , Renaissance, p. 156Google Scholar.

58. This section is much indebted to Rothblatt's, SheldonThe Revolution of the Dons, Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (New York, 1968), esp. pp. 90–93Google Scholar. Rothblatt stressed that for those reforming dons who claimed professional status the professional ideal was more than an occupational category based on special expertise. It also encompassed both a broader social ethic (that of disinterested service, as opposed to the pursuit of private profit) and a reserved personal style by which professional men might hope to distinguish themselves from the lower order of flashy, bumptious men of trade.

59. Association of Head Mistresses, Annual Conference Minutes, II, 20 June 1891, 151Google Scholar.

60. Burstall, , Retrospect, p. 161Google Scholar. Miss Burstall was Headmistress of the Manchester High School for Girls.

61. Ridley, , Frances Mary Buss, p. 91Google Scholar.

62. Thus the headmistresses tended to favor a severe sartorial style and sometimes enforced this on their assistants as well. At Central Newcastle, the Headmistress Miss Moberly prescribed a coat, a skirt with a shirt blouse, a stiff collar, and a tie for herself and her assistants. Carter, , Gateshead and Central Newcastle, p. 35Google Scholar. Miss Beale's biographer writes of her “half-expressed” wish that the Cheltenham staff wear black to express their sense of vocation. Raikes, , Dorothea Beale, p. 250Google Scholar.

63. “GIRLS' SCHOOLS WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO SALARIES OF HEAD MISTRESSES AS RECOMMENDED BY THE ENDOWED SCHOOLS COMMISSION,” Journal of the Women's Education Union, IV (1876) 96Google Scholar, lists possible minimum and maximum salaries, including capitation fees. These ranged from £110 to £190 given the Head of the Dolgelly School, Wales to £1100 to £2000 projected for the Head of St. Paul's School for Girls and averaged about £400.

In 1894, the thirty-five heads of Girls' Public Day School Company schools received the following salaries: six earned £250; twelve £250 to £400; thirteen £400 to £600; two £600 to £700; and two a little over £700. (Calculated from numbers given in the Girls' Public Day School Trust, Minutes of Council and Committees for 1895, p. 19Google Scholar.)

Some heads supplemented their salaries with profits from boarders and private pupils. Miss Buss, said to be one of the most successful women of her times, reportedly had an income of “not less” than £2500 from boarders and private pupils in addition to the £800 to £1300 she received as Headmistress of the North London Collegiate. (Ridley, , Frances Mary Buss, p. 94Google Scholar). Her income was thus similar to that received by headmasters of the great public schools, such as Arnold, who is said to have had an income of over £4000 at Rugby. Bamford, T. W., The Rise of the Public Schools. A Study of Boys' Boarding Schools in England and Wales from 1831 to the Present Day (London, 1967), p. 127Google Scholar.

64. Average professional earnings at a somewhat later date, 1913/14, have been calculated for barristers (£478), solicitors (£568), general practitioners (£395), and clergymen (£208) by Routh, Guy, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906-1960 (Cambridge, 1965), p. 64Google Scholar.

65. As, for instance, when Miss Benton arranged the transfer of a gifted student from her South Hampstead High School to the North London Collegiate, where more advanced mathematical teaching was available. Girls' Public Day School Trust Archives, MS. account of Alary Sophia Benton's life, perhaps by Miss Stead.

66. Headmistresses, for instance, gradually established the rule that girls would conform to the school calendar and would normally absent themselves from school only with their permission. Miss Beale recalled that in the early days at Cheltenham girls would miss the first term so that the family could prolong their holiday, but that “when the College grew more independent, we refused to reenter those who played this trick.” Beale, Dorothea, History of the Cheltenham Ladies' College 1853-1904 (Cheltenham, [1904]), p. 25Google Scholar. When a girl absented herself without leave from the King Edward VI High School to attend a wedding, the headmistress, Miss Creak, expelled her. Vardy, Winifred I., King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham, 1883-1925 (London, 1928), p. 49Google Scholar.

67. Bryce, Mary Gurney's Testimony, II, 173, 1713, suggests this was so in the case of the Girls' Public Day School Company's schools.

68. Ibid., Mary Gurney's Testimony, II, 174, 1717-18.

69. Of the 202 women who joined the Head Mistresses' Association from its founding in 1874 through 1894 the educational backgrounds of seventy-four were ascertained: at least forty-six received their advanced education at Oxbridge colleges; five at University College, London; six at Queen's College, London; four (and probably more) at London women's colleges which came to be of university rank; two at the North London Collegiate; two at Cheltenham; two at other public schools; and seven were educated at home or in private schools.

The Oxbridge college registers contain biographical information about some students, often including schools where they taught, and it was easy to match these with the lists of new members (and their schools) found in the Minutes of the Headmistresses' Association. In the case of the early London colleges and University of London degree lists which do not give biographical details everything became much more difficult, since it was impossible to know whether a Miss Clarke who attended Bedford was the same Miss Clarke who appeared in the Headmistresses' Minutes without independent corroboration, which was hard to come by.

70. The pattern is similar to that found by Jenkins, Hester and Jones, D. Caradog, “Social Class of Cambridge University Alumni of the 18th and 19th Centuries,” British Journal of Sociology, I, (1950), 93-116, 99Google Scholar, although professionals' and business and tradesmen's daughters comprised a larger proportion of the Cambridge women college students of known origin than did the sons of such men in the University as a whole.

71. Unfortunately, it proved possible to discover the fathers' occupations of only twenty-two of the 202 women who joined the Head Mistresses' Association between 1874 and 1894, to whom may be added a twenty-third woman, a widow whose husband's occupation was established: seventeen were professionals (ten clergymen, two doctors, two artists, one army officer, one schoolmaster, and one engineer); five in business or trades (a chemical manufacturer, a merchant, a manager and partner of a clay company, a tailor, and a commercial traveler); and one a planter. Although these women constitute a mere 10 percent of the group and may well not be representative, it is noteworthy that their composition is similar to that of the Oxbridge women students of the period, both as regards the proportion of professional to business backgrounds and the large proportion of clergymen's daughters within the professional group.

72. At Girton, for instance, where the fees were £105 per annum, of thirteen scholarships noted in the Admissions Book as awarded in 1894, one was worth £100 per annum, one £75, two £60, two £52 10s, one £50, two £45, one £30, two £27, one £21.

73. Quoted in Stephen, Barbara, Girton College, 1869-1932 (Cambridge, 1933), p. 235Google Scholar.

74. “The style of dress here is certainly not elegant,” a new Newnham student wrote in 1885. Glendinning, Victoria, A Suppressed Cry, Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter (London, 1969) p. 73Google Scholar.

“I see in memory spectacles, cropped but otherwise undressed hair, stiff stand-up linen collars and inconspicuous dress as characteristic of many [students],” an Oxford resident recalled. Fletcher, Margaret, O Call Back Yesterday (Oxford, 1939), p. 76Google Scholar.

75. Maynard, Constance L. in her memoir, Between College Terms (London, 1910), p. 192Google Scholar, described a typical day at Girton College in the 1870s.

76. Bryce, V, 186, 191Google Scholar.

77. Maynard, , Between Terms, p. 181Google Scholar; Stephen, , Emily Davies, p. 226Google Scholar. Miss Maynard entered Girton without intending to teach but then taught at St. Leonard's School and later became Principal of Westfield College.

78. Turner, Ralph H., “Modes of Social Ascent through Education. Sponsored and Contest Mobility,” Bendix, Reinhard and Lipset, Seymour Martin (eds.), Class, Status, and Power, Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1966), pp. 449–58Google Scholar.

79. There was the case of Miss Benton, for example, Headmistress of the South Hampstead High School, remembered for having no memory for names (a most acceptable, even stereotypical eccentricity in a high-minded scholar) and her odd style of dress. Apparently, she invariably wore a well-cut coat and skirt, a plain shirt with a stiff collar and a tie, and a Homburg hat. The effect is said to have been “certainly individual and rather masculine.” Article by Barber, M. M. in the Girls' Public Day School TrustNewsletter (1956), p. 27Google Scholar. While doubtless mildly remarkable, her dress seems but an exaggerated version of the plain styles affected by many women college students, and her appearance was surely not disturbing to the values of an academic community in the way that a bejewelled, bedizened headmistress erring in the opposite direction would have been.

80. The details are related in her autobiography, Retrospect.

81. Ibid., pp. 36-37.

82. The Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and Ireland. Constitution & Objects of the Guild, together with a Report of the General Meeting, held … on Monday, April Uth, 1893, p. 8.

83. London Association of Schoolmistresses, Minutes, I, 31 May 1870Google Scholar.

84. Association of Head Mistresses, Minutes of Annual Conferences, I, 22 Dec. 1874, 5Google Scholar.

85. London Association of Schoolmistresses, Minutes, I, 12 Dec. 1873Google Scholar.

86. Association of Head Mistresses, Minutes of Annual Conferences, I, 4 Feb. 1876, 21Google Scholar.

87. Dorothea Beale, for instance, related how very carefully she went about introducing curricular reforms at Cheltenham so as not to alienate too many parents in “Girls' Schools Past and Present,” Nineteenth Century, XXIII, (1888), 541–54, 547Google Scholar.

88. Information about the curricula in some girls' public schools is given in Bryce, IX Appendix, 416-23; VI, Appendix D, 207.

89. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, esp. Ch. 1, “Sweetness and Light,” for his concept of culture.

90. Beale, , Work and Play, p. 2Google Scholar.

91. Ibid., p. 3.

92. Quoted in Paul, , Mrs. Woodhouse, p. 29Google Scholar.

93. A study of the social origins of students in nine girls' public schools indicated that these schools, at least, catered primarily to the upper middle class, especially to professional people, in the 19th century. Pedersen, “Reform”, Ch. IX.

94. Toplis, Grace (ed.), Leaves from the Notebooks of Frances M. Buss (London, 1896), p. 122Google Scholar.

95. Dove, Jane Frances, “Cultivation of the Body,” in Work and Play, Beale, et al., pp. 400–01Google Scholar.

96. Quoted in Raikes, , Dorothea Beale, p. 256Google Scholar.

97. Soulsby, Lucy H. M., The Religious Side of Secular Teaching (London, 1907), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

98. Soulsby, Lucy H. M., “The Moral Side of Education,” in Work and Play, Beale, et al., p. 386Google Scholar.

99. Even early headmistresses who initially opposed applying a competitive principle in their schools gradually came round. Raikes noted that Miss Beale at first opposed entering students for competitive examinations. (Dorothea Beale, p. 147.) However, Cheltenham girls were soon being prepared for examinations, and Miss Beale pointed with pride to their successes in her History of Cheltenham, pp. 44, 102-04. Also see James, , Alice Ottley, p. 95Google Scholar.

100. For instance, it was reported to the Bryce Commission that headmistresses sometimes combined with girls to induce reluctant parents to permit their daughters to go on to university. Bryce, VI, 298Google Scholar.

101. For example, Jane Beggs (Head of Tottenham High School) served on the Tottenham District Council; Ethel Conder (Head of Milton Mount College) was a Committee Member of the Gravesend Borough Council; while Ethel Gavin (Head of Shrewsbury, then Notting Hill, then Wimbledon High School), Edith Hastings (Head of Nottingham, then Wimbledon High School), and Alice Woods (Head of the Junior Division of Clifton High School, then Principal of the Maria Grey Training College) all served on local education authorities.

102. Miss Buss's taste for gubernatorial activities seems to have been almost insatiable. She sat on the governing bodies of at least thirteen institutions in addition to being a Governor of the two schools she founded. Ridley, , Frances Mary Buss, p. 288Google Scholar.

103. For instance, Miss Conder worked for the Canning Town Women's Settlement; Isabel Bain (Head of the Carlisle High School) later became Inspectress of Schools in Madras, probably after her marriage to James Brander.

104. Miss Beale and Miss Soulsby, for example, wrote numbers of educational tracts, some of which have been cited above, while Helena Powell (Head of the Leeds High School, then Principal first of the Cambridge Training College, then of St. Mary's College) wrote history books.

105. Although the mistresses of girls' schools had not traditionally been called “headmistresses,” the Association of Head Mistresses chose the title because it was the feminine analogue of “headmaster.” Ridley, , Frances Mary Buss, p. 246Google Scholar.

As the academic and clerical worlds began partially to sort themselves out in the latter half of the 19th century, dons and public school masters (who could no longer automatically rely as a group on a clerical connection to define the prestige and character of their office) were themselves casting about for a new professional identity. See Rothblatt, Revolution, esp. Ch's. 6 and 7.

106. Harold Perkin's construct of a professional middle class ideal seems to tie in well with the values espoused by the public school heads. See his section on “The Forgotten Middle Class” in The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880 (Toronto, 1972), pp. 252–70Google Scholar.

107. Capitalizing on an expanded market for their services, as urbanization and rising living standards extended their potential clientele, modern professional groups typically have attempted to free themselves from the bonds of personal dependency which in pre-industrial times tied the professional (or pre-professional) practitioner to his patron, but which in an age which valued independence were felt to be irksome and demeaning. Ibid., 254-55; Elliott, , Sociology, pp. 24, 94–95Google Scholar. Elliott views the autonomy accorded the professional practitioner as the distinguishing feature of modern professional practice.

108. Pedersen, “Reforms,” Ch's. III and IX.