Review of female education Jane Robinson: Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education
Smug, with no good reason, June 28, 2010
This is Britain-only (apart from a few asides on US women's colleges) and university only—the subtitle ('.. First Women to Fight for an Education') is misleading. There's a chronological table which incidentally dates Oxford from post-Norman Conquest. As other commentators have stated, it's anecdotal—the author contacted elderly women and interviewed them. The result is attractive enough and makes a nostalgic impression. Worth mentioning is that the academic studies are barely referred to—if you want to know what work these women actually did, you'll be disappointed—but this of course is a feature of very many biographies with Oxbridge and redbrick as background.
BUT
[1] The hermetic, isolated nature of university education is unconsciously emphasised—the author (a graduate in—of course—English) isn't even aware of this. For example (p. 176) 'Nineteen-eighteen was a momentous year for several reasons. ... the first dance to which Girtonians could invite male partners was held. ... permission to smoke in their own rooms was granted to lady students.'
[2] The underlying social conditions are similarly skated over ... the main period she deals with (19th and 20th centuries) was on the whole characterised by increasing wealth. Robinson seems to present it purely as a battle against reactionary males. She has little idea of the way token education can be used to mop up new wealth.
[3] It follows, I suppose, that the single most important part of this book, the essential few chapters, are missing. We have female new blood trickling, then flowing, into education. Where are the tremendous exciting achievements of educated women? What did they do? What new breakthroughs, and corrections of errors, were made by these women? --- Unfortunately, to ask these questions is to answer them. Despite the pother about education, there are few if any contributions by women to science, technology, or applied science—such as medicine; nor in any sort of critical activity, from history to criminology, from psychology to studies of religion. Most went in for conventional careers, in many cases of course teaching or administering teaching.
If you think women vicars are a mark of great social progress, you'll like this book rather better than those who think there's little value in increasing the numbers of rather parasitic and uncreative retailers of feeble ideas.