19th Century Girls Vs Boys Schooling

[sheilajim]

Hi All

My mother also thought that higher education was wasted on girls, unless you wanted to be a doctor or something. My mother thought that all the education that you needed, was to learn how to read, write, and do a little arithmetic. This is all that she ever learned, it seemed.

When I was growing up, there didn't seem to be very many opportunities for girls.
The only positions that I was aware of at the time, were to be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or "housewife". None of which appealed to me.
There are much more opportunities today, not just for girls, but for boys as well.

As far as I am concerned, education is not just job training. I think the most important thing about education, is to be able to make informed decisions, about, for example: politics, science and life in general.

Reading between the lines, of my ancestors, I think that the boys must have had a little more education than the girls. If my mother had such ideas in the latter part of the 20th century, I can just imagine what the attitudes were like a century or more earlier.

Regards

Sheila

PS. The GtGrandmother who couldn't write. Her parents were Irish.
The GtGtGrandmother who couldn't write had an Northern Irish father, but the family was Protestant, Presbyterian and Free Kirk

[StewL]

Just to add my thruppence to this topic. My late mother was brilliant at school (english, maths sciences) but when she turned 16? in the 1930's off to the cotton mills with her sisters.

In her later life she developed a high level of knowledge about plants and plant biology, and not your usual home gardner level either

[emanday]

Just to add my thruppence to this topic. My late mother was brilliant at school (english, maths sciences) but when she turned 16? in the 1930's off to the cotton mills with her sisters.

In her later life she developed a high level of knowledge about plants and plant biology, and not your usual home gardner level either

Hi Stewie, If she was as old as 16 when she went to the cotton mill, then she must have been allowed to stay longer at school. When I left in 1963, the leaving age was 15 and I know my father was 14 when he started work in 1930's.

[scml]

I think education depended a lot of the life style of the family. My grandmother born in 1902 had very little education, as her family had a cane farm and the boys were made to work the farm (cutting cane by hand back then) and the girls worked in the house. They had a very strict father who ruled the home, but there was a lot of work to be done. It didn't stop my grandmother from teaching herself to read and write and she had a very lovely copy book style of writing.

[emanday]

Right enough, Sandy, my grandmother was born in 1898. Her father was an Iron Foundry Warehouseman and, although she did leave school quite young, he did oversee their education quite strictly.

She told us that his standards were a lot higher than the school's and, as a result, her handwriting could only be described as calligraphic, even when she was quite old. You could place a ruler under it and it never deviated from the straight. Even her shopping lists were beautiful !

[StewL]

Hello Mary

You could be right about leaving school at 15 but then that age of 16 seems to have stuck in ma heid. But of course there could be many reasons for that, some of them related to age?? or to other causes of cerebral degeneration

[emanday]

The other possibility is that, if she was clever enough, she might have qualified for some kind of scholarship or "bursary".

These were very often funded by a "worthy" who had gone to the same school to benefit "a pupil showing promise".