Deirdre Raftery

Gender Balance/Gender Bias: issues in education research

‘Gender Balance/Gender Bias’ is the theme of this special edition of Gender and Education. It arises from the 2007 conference of the Gender and Education Association, held in Trinity College, Dublin and hosted by the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University College Dublin and the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College. The conference was attended by almost 200 delegates from 25 different countries, and 144 papers were presented over three days. The conference included strands on:

Social Change and Education in Ireland, Scotland and Wales: Historiography on Nineteenth‐century Schooling

This paper presents a summary and analysis of historiography on social change and education in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, with particular reference to nineteenth‐century schooling. The nineteenth century is identified as the period during which Ireland, Scotland and Wales developed distinctive systems of schooling that reflected not only their relationship to Westminster but also significant contemporaneous economic and social change. This paper identifies research which has treated this period, offering brief analytical commentaries on some key works. Thereafter, the paper provides a discussion of developments in educational historiography in Ireland, Scotland and Wales and points to lacunae in research. The aim of the paper is to create the basis for comparative work, and to identify areas that demand attention. The comprehensive set of references is therefore a product of this paper, and not a by‐product as is often the case with endnotes to academic papers. 1 1 Scholars are referred to in this paper by their full names, excepting in a few instances where scholars write using initials and surname.

Religions and the history of education: a historiography

This article provides a study of scholarship on religions and education, published over the past forty years, in History of Education. It also includes reference to other publications, attempting a thematic analysis that scrutinises work on missionaries, churchmen, convents, charitable societies, denominations and education. Methodologies and sources are also examined, and areas for further research are identified.

Mapping the Terrain of Female Education in Ireland, 1830-1910.

Education for Irish women and girls developed significantly in the period 1830–1910. During this time, formal state‐funded education systems were established in Ireland by the British government. Some of these systems included females from their inception and some attempted to exclude girls and women. This article charts the opening up of formal schooling and university to Irish girls and women, examining the points at which they were excluded, the alternative educational provision developed by Protestant women and Catholic religious, and the means whereby the case for female education was successfully made. Moving from the public/private paradigm which has dominated much of the discussion around womens education for the period in question, the article focuses on what was occurring in some political and social institutions of the period and identifies womens agency and autonomy within such institutions. Through ‘mapping’ this ground, the article notes womens success in gaining access to institutions previously dominated by men, and highlights areas that require sustained scrutiny by scholars.

The "Mission" of Nuns in Female Education in Ireland, c.1850-1950.

This article provides a review and critique of scholarship on female education in Ireland, arguing that researchers have provided a consensual narrative in which women religious (nuns) played a central role in providing academic education to girls and higher education to women. The tendency has been to claim the activities of women religious as part of the impetus that drove the organised women’s movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that brought about a “revolution” in female education. But there remains a need to stand back from this decidedly secular “cause and effect” narrative, and turn a critical eye on the urge which congregations themselves identified as central to their mission in education. This is a revisionist perspective, qualifying and modifying claims made elsewhere by this author, and challenging the way in which the work of nuns in education has been interpreted as a part of the female education “revolution”. Recognising the spiritual impulse within religious orders that found expression in acts of duty, vocation and mission, the article concludes that convent education had purposes that were quite distinct from those prescribed by official “state” education programmes and examination systems, and that these purposes demand greater scrutiny in order to provide a more balanced understanding of female education in Ireland.

Rebels with a cause: obedience, resistance and convent life, 1800–1940

This article examines the biographies and personal records of nineteenth-century Catholic nuns who worked in education, with a view to determining how they reconciled their individuality with the demands of religious life. Their resistance to rules, and the ways in which they wrestled with the vow of obedience, is examined. The roles of the Novice Mistress and the Superior in teaching and managing the members of their religious communities are explored, with particular reference to three orders of women religious.

Teaching Sisters and transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long nineteenth century

This article examines the management of the education enterprise of teaching Sisters, with reference to their transnational networking. The article suggests that orders of women religious were the first all-female transnational networks, engaged constantly in work that was characterised by ‘movement, ebb and circulation’. The mobility of teaching Sisters is framed within a discussion of three interconnected features of their global networking: the management of transnational recruitment networks, the advantageous use of international travel networks, and the movement of resources around the world. The article draws on sources from convent archives in Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA that throw light on the transnational networking of women religious around the world.

'Je suis d'aucune Nation': the recruitment and identity of Irish women religious in the international mission field, c. 1840-1940

This article examines the lives of Irish-born women religious around the world in the period 1840–1940. Ireland sent thousands of nuns overseas as teachers and missionaries, to work in schools, orphanages and hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe. Looking at contemporaneous views of missionary work, recruitment to religious life and the social conditions for Irish women during and after the years of the Great Famine, the article determines some of the attractions of religious life for Irish women, and the expression of their Irish identity to be found in convents internationally. The article concludes with comments on the bifurcated identity of Irish women religious who, though first and foremost members of particular religious orders, were often identified by others as “Irish Nuns”.

Forty years of History of Education, 1972–2011

This special issue reflects on the first 40 years of History of Education with articles by four past editors, the founding editor of the successful ‘Sources and Interpretations’ strand and the two current editors. Though now 40, the journal is a younger sibling of Paedagogica Historica and the USA’s History of Education Quarterly (both founded in 1961), the History of Education Society Bulletin and the Journal of Educational Administration and History (both founded in 1968), but older than the French and Canadian journals, respectively Histoire de l’Éducation and Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’Histoire de l’Éducation (founded in 1978 and 1988). Interestingly, History of Education is an exact contemporary of the Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society journal, History of Education Review, which recently marked the beginning of its 40th year by transferring to a new publisher and publicly renewing its scholarly mission. In discussion with the editorial board, a more celebratory issue than the one we introduce here was briefly considered, but rejected. Modestly, we do take this opportunity to express huge satisfaction in the decision, communicated in late 2009, to admit the journal to the prestigious Thomson Reuters Social Science Citations Index and in the first impact factor of 0.280, awarded in the summer of 2011. There is so much more, too, that might be celebrated: for example contributions by two of today’s most prominent UK media-friendly historians, Simon Schama and Lisa Jardine, were published in the infancy years of History of Education, and some key journal articles considered to be of seminal importance, either in respect of content or methodology, have been re-published in edited volumes by two former editors and contributors to this special issue. But now that, one suspects, most readers of the journal have electronic access to every back issue, going right back to 1972, the case for a ‘greatest hits’ anthology issue to mark 40 years of the journal seemed questionable. We also felt that contributors to this special issue should be liberated from any requirement to dwell unduly upon scholarship trends and patterns occurring during their own periods of editorship. So, what we have sought are critical thematic analyses of topics linked to some of the authors’ particular research

The Opening of Higher Education to Women in Nineteenth Century England: ‘Unexpected Revolution’ or Inevitable Change?

The nineteenth century movement to open higher education to women in England has been the subject of much scholarship in the last two decades. Studies of individual colleges have added to the corpus of research on how women were provided with formal higher education at this time. However, scholars offer differing theories as to why radical changes in the higher education of women took place when they did. This paper offers a synthesis of these various theories, and challenges the general perception that the opening of higher education to women was an ‘unexpected revolution’ (Bryant, 1987).