Jane McDermid

School board women and active citizenship in Scotland, 1873–1919

Although the number of women who served on Scotland’s school boards (1873–1918) was not large, they made the case for female representation on public bodies both through their electoral campaigns and their record of office. Many were simultaneously active on parish and town councils and in feminist causes, with a few in the labour movement from the 1890s. Some were honoured for their work by being made Fellows of the Educational Institute of Scotland which, though opposed to school boards, recognised that these women not only made important contributions to local politics but cumulatively, and in a few instances personally, had an impact on Scotland as a whole. A significant number were members for between three and seven terms (nine to 21 years) and some continued to stand for election in the 1920s when educational authorities replaced school boards, supported first by the Association for Promoting Lady Candidates at School Board and Parochial Elections, and subsequently by women citizens’ associations. School board women propounded a civic maternalism through their advocacy of social reforms, but working across the committee structures enabled them to help shape policy more generally. Their service was local but the wider aim was to secure representation of women in national and indeed imperial affairs. Their strategy of putting forward a ‘ladies’ platform’ in elections may have reinforced traditional notions of women’s place but, through their campaigns for and service on school boards, these women set an example of active citizenship.

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.

What's in a name?: The Scottish Women's Hospitals in the First World War

The Scottish Womens Hospitals was not the only, or first, all-woman wartime medical organization, but it was the largest and most famous, working in France, Belgium, Serbia, Romania and Russia. It was founded, supported and run by feminists, notably Dr. Elsie Inglis, a leading suffragist. This article examines the writings of women who both served in the SWH and supported it and focuses on the debates surrounding its identity as a Scottish organization. It addresses issues of nationality, gender and social class, and considers the womens attitudes towards race, empire and war.

No Longer Curiously Rare but Only Just within Bounds: women in Scottish history

This article examines the development of womens history in Scotland since the first conference of the International Federation for Research in Womens History (1989). The title is taken from a 1997 article in Scottish Affairs (issue 18), in which Esther Breitenbach asked whether the ‘curiously rare’ women in Scottish history was a case of the ‘suppression of the female in the construction of national identity’. Thus, this study focuses on key themes in the modern period of that history, notably education, the military, politics, labour, religion and literature. It concludes that while the place of women in Scottish history has indeed been asserted since 1989, and different questions are now being asked of the source material, women are still only slowly being integrated into mainstream studies.

Place the Book in Their Hands: Grace Paterson's Contribution to the Health and Welfare Policies of the School Board of Glasgow, 1885-1906.

This article focuses on the role of Grace Paterson (1843–1925) in education, health and social welfare in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Glasgow. Integral to her efforts to improve the health of the citys poor was her emphasis on the need to raise the standards of the domestic education of working‐class girls and women, both in the Board schools (she was one of the first women elected to the Glasgow School Board in 1885) and through the establishment of the Glasgow School of Cookery a decade earlier. Paterson did not herself teach, instead organizing and directing the work of others, and her contribution to education and health was within the expectations of service expected of middle‐class women. Nevertheless, she was a firm believer in womens capacity both for work and for representation on public bodies, and she was determined not only to influence welfare policy but to make it.

Gender, national identity and the royal (Argyll) commission of inquiry into Scottish education (1864-1867)

Concern over the state of education in Scotland saw the Argyll Commission set up in 1864. Its reports revealed differences in the experience of schooling throughout Scotland as well as resistance to Anglicisation. Nevertheless, the influence of English attitudes is reflected throughout the reports. So too are the themes of social control and the interaction of class, gender and nationality. The Commission was not primarily concerned with gender issues, but it insisted that the ‘democratic’ tradition, which favoured the talented poor boy, should be safeguarded, while it was clear that the position of women in Scottish education would be profoundly affected by its outcome. The hope was that increased employment of schoolmistresses would not result in loss of the schoolmaster’s professional status. Rather, the former were to be enlisted in defence of the national education tradition against the encroachment of inferior English policies.

Girls at School in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

This chapter focuses on the formal education of girls in Ireland, both working and middle class, in the century between the 1801 Act of Union and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Historians such as Mary Cullen, Susan Parkes and Deirdre Raftery have established that gender—as a social and cultural determinant of what, where, why and how girls were educated—was a key influence on female education in Ireland. Their work has also revealed that, while gender was not the only, or always the primary, factor affecting girls’ education, it was almost always in the mix with religion, politics, social class, and family values and needs.

Women at Work, 1860–1939: How Different Industries Shaped Women's Experiences

the Worsted Acts, nor is the data sufficient enough to support any significant analysis of long-term trends in either workplace crime or prosecutions. Without doubt, the data presented are extremely helpful and very interesting. However, the fact that nineteenthcentury manufacturers continued to use eighteenth-century laws for their own ends only partially explains the historical relationship between the law, criminality and industrial capitalism. Moreover, as with almost all similar nineteenth-century data, the relationship between trends in observed prosecutions and the ‘real’ trends in workplace pilfering and theft is often a tenuous one at best. The authors are on much firmer ground when they discuss the complicated nature of the administration of justice and the ad hoc character of the relationship between public and private police forces during this period. Much like the work on the master-andservant laws analysed by Christopher Frank, Godfrey and Cox similarly observe both the resistance to the implementation of the law that characterized some justices of the peace as well as the confusion that often existed among them as to the law’s meaning and interpretation. In this regard, perhaps the authors’ most interesting contribution is their account of the evolving relationship between the Worsted Committee’s private inspectors and the local police forces. Not surprisingly, the two appear to have developed a rather cosy relationship, the former restricting their efforts to the factories and workshops while the latter controlled the streets and other public spaces. Naturally, some degree of co-ordination between the two was necessary since the inspectors relied upon constables and later the police to arrest alleged pilferers. Moreover, many manufacturers were active on local watch committees, such as in Bradford, where they also helped to oversee the introduction of the borough police. Given the limited time-span of the statistical data offered, the success or failure of the manufacturers’ ‘war on appropriation’ remains in question. That they expended a great amount of energy and effort to combat the perceived problem iswithout doubt. The factory system obviously facilitated a much greater degree of supervision and surveillance of the production process. Yet the employers’ ‘war’ began long before these developments, andwe are missing critical comparative data on prosecutions during the first seventy years of the WorstedCommittee’s existence.Thus,while this bookhas a great deal to offer, questions still remain about the historical relationship between private policing and industrial capitalism.

The works of Mrs. Trimmer (1741-1810)

This volume is a painstaking study of the works of Sarah Trimmer which seeks to assess her writings within the context in which she lived rather than refracted through the criticisms of later, especially twentieth-century, critics. In particular, it aims to defend Trimmer from Marxist and feminist dismissals of her as a didactic and dyed in the wool anti-egalitarian who never seemed to question her own beliefs. Pauline Heath argues that Trimmer’s work and influence were considerably more subtle than that. It is not just that Trimmer has been misrepresented, but that her works, in their various editions, are an under-used historical source. Trimmer was a prolific author of school readers, spelling books, and stories for children as well as abridgements from the Bible, guides for teachers, lesson plans, visual aids, and magazines aimed at adults. Moreover, she was a brave writer, prepared to argue her case for educating the poor in the face of contemporary critics who equated ‘too much’ learning with subversion. Sarah Trimmer was indeed a conservative woman who upheld the established order. Education was not intended to raise the poor or women above their status in life, but rather to fit them for it. Yet she did not simply lump all the poor together: she held that there should be different kinds of education (Sunday schools, charity, schools, school of industry) according to degree of poverty. She wrote mainly for children (both of the poor and of the middle class) and believed that the role of women was to reconcile society. A firm believer in a wife’s duty of obedience to her husband, Trimmer also held that Christianity, and particularly the Established Church, exalted women. She raised the status of mothers by insisting on their crucial role as first educator of their children, seeing the domestic sphere as a classroom, but she also called on single women to become the mothers of the poor: Trimmer viewed charity as a female profession. She herself was active from the 1780s in establishing and running Sunday schools and schools of industry in her home town of Brentford, Middlesex, and working with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mother of 12, Trimmer built on her experience of two decades in the home classroom to offer practical advice for teachers (both amateur and professional), as well as stories for children which would appeal to their (guided) imagination as well as provide them with valuable moral lessons. She did not write works of theory, though Heath points to resemblances between her ideas on education and those of, for example, Locke, Rousseau, Fénelon and Madame de Genlis. To later readers, there is a distinct trace of didacticism in Trimmer’s tales for the edification of the poor, and indeed of middle-class girls; but, as Heath points out, that did not mean learning for Trimmer should be a grind. Rather, it was to be a pleasure. Trimmer believed that children needed to understand what they were taught, and not simply learn by rote. Hence History of Education Vol. 40, No. 4, July 2011, 543–556

Mariya Spiridonova: Russian Martyr and British Heroine? The Portrayal of a Russian Female Terrorist in the British Press

In his biographical notes to The Russian Revolution 1917–21, James D. White records that Mariya Aleksandrovna Spiridonova (1884–1941) attempted to assassinate General Luzhenovskii in 1906 as reprisal for his brutal suppression of local peasant disturbances in Tambov.1 Anna Geifman suggests that this assassination is particularly noteworthy due to the fact that it was widely publicised and received a great deal of attention both inside Russia itself and abroad, mainly because Spiridonova was reportedly beaten by the general’s guards, then tortured and sexually assaulted during interrogation.2 Indeed, there was what might be described as a lurid press campaign in support of Spiridonova which influenced western public opinion to see her as a martyr rather than a terrorist, as a victim rather than an assassin. Spiridonova came to epitomise the Russian female revolutionary, as reflected in Jaakoff Prelooker’s 1908 publication Heroes and Heroines of Russia, and 90 years later, in Margaret Maxwell’s Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom.3 As a British reviewer of Prelooker’s book wrote, ‘whilst Russian women give not only themselves, but their daughters to the holy war (does not Maria Spiridonova’s mother call herself “the proudest mother in Russia”?) it must triumph’.4