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Home and Away: A Schoolmistress in Lowland Scotland and Colonial Australia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jane McDermid
Jane McDermid*
Affiliation:
Southampton University, UK, with research interests in British and Russian women's history in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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Extract

Writing in this journal in 1993, Marjorie Theobald examined the history of middle-class women's education in late-eighteenth-century Britain and its transference and adaptation to colonial Australia in the nineteenth century. She questioned both the British historical perception that before the middle of the nineteenth century middle-class parents showed little, if any, interest in their daughters' education, and the Australian assumption that the transplantation of the private female academy (or seminary) was simply a reflection of the scramble for respectability by a small middle class scattered among a convict society. Theobald found that, as in Britain by the early 1800s, these schools—all private and run for profit by the wives and daughters of clergy and other professional men—shared a remarkably similar curriculum, generally advertised as “An English education with the usual accomplishments.” This was not, she argued, an elementary education, but rather was rooted in the liberal arts tradition and had been influenced by the search for stability within a rapidly industrializing Britain. The daughters of the British middle classes were to be taught how to deploy their learning discreedy, to ensure that it was at the service of their domestic role and civilizing influence.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 28 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Theobald, Marjorie, “Boundaries, Bridges, and the History of Education: An Australian Response to Maxine Schwarz Seller,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1993): 497–510. Convict transportation to eastern Australia ended in 1852, by which time the six colonies had received a certain degree of political autonomy; transportation to western Australia ended in 1867. See Catriona Elder, “Immigration History,” in Australia's History: themes and debates, ed. Lyons, Martyn and Russell, Penny, 98–115 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005).Google Scholar

2 Theobald, Marjorie R., “The Accomplished Woman and the Propriety of Intellect: A New Look at Women's Education in Britain and Australia, 1800–1850,” History of Education 17, no. 1 (1988): 21–35. See also McDermid, Jane, “Conservative Feminism and Female Education in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 18, no. 4 (1989): 309–22.Google Scholar

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4 Papers of the Brown family, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Acc. 12100/1–15 (15 boxes), hereafter cited as NLS, Acc. 12100, box number. When last consulted (July 2006), the papers had not been catalogued. The archive contains a typewritten transcript and summary of events which is accurate. All quotations are taken from the original letters, which are in good condition and, for the most part, legible. While the original letters are now held in Edinburgh, they were filmed (consisting of six reels) as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project by the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the State Library of New South Wales, call number NLA, Mfm M858–863.Google Scholar

5 The biographical sketch is based on the typed chronology and summary of the letters, headed “Family History and Notes for the Brown-Hamilton Papers,” NLS, Acc. 12100, box 1.Google Scholar

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