This article focuses on the occupational emancipation of women in Finland and examines the professional careers of women who graduated with a matriculation examination from three upper secondary girls' schools during the period of the 1890s to the 1910s. One of the schools was for Finnish-speaking girls, and two of the schools were for…

As educational opportunities for women and girls expanded in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, science and domestic subjects were increasingly linked. This article draws upon research from the history of education and women's history to examine how schools contributed to contemporary constructions of housework. It takes two case studies: the…

In 1893, Annie Besant touched the shores of India as a leader of the Theosophical Society. In India, Besant is widely known for her involvement in the Home Rule Movement and as president of the Indian National Congress, the chief political organisation in the Indian freedom struggle. Before entering into the political arena of the country, Besant…

This article concentrates on visual sources relating to secondary education, and asks how a collection of photographs can be understood and interpreted as part of the institutional and collective memory of one Finnish girls' school. The photographs were published in the anniversary books of the school. They construct an entirety, where public…

This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three…

Central to the assembling of the New South Wales public education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the setting of borders and boundaries between different categories of students. These boundaries were particularly decisive in the institution of the public high school, where entry and progress were regulated by tests…

This article develops a comparative analysis of lay boarding schools for girls in France and England in the first part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that the character of school life in the two countries differed markedly. Contemporary observers such as Matthew Arnold, Henry Montucci and Jacques Demogeot visited boys' schools on either…