Teachers at primary school level are I think also assumed female, but not to the extent that we've required extra language to indicate a man.
The historical background to this, in Scotland (although I assume elsewhere too) was that teaching infants aged 5/6 was believed to be best suited to women (as per educationalist David Stow c1840).
As more women entered the teaching profession the age at which the switch to male teachers rose. However, what made primary school teachers almost exclusively female was economic. State school teachers were paid from the rates; ratepayers wanted value for money; female teachers were cheaper to employ as they were paid less. But it was believed that children* needed a male influence and this was achieved by ring fencing the wellpaid head teacher role for men. One headmaster, or possibly a headmaster and male deputy headmaster was all that was needed to cast his / their beneficial male influence over an entire school. A male head and an all or mostly female teaching staff was the model in Scotland for state schools from around the time of the Boer War onwards.
*there was concern around the start of the C20th about the number of working class boys being raised in what were effectively single-mother households. Many of these were families in which the father had gone to work abroad (South African railways / Australian engineering projects / American stone mines) and were remitting money home. It made economic sense for the individual families, but meant that there were large numbers of boys growing up in households headed de facto by women.
So I don't think there has been a need for a name for male primary teachers, because they were not unusual until the C20th.
Teachers at primary school level are I think also assumed female, but not to the extent that we've required extra language to indicate a man.
The historical background to this, in Scotland (although I assume elsewhere too) was that teaching infants aged 5/6 was believed to be best suited to women (as per educationalist David Stow c1840).
As more women entered the teaching profession the age at which the switch to male teachers rose. However, what made primary school teachers almost exclusively female was economic. State school teachers were paid from the rates; ratepayers wanted value for money; female teachers were cheaper to employ as they were paid less. But it was believed that children* needed a male influence and this was achieved by ring fencing the wellpaid head teacher role for men. One headmaster, or possibly a headmaster and male deputy headmaster was all that was needed to cast his / their beneficial male influence over an entire school. A male head and an all or mostly female teaching staff was the model in Scotland for state schools from around the time of the Boer War onwards.
*there was concern around the start of the C20th about the number of working class boys being raised in what were effectively single-mother households. Many of these were families in which the father had gone to work abroad (South African railways / Australian engineering projects / American stone mines) and were remitting money home. It made economic sense for the individual families, but meant that there were large numbers of boys growing up in households headed de facto by women.
So I don't think there has been a need for a name for male primary teachers, because they were not unusual until the C20th.
My mother, a primary school head, was convinced that we wouldn’t have equality until there was affirmative action from the government to ensure 50% of primary school teachers and nurses were men.
I’m not totally convinced she’d thought that through in terms of how it would work, and she’s no longer with us to ask, but she was entirely serious.
That’s odd because both professions used to be primarily men - which means there must have been a point in the late 19th century and early 20th century when that was true - and it didn’t have that effect.
The tipping point between male majority and female majority teachers happened in the 1870s in Scottish State schools (i.e. the majority of Scottish schools.) I don't know, but would guess that there were a lot of female teachers in the Roman Catholic schools as I know many were staffed from teaching orders of nuns. Fee paying schools retained a male majority longer. Much longer, I think, probably well into the C20th.
The civil service burgeoned during the second half of the C19th. Both entry to Teacher Training Schools and to the Civil Service were by competitive exam. It meant that men for whom teaching would have been the obvious career path had alternative careers opening up for them in the civil service. There were a few female careers in the civil service, but not enough to make a dent in the number of applicants for teacher training.
From the 1870s on, Scottish state schools in the cities became fewer and larger. Whereas before men could expect to become head teacher of a school with a couple of hundred pupils, employing at most half-a-dozen teachers (including pupil teachers), by the age of thirty, in the new larger schools they could expect to become Second Master (deputy head) by thirty, but not Headmaster till nearer 40. So this helped make teaching a less attractive career compared to the civil service.
So there was a process by which fewer men were going to Teacher Training College and this created more vacancies for women.
Absolutely. It is modern (current) thinking that Lewis is critiquing - in many ways, he was looking ahead to today and writing about what he saw. Given his attitude to existentialism and subjectivism, it's hard to see him adopting a significantly different position.
Absolutely!
To use his own terms: Lewis is not writing about the education of schoolchildren, he is writing about the education of schoolboys. He has nothing to say about the education of schoolgirls - not so much because he doesn't think it's important, but because it just isn't relevant to how he thinks about the argument he's making.
I don't know what the education of schoolgirls was like back then, or if the messages about objective morality and such were different. But I think the issues of existentialism, subjectivism, and also scientism he writes about are at least very similar to what we're dealing with now, regardless of the genders of students in schools. Because of that, I genuinely am not seeing how this relates: "Essentially, Lewis uses gendered language because his view of the world is gendered. So while many of his criticisms still seem pertinent, I don't think we can rewrite that aspect of his argument and still be left with the same argument - it seems to be too deeply embedded." How do you mean here?
Lewis was very much a man* of his time, and his expectations of education from which he launches his arguments in The Abolition of Man are bound up with the common views relating to both gender and class. He was writing before the post-war partial opening up of schools, and well in advance of the introduction of comprehensive education in the mid 60s. He was writing in a society where compulsory education to 14 was still relatively new, which for most children barely exceeded teaching basic literacy and numeracy with a bit of history thrown in. Post-14 education was almost entirely restricted to the children of parents who could afford it, and so the children he was concerned about being exposed to subjectivism etc mostly excluded girls and working class boys (who were at that age working). For someone with such a sharp mind, he seems to have had a big blind spot in relation to social views on gender and class that he appears to have simply accepted without question.
If Lewis were alive today and writing a version of The Abolition of Man he'd certainly start from a different point (because the particular text book he was criticising is no longer in use, and the whole education system has been radically reformed to the point of being practically unrecognisable to anyone from 100 years ago). He'd publish using a different title and wouldn't use gendered language, because if he didn't then his arguments would be lost in the language. Whether the fundamental arguments would be different it's difficult to know, but the same arguments could be easily made without the use of gendered language.
* and, I'm deliberately using that term, because it does encompass the unquestioned patriarchalism that's present in much of his writing.
<snip>
I’m confused. Are you saying that female education at the time had fewer of the problems Lewis talks about in Abolition of Man? <snip>
I think CSL simply didn’t have girls and women and their education in mind at all. He wasn’t ignoring it as such. He simply had a blind spot about it. If asked directly he might have given attention to it and addressed it, and his criticisms might have been the same, or he might have said, ‘Yes, of course. The same applies to girls’ education.’ But it is simply unaddressed.
<snip>
I’m confused. Are you saying that female education at the time had fewer of the problems Lewis talks about in Abolition of Man? <snip>
I think CSL simply didn’t have girls and women and their education in mind at all. He wasn’t ignoring it as such. He simply had a blind spot about it. If asked directly he might have given attention to it and addressed it, and his criticisms might have been the same, or he might have said, ‘Yes, of course. The same applies to girls’ education.’ But it is simply unaddressed.
I’m not aware of there being different textbooks on the same subjects for girls and women back in those days. In any case, he’s using that textbook as a springboard/entry point for things which he (and others, including I) considers to have gone wrong with the world regarding the doctrine of objective value.
I think we can safely take it that, if asked, he would have given the same answer he did to the question of women’s friendships in The Four Loves. There he deliberately refused to say much about the subject at all as he was unqualified to talk about it, having no experience of it.
I think we can safely take it that, if asked, he would have given the same answer he did to the question of women’s friendships in The Four Loves. There he deliberately refused to say much about the subject at all as he was unqualified to talk about it, having no experience of it.
Famously, girls and boys didn’t take all the same subjects for a start - for along time they didn’t even attend the same schools as boys. Then in the Uk the 11 plus was rigged to have lower pass marks for boys to ensure that too many girls didn’t get into grammar school.
Famously, girls and boys didn’t take all the same subjects for a start - for along time they didn’t even attend the same schools as boys. Then in the Uk the 11 plus was rigged to have lower pass marks for boys to ensure that too many girls didn’t get into grammar school.
I could go on at length.
That rigging sounds horrible. Again, though, if they were using textbooks on the same subjects, were there different ones for boys and girls? (And, again, critically, in Abolition of Man, the textbook issue is a springboard for the larger issues he regarded as toxic in modern society, rather than just being focused on bad textbooks for schoolboys in the 20th-century UK.)
Theyndidnt necessarily get textbooks - but the big differences would have been between grammar and non grammar schools. Though we have historians on this site who’s would probably know more.
My point here is that most women’s default assumption would not be that girls got equal access to stuff in the early 20th century - because sexism tends to be more obvious to us than men.
Theyndidnt necessarily get textbooks - but the big differences would have been between grammar and non grammar schools. Though we have historians on this site who’s would probably know more.
My point here is that most women’s default assumption would not be that girls got equal access to stuff in the early 20th century - because sexism tends to be more obvious to us than men.
I know that girls and women didn't have as much access to stuff in the early 20th century; I have been assuming, however, that the stuff they did have access to, assuming textbooks were involved, would have been the same textbooks, if/when they were learning the same subjects as boys and men.
So does this mean female students got more of the same messages (rejecting, or even just taking for granted by assumption, that the doctrine of objective value does not exist) Lewis regards as toxic, or fewer, or...?
<snip>
I’m confused. Are you saying that female education at the time had fewer of the problems Lewis talks about in Abolition of Man? <snip>
I think CSL simply didn’t have girls and women and their education in mind at all. He wasn’t ignoring it as such. He simply had a blind spot about it. If asked directly he might have given attention to it and addressed it, and his criticisms might have been the same, or he might have said, ‘Yes, of course. The same applies to girls’ education.’ But it is simply unaddressed.
I’m not aware of there being different textbooks on the same subjects for girls and women back in those days. In any case, he’s using that textbook as a springboard/entry point for things which he (and others, including I) considers to have gone wrong with the world regarding the doctrine of objective value.
They needn't have separate textbooks if they are not taking the same courses.
<snip>
I’m confused. Are you saying that female education at the time had fewer of the problems Lewis talks about in Abolition of Man? <snip>
I think CSL simply didn’t have girls and women and their education in mind at all. He wasn’t ignoring it as such. He simply had a blind spot about it. If asked directly he might have given attention to it and addressed it, and his criticisms might have been the same, or he might have said, ‘Yes, of course. The same applies to girls’ education.’ But it is simply unaddressed.
I’m not aware of there being different textbooks on the same subjects for girls and women back in those days. In any case, he’s using that textbook as a springboard/entry point for things which he (and others, including I) considers to have gone wrong with the world regarding the doctrine of objective value.
They needn't have separate textbooks if they are not taking the same courses.
Agreed. (Hence “on the same subjects”—I don’t know how much overlap there was in any given case…)
Originally posted by Doublethink: Though we have historians on this site who’s would probably know more.
My PhD is in History of Education, but my area focusses on women in state education in Scotland. I can't speak authoritatively on middle class education in England!
I do know about the different pass marks required of girls and boys at the 11+ The theory was that, although at the age of 11 both boys and girls had spent exactly the same amount of time in education, the girls were effectively "older". In Roman times, the age of marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and this concept of an 11 year girl being "almost adult" whereas an 11 year old boy was not "almost adult" lingered on in various ways. Had the passmark for both girls and boys been the same at the 11+ girls would have outperformed boys, and as girls couldn't possibly be "better" than boys, this was explained by girls having the "advantage" of being closer to puberty. The idea was that this advantage would disappear once the boys "caught up" at age 14. Therefore it would be unfair to "penalise" boys with a level playing field at 11. And so the pass mark for girls was higher than the passmark for boys.
Theoretically, having a lower pass mark for boys enabled the 11+ results to correctly "predict" what the boy would be capable of, academically, at the age of 14. Of course, in reality, it was just an example of boosting the confidence of the mediocre male.
To add to the injustice, early academic success in girls under the age of 12 was often thought of as "not real" but as evidence of an early blossoming which would fade.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, the 11+ is a bit of a red herring in discussing The Abolition of Man, as it's part of the system of grammar and secondary modern schools established at the end of the war after Lewis had written the book. Although undoubtedly the concepts inherent in the new schooling system were part of the education system prior to that - including the ideas of girls being "effectively older" as NEQ has just described.
To add to the injustice, early academic success in girls under the age of 12 was often thought of as "not real" but as evidence of an early blossoming which would fade.
I first sat the exam aged 10 - didn't pass and didn't much expect to. But I wonder if I would have, had I been a boy....
Astonishing info from @Doublethink and @North East Quine.
Now I know how I managed to pass the 11+ in spite of not being very bright!
That’s nothing, the research on which the whole concept of the 11-plus and its justification of selective education were based; was a crock of shit put together by Cyril Burt in support of his own prejudices.
I know that girls and women didn't have as much access to stuff in the early 20th century; I have been assuming, however, that the stuff they did have access to, assuming textbooks were involved, would have been the same textbooks, if/when they were learning the same subjects as boys and men.
History textbooks may have been the same for both boys and girls but in the early C20th they were heavily focussed on wars and battles, and presented a view of history which focussed on "important dates" and "great men." Even now, instead of incorporating women throughout textbooks, there tends to be a "bolt-on" section on, say, the suffragettes, or "the Home Front".
I can't comment on textbooks on other subjects, but suspect that most of the authors and poets studied would have been male. In fact, during my own schooldays we studied plays by Shakespeare, Miller, O'Casey and Gordon Daviot*. I think Daviot was the only female playright, and she was included as she was a former pupil of my school! Novelists included Austen, Hardy, Grassic Gibbon, Steinbeck, Crichton Smith and MacKay Brown. I think Austen may have been the only female novelist in the curriculum. Poets included Burns, Owen and Sassoon, McCaig, and Browning. There were others, but I cannot recollect any female poets.
*Gordon Daviot is better known as the novelist Josephine Tey.
Poets included Burns, Owen and Sassoon, McCaig, and Browning. There were others, but I cannot recollect any female poets.
We read Mrs Browning in school, but not her husband. Burns, Owen, and Sassoon, and also Blake and Wordsworth and Masefield and Coleridge.
Jane Austen and the Brontës were the only female novelists, and I think the only real mention of women in history other than as monarchs or wives and mothers of monarchs was a token mention of the Suffragette movement, with the obligatory mention of Emily Davison throwing herself under the King's horse, and a brief acknowledgement of the existence of Florence Nightingale.
When I was at an English girls boarding school in the late 80s and early 90s we were told we couldn’t do football in PE lessons in case a football hit us in the midriff and damaged our ovaries.
More seriously, we had some contact with a boys boarding school - if a girl got pregnant she got expelled but the boy concerned would just get suspended for a short while.
(Not that they were especially observant, one soxthformer managed to hide her pregnancy for the last part of her final year.)
I left when the two schools were about to merge and become coed. The boy’s school had to have it explained as to why run through showers by the front door were no longer going to be appropriate (as if they’d ever been).
The school did pass on girls’ interest in joining the marine cadets - but the MOD said they’d have to join the infantry cadets because girls. (Though why you want to teach isolated pissed off teens to shoot assault rifles every Wednesday afternoon is beyond me.)
I am fairly confident the boys were not to do home economics, learn to cook and how to sew a short - and we were not offered woodworking or rugby.
When my mother was in high school (in the '40s) she was the only girl in her physics class and the teacher announced to the class he had never passed a girl in the course. (My mother passed with 100 and he did apologize)
When I was at school we boys were given a 'short course' in 'domestic science', as it was called. (The idea was so we could look after ourselves at university.) The girls had the subject on a continuing basis.
I think it's difficult now to remember how different education was for boys and girls. The girls were all taught to bang typewriters. I had to teach myself that skill.
All this, of course, was based on assumptions about what our future would be like. In the next twenty years or so, I suspect there was more social change than in the previous two hundred, and women, rightly, were given (or seized) new opportunities.
If modernising language helps this progress, I am all for it. No woman should ever feel 'less'.
When I started high school, in around 1980, craft lessons were separated out according to sex, with girls doing needlework and boys woodwork. It was reformed a year or so later so we all did the same, except sports. At least until they were given some government money a few years later to encourage skills based learning - the boys were offered some computer training and the girls secretarial skills!
And I went to quite a progressive urban school, which did break dancing and BMX biking in Arts Week.
(Pregnant girls were treated very sympathetically at my school but my school was in a very deprived area)
Poets included Burns, Owen and Sassoon, McCaig, and Browning. There were others, but I cannot recollect any female poets.
We read Mrs Browning in school, but not her husband. Burns, Owen, and Sassoon, and also Blake and Wordsworth and Masefield and Coleridge.
Jane Austen and the Brontës were the only female novelists, and I think the only real mention of women in history other than as monarchs or wives and mothers of monarchs was a token mention of the Suffragette movement, with the obligatory mention of Emily Davison throwing herself under the King's horse, and a brief acknowledgement of the existence of Florence Nightingale.
This has set me thinking. I did English Literature to A Level, and I don't recall a single female author being studied. Not one. In retrospect, I find that amazing. Women have, after all, been writing great novels for at least 250 years.
Similarly, I don't recall much mention of women in history. Our (female) history teacher at A Level did talk about the influence of Queen Caroline, but only in passing. I don't recall any 'women's history' at all. Bear in mind that from the 4th year onwards this was a mixed school. There were girls in the classroom. Quite shocking when I think about it.
The version of history taught at any one time can be very tendentious. I can recall Peter Ustinov on something he encountered in a class room '...depicting Our Lord leading a Boy Scout while with His other, free, hand he indicated on a map the extent of the British Empire. Even at the time this did not seem quite right to me.'
I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on English intended for 'boys and girls in the upper forms of schools'. I do not think the authors of this book (there were two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy.
Thereafter, Lewis addresses the effects of its ideology on boys and men; female people are barely mentioned, other than in their role as mothers and nurses:
Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant "a bastard nursed in a bureau", and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.
NB The book in question was The Control of Language: A critical approach to reading and writing, by Alex King and Martin Ketley.
Working class girls' education in Scotland was actually better than in most parts of the world, because the Presbyterian church saw the ability to read the Bible as important for everybody, but also thought that the ability to read the Bible to your children was a parental virtue. A good mother could read. It was a womanly attribute. Writing and arithmetic, not so much.
From the Reformation to 1843, the Church of Scotland was responsible for working class education. It was patchy, but better than in most other countries. In 1843, the church split and the Free Church went on a massive school building project. This actually gave female education a boost, as the churches were keen to out do each other and get girls as well as boys into education. However, the resultant patchwork and fragmentation of the education system, coupled with urbanisation and population movement was not good.
Education from the ages of 5-12 became compulsory in Scotland in 1872. At that point, something like 96% of children attended school at some point, although some attended between the ages of 6-10, or attended only in winter, doing farm labour over the summer.
When education became compulsory, Edinburgh already had enough school places to accomodate everyone, although some places were overcrowded and substandard. Glasgow had enough places to accomodate all 6-12 year olds, so made 6 the de facto starting age till they had built more schools. Aberdeen had enough places, but a higher proportion of overcrowding / substandard schools than Edinburgh. And Dundee - the less said about Dundee the better! But it does indicate that in most places (apart from Dundee) working class girls were generally in school prior to it becoming compulsory.
A few years ago I took a look at truancy enforcement in the late 1870s to see if there was a gender bias. Both Edinburgh and Aberdeen followed up female truancy at the same rate as male truancy. The Glasgow figures weren't broken down by sex sufficiently to analyse. Dundee focussed on getting nuisance truants off the streets, so mostly boys. Girls skipping school to look after sick relatives didn't concern the Dundee authorities. But generally, the non-Dundee authorities took girls' attendance at school as seriously as boys'.
A point coming out in this discussion is what is absent. I remember the careers(!) talk in 6th form. The only words present that I can remember were 'teacher', 'nurse' and, um, 'florist' (for the creative among you). Absent were doctor, scientist, executive, engineer, architect, lawyer, academic - in short just about every profession with degree-level entrance (even though we were all expected to go onto tertiary education).
OK, if people are going to go there, I'm just gonna provide my own recollections of early puberty as a more-or-less well-adjusted straight white male in small town USA in the early 1990s.
Just to provide an anecdote, I'll just note that I first started noting horniness in my own body at the age of 10. I can remember pretty specifically in 5th grade hearing a female peer tell a joke around some guys of the same age about inserting nudity into what was otherwise a children's game, maybe hide and go seek. It wasn't a big deal, nobody called child protective services, this was in no way, shape, or form prompted by an adult, but it was definitely a thing that happened and I remember, pretty vividly, that it was in fifth grade. And I was young for my grade, having a birthday very late in the year.
By sixth grade I was very specifically interested in female anatomy, and didn't have the sense to be discreet about it until a girl in my class glared at me, which I fairly deserved.
I also remember, even in third or fourth grade, being completely oblivious when kids ran around the playground asking you if you were a virgin and giggling uproariously no matter what your answer was. For what it's worth, I found that joke completely incomprehensible at the time. I had not yet been introduced to radical feminism and patriarchy, or the disgusting phrase "damaged goods." Though I know now.
I think kids figure out sexuality a lot earlier than grown ups are generally comfortable admitting. It's very appropriate that we stay the hell out of that space, but I'm not going to pretend that sexuality doesn't appear in kids' life until it's convenient for us old fogies.
I remember an earnest discussion my brother and I had when he was in first grade and I in fourth about whether or not "butt" was a bad word. As I recall, we weren't sure but thought we'd better not find out the hard way that it was a bad word by using it in front of Mom and Dad.
That same year, there was a girl named Dawn in my class who wore panty hose to school, which seemed very adult and sexual to me at the time, and I really wondered what her parents were thinking, letting her go out like that (as I had no knowledge of bad parenting). The boys had a song for her which they sang to the tune of the then-ubiquitous Libby's jingle:
When it says Dawn, Dawn, Dawn,
On your dick, dick, dick,
She will lick, lick, lick
All the shit off your dick.
On the playground, in the hallways, throughout that whole school year. I could only imagine what that was like for her.
I remember an earnest discussion my brother and I had when he was in first grade and I in fourth about whether or not "butt" was a bad word. As I recall, we weren't sure but thought we'd better not find out the hard way that it was a bad word by using it in front of Mom and Dad.
That same year, there was a girl named Dawn in my class who wore panty hose to school, which seemed very adult and sexual to me at the time, and I really wondered what her parents were thinking, letting her go out like that (as I had no knowledge of bad parenting). The boys had a song for her which they sang to the tune of the then-ubiquitous Libby's jingle:
When it says Dawn, Dawn, Dawn,
On your dick, dick, dick,
She will lick, lick, lick
All the shit off your dick.
On the playground, in the hallways, throughout that whole school year. I could only imagine what that was like for her.
I had been out of the country before starting school in a North London state primary school aged around 7. People came up to me in the playground and asked if I was posh, if I was a prostitute. I didn’t know what these terms meant, so I asked my parents what to say - they advised me to say no to everything, other kids picked up on this really fast - so then they asked me if I was a virgin, and I didn’t know what that meant either.
No, being bullied is not fun.
Meanwhile, the council thought that insisting we line up boy girl boy girl, would somehow stop us growing up sexist (as well as putting stickers in the reading books saying “warning; contains sexist/racist material”. They meant well, but surely a good start would be picking different books ?
It had to have been very damaging to her -- and possibly that damage came on top of whatever was going on at home that led to a 9-year-old going to school in panty hose. As you say, horrible.
Think also about what it said to the rest of us girls, not primary victims by a long shot, but still victims. To me it said being an adult woman, being perceived as sexual, was going to be a dangerous thing, and that there would be no protection, nothing you could do other than endure or run away. Other girls may have interpreted it differently. I don't know; I never took part in or overheard any conversations about it. And that's significant too, because this was a school where almost everyone had been together since kindergarten and the girls were extremely clique-ish, had a well-established pecking order, and talked endlessly about the perceptions of each other that created their little stratified society. But no girl ever touched on this and what it meant, as far as I know, so we were all on our own to process this as best we could, unless we had parents we could talk to about such things (I did not).
A detailed discussion of UK class distinctions would be rather off-topic for this discussion, but "posh" and "rich" are certainly not synonymous. "Posh" tends to refer to the "upper classes" rather than the wealthy, and although there is overlap between class and wealth, they are not equivalent.
A detailed discussion of UK class distinctions would be rather off-topic for this discussion, but "posh" and "rich" are certainly not synonymous. "Posh" tends to refer to the "upper classes" rather than the wealthy, and although there is overlap between class and wealth, they are not equivalent.
It had to have been very damaging to her -- and possibly that damage came on top of whatever was going on at home that led to a 9-year-old going to school in panty hose. As you say, horrible.
Think also about what it said to the rest of us girls, not primary victims by a long shot, but still victims. To me it said being an adult woman, being perceived as sexual, was going to be a dangerous thing, and that there would be no protection, nothing you could do other than endure or run away. Other girls may have interpreted it differently. I don't know; I never took part in or overheard any conversations about it. And that's significant too, because this was a school where almost everyone had been together since kindergarten and the girls were extremely clique-ish, had a well-established pecking order, and talked endlessly about the perceptions of each other that created their little stratified society. But no girl ever touched on this and what it meant, as far as I know, so we were all on our own to process this as best we could, unless we had parents we could talk to about such things (I did not).
It is scary how shaming others seems to come so naturally at an early age. And the various narratives (particularly around gender) that it creates and reinforces.
I think there's also a range of children who really don't understand sex, but they understand that it's provocative and taboo, so therefore they will say the most outrageous things - with no practical understanding - for the attention, really shock value. "Pass the damned ham" and all that, which I think is a line from To Kill a Mockingbird.
Some people stay that way for a long time.
Whether or not this counts as sexual behavior is debatable, but I'm pretty sure it safely isn't considered mature behavior. It was pretty common when I was between old elementary and young high school.
Originally posted by @Sighthound : When I was at school we boys were given a 'short course' in 'domestic science', as it was called. (The idea was so we could look after ourselves at university.) The girls had the subject on a continuing basis.
When I was at school (bog standard Scottish state comp), girls could drop Home Ec, and boys could drop Woodwork to do Latin at age 14. However in my final year at school I had a short course on "dinner party cooking" on the theory that girls going to university would marry the sort of men who would require a wife who could throw a dinner party. Our "dinner party menu" involved a French sounding soup which contained cream and tinned sweetcorn, a main which involved pastry (Boeuf Wellington?) and Hazelnut Dacquoise.
At that point my only cooking experience had been in billy-cans over an open fire at Guide camp. I arrived at University unable to make e.g. spag bol, but I could whip up a mean Hazelnut Dacquoise.
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Teachers at primary school level are I think also assumed female, but not to the extent that we've required extra language to indicate a man.
The historical background to this, in Scotland (although I assume elsewhere too) was that teaching infants aged 5/6 was believed to be best suited to women (as per educationalist David Stow c1840).
As more women entered the teaching profession the age at which the switch to male teachers rose. However, what made primary school teachers almost exclusively female was economic. State school teachers were paid from the rates; ratepayers wanted value for money; female teachers were cheaper to employ as they were paid less. But it was believed that children* needed a male influence and this was achieved by ring fencing the wellpaid head teacher role for men. One headmaster, or possibly a headmaster and male deputy headmaster was all that was needed to cast his / their beneficial male influence over an entire school. A male head and an all or mostly female teaching staff was the model in Scotland for state schools from around the time of the Boer War onwards.
*there was concern around the start of the C20th about the number of working class boys being raised in what were effectively single-mother households. Many of these were families in which the father had gone to work abroad (South African railways / Australian engineering projects / American stone mines) and were remitting money home. It made economic sense for the individual families, but meant that there were large numbers of boys growing up in households headed de facto by women.
So I don't think there has been a need for a name for male primary teachers, because they were not unusual until the C20th.
My mother, a primary school head, was convinced that we wouldn’t have equality until there was affirmative action from the government to ensure 50% of primary school teachers and nurses were men.
I’m not totally convinced she’d thought that through in terms of how it would work, and she’s no longer with us to ask, but she was entirely serious.
The civil service burgeoned during the second half of the C19th. Both entry to Teacher Training Schools and to the Civil Service were by competitive exam. It meant that men for whom teaching would have been the obvious career path had alternative careers opening up for them in the civil service. There were a few female careers in the civil service, but not enough to make a dent in the number of applicants for teacher training.
From the 1870s on, Scottish state schools in the cities became fewer and larger. Whereas before men could expect to become head teacher of a school with a couple of hundred pupils, employing at most half-a-dozen teachers (including pupil teachers), by the age of thirty, in the new larger schools they could expect to become Second Master (deputy head) by thirty, but not Headmaster till nearer 40. So this helped make teaching a less attractive career compared to the civil service.
So there was a process by which fewer men were going to Teacher Training College and this created more vacancies for women.
Absolutely!
I don't know what the education of schoolgirls was like back then, or if the messages about objective morality and such were different. But I think the issues of existentialism, subjectivism, and also scientism he writes about are at least very similar to what we're dealing with now, regardless of the genders of students in schools. Because of that, I genuinely am not seeing how this relates: "Essentially, Lewis uses gendered language because his view of the world is gendered. So while many of his criticisms still seem pertinent, I don't think we can rewrite that aspect of his argument and still be left with the same argument - it seems to be too deeply embedded." How do you mean here?
If Lewis were alive today and writing a version of The Abolition of Man he'd certainly start from a different point (because the particular text book he was criticising is no longer in use, and the whole education system has been radically reformed to the point of being practically unrecognisable to anyone from 100 years ago). He'd publish using a different title and wouldn't use gendered language, because if he didn't then his arguments would be lost in the language. Whether the fundamental arguments would be different it's difficult to know, but the same arguments could be easily made without the use of gendered language.
* and, I'm deliberately using that term, because it does encompass the unquestioned patriarchalism that's present in much of his writing.
I’m not aware of there being different textbooks on the same subjects for girls and women back in those days. In any case, he’s using that textbook as a springboard/entry point for things which he (and others, including I) considers to have gone wrong with the world regarding the doctrine of objective value.
I think we can safely take it that, if asked, he would have given the same answer he did to the question of women’s friendships in The Four Loves. There he deliberately refused to say much about the subject at all as he was unqualified to talk about it, having no experience of it.
That makes sense.
I assume they would be the same textbooks, if they were on the same subjects, even in those days.
I could go on at length.
That rigging sounds horrible. Again, though, if they were using textbooks on the same subjects, were there different ones for boys and girls? (And, again, critically, in Abolition of Man, the textbook issue is a springboard for the larger issues he regarded as toxic in modern society, rather than just being focused on bad textbooks for schoolboys in the 20th-century UK.)
My point here is that most women’s default assumption would not be that girls got equal access to stuff in the early 20th century - because sexism tends to be more obvious to us than men.
I know that girls and women didn't have as much access to stuff in the early 20th century; I have been assuming, however, that the stuff they did have access to, assuming textbooks were involved, would have been the same textbooks, if/when they were learning the same subjects as boys and men.
So does this mean female students got more of the same messages (rejecting, or even just taking for granted by assumption, that the doctrine of objective value does not exist) Lewis regards as toxic, or fewer, or...?
They needn't have separate textbooks if they are not taking the same courses.
Agreed. (Hence “on the same subjects”—I don’t know how much overlap there was in any given case…)
But have you made any attempt to find out about any of this ?
Though we have historians on this site who’s would probably know more.
My PhD is in History of Education, but my area focusses on women in state education in Scotland. I can't speak authoritatively on middle class education in England!
I do know about the different pass marks required of girls and boys at the 11+ The theory was that, although at the age of 11 both boys and girls had spent exactly the same amount of time in education, the girls were effectively "older". In Roman times, the age of marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and this concept of an 11 year girl being "almost adult" whereas an 11 year old boy was not "almost adult" lingered on in various ways. Had the passmark for both girls and boys been the same at the 11+ girls would have outperformed boys, and as girls couldn't possibly be "better" than boys, this was explained by girls having the "advantage" of being closer to puberty. The idea was that this advantage would disappear once the boys "caught up" at age 14. Therefore it would be unfair to "penalise" boys with a level playing field at 11. And so the pass mark for girls was higher than the passmark for boys.
Theoretically, having a lower pass mark for boys enabled the 11+ results to correctly "predict" what the boy would be capable of, academically, at the age of 14. Of course, in reality, it was just an example of boosting the confidence of the mediocre male.
To add to the injustice, early academic success in girls under the age of 12 was often thought of as "not real" but as evidence of an early blossoming which would fade.
Now I know how I managed to pass the 11+ in spite of not being very bright!
...and maybe why I was the only girl from my primary school who went on to my grammar school!
I first sat the exam aged 10 - didn't pass and didn't much expect to. But I wonder if I would have, had I been a boy....
That’s nothing, the research on which the whole concept of the 11-plus and its justification of selective education were based; was a crock of shit put together by Cyril Burt in support of his own prejudices.
I know that girls and women didn't have as much access to stuff in the early 20th century; I have been assuming, however, that the stuff they did have access to, assuming textbooks were involved, would have been the same textbooks, if/when they were learning the same subjects as boys and men.
History textbooks may have been the same for both boys and girls but in the early C20th they were heavily focussed on wars and battles, and presented a view of history which focussed on "important dates" and "great men." Even now, instead of incorporating women throughout textbooks, there tends to be a "bolt-on" section on, say, the suffragettes, or "the Home Front".
I can't comment on textbooks on other subjects, but suspect that most of the authors and poets studied would have been male. In fact, during my own schooldays we studied plays by Shakespeare, Miller, O'Casey and Gordon Daviot*. I think Daviot was the only female playright, and she was included as she was a former pupil of my school! Novelists included Austen, Hardy, Grassic Gibbon, Steinbeck, Crichton Smith and MacKay Brown. I think Austen may have been the only female novelist in the curriculum. Poets included Burns, Owen and Sassoon, McCaig, and Browning. There were others, but I cannot recollect any female poets.
*Gordon Daviot is better known as the novelist Josephine Tey.
We read Mrs Browning in school, but not her husband. Burns, Owen, and Sassoon, and also Blake and Wordsworth and Masefield and Coleridge.
Jane Austen and the Brontës were the only female novelists, and I think the only real mention of women in history other than as monarchs or wives and mothers of monarchs was a token mention of the Suffragette movement, with the obligatory mention of Emily Davison throwing herself under the King's horse, and a brief acknowledgement of the existence of Florence Nightingale.
More seriously, we had some contact with a boys boarding school - if a girl got pregnant she got expelled but the boy concerned would just get suspended for a short while.
(Not that they were especially observant, one soxthformer managed to hide her pregnancy for the last part of her final year.)
I left when the two schools were about to merge and become coed. The boy’s school had to have it explained as to why run through showers by the front door were no longer going to be appropriate (as if they’d ever been).
The school did pass on girls’ interest in joining the marine cadets - but the MOD said they’d have to join the infantry cadets because girls. (Though why you want to teach isolated pissed off teens to shoot assault rifles every Wednesday afternoon is beyond me.)
I am fairly confident the boys were not to do home economics, learn to cook and how to sew a short - and we were not offered woodworking or rugby.
I think it's difficult now to remember how different education was for boys and girls. The girls were all taught to bang typewriters. I had to teach myself that skill.
All this, of course, was based on assumptions about what our future would be like. In the next twenty years or so, I suspect there was more social change than in the previous two hundred, and women, rightly, were given (or seized) new opportunities.
If modernising language helps this progress, I am all for it. No woman should ever feel 'less'.
And I went to quite a progressive urban school, which did break dancing and BMX biking in Arts Week.
(Pregnant girls were treated very sympathetically at my school but my school was in a very deprived area)
This has set me thinking. I did English Literature to A Level, and I don't recall a single female author being studied. Not one. In retrospect, I find that amazing. Women have, after all, been writing great novels for at least 250 years.
Similarly, I don't recall much mention of women in history. Our (female) history teacher at A Level did talk about the influence of Queen Caroline, but only in passing. I don't recall any 'women's history' at all. Bear in mind that from the 4th year onwards this was a mixed school. There were girls in the classroom. Quite shocking when I think about it.
Thereafter, Lewis addresses the effects of its ideology on boys and men; female people are barely mentioned, other than in their role as mothers and nurses: NB The book in question was The Control of Language: A critical approach to reading and writing, by Alex King and Martin Ketley.
About whether or not, 80 years ago, schoolgirls were getting the same toxic messages rejecting the doctrine of objective value that schoolboys were?
From the Reformation to 1843, the Church of Scotland was responsible for working class education. It was patchy, but better than in most other countries. In 1843, the church split and the Free Church went on a massive school building project. This actually gave female education a boost, as the churches were keen to out do each other and get girls as well as boys into education. However, the resultant patchwork and fragmentation of the education system, coupled with urbanisation and population movement was not good.
Education from the ages of 5-12 became compulsory in Scotland in 1872. At that point, something like 96% of children attended school at some point, although some attended between the ages of 6-10, or attended only in winter, doing farm labour over the summer.
When education became compulsory, Edinburgh already had enough school places to accomodate everyone, although some places were overcrowded and substandard. Glasgow had enough places to accomodate all 6-12 year olds, so made 6 the de facto starting age till they had built more schools. Aberdeen had enough places, but a higher proportion of overcrowding / substandard schools than Edinburgh. And Dundee - the less said about Dundee the better! But it does indicate that in most places (apart from Dundee) working class girls were generally in school prior to it becoming compulsory.
A few years ago I took a look at truancy enforcement in the late 1870s to see if there was a gender bias. Both Edinburgh and Aberdeen followed up female truancy at the same rate as male truancy. The Glasgow figures weren't broken down by sex sufficiently to analyse. Dundee focussed on getting nuisance truants off the streets, so mostly boys. Girls skipping school to look after sick relatives didn't concern the Dundee authorities. But generally, the non-Dundee authorities took girls' attendance at school as seriously as boys'.
Just to provide an anecdote, I'll just note that I first started noting horniness in my own body at the age of 10. I can remember pretty specifically in 5th grade hearing a female peer tell a joke around some guys of the same age about inserting nudity into what was otherwise a children's game, maybe hide and go seek. It wasn't a big deal, nobody called child protective services, this was in no way, shape, or form prompted by an adult, but it was definitely a thing that happened and I remember, pretty vividly, that it was in fifth grade. And I was young for my grade, having a birthday very late in the year.
By sixth grade I was very specifically interested in female anatomy, and didn't have the sense to be discreet about it until a girl in my class glared at me, which I fairly deserved.
I also remember, even in third or fourth grade, being completely oblivious when kids ran around the playground asking you if you were a virgin and giggling uproariously no matter what your answer was. For what it's worth, I found that joke completely incomprehensible at the time. I had not yet been introduced to radical feminism and patriarchy, or the disgusting phrase "damaged goods." Though I know now.
I think kids figure out sexuality a lot earlier than grown ups are generally comfortable admitting. It's very appropriate that we stay the hell out of that space, but I'm not going to pretend that sexuality doesn't appear in kids' life until it's convenient for us old fogies.
That same year, there was a girl named Dawn in my class who wore panty hose to school, which seemed very adult and sexual to me at the time, and I really wondered what her parents were thinking, letting her go out like that (as I had no knowledge of bad parenting). The boys had a song for her which they sang to the tune of the then-ubiquitous Libby's jingle:
When it says Dawn, Dawn, Dawn,
On your dick, dick, dick,
She will lick, lick, lick
All the shit off your dick.
On the playground, in the hallways, throughout that whole school year. I could only imagine what that was like for her.
Oh my God that’s horrible.
No, being bullied is not fun.
Meanwhile, the council thought that insisting we line up boy girl boy girl, would somehow stop us growing up sexist (as well as putting stickers in the reading books saying “warning; contains sexist/racist material”. They meant well, but surely a good start would be picking different books ?
I’m sorry they did that to you.
I’m curious about which books those were, and what era this was. Over in the US I’m not sure we had anything like those stickers till maybe the 90s?
It was just the first question they started with. I didn’t have a local accent, hence Posh.
Ah, I see…
Think also about what it said to the rest of us girls, not primary victims by a long shot, but still victims. To me it said being an adult woman, being perceived as sexual, was going to be a dangerous thing, and that there would be no protection, nothing you could do other than endure or run away. Other girls may have interpreted it differently. I don't know; I never took part in or overheard any conversations about it. And that's significant too, because this was a school where almost everyone had been together since kindergarten and the girls were extremely clique-ish, had a well-established pecking order, and talked endlessly about the perceptions of each other that created their little stratified society. But no girl ever touched on this and what it meant, as far as I know, so we were all on our own to process this as best we could, unless we had parents we could talk to about such things (I did not).
A detailed discussion of UK class distinctions would be rather off-topic for this discussion, but "posh" and "rich" are certainly not synonymous. "Posh" tends to refer to the "upper classes" rather than the wealthy, and although there is overlap between class and wealth, they are not equivalent.
Ah, right. I’d forgotten that.
It is scary how shaming others seems to come so naturally at an early age. And the various narratives (particularly around gender) that it creates and reinforces.
Some people stay that way for a long time.
Whether or not this counts as sexual behavior is debatable, but I'm pretty sure it safely isn't considered mature behavior. It was pretty common when I was between old elementary and young high school.
When I was at school we boys were given a 'short course' in 'domestic science', as it was called. (The idea was so we could look after ourselves at university.) The girls had the subject on a continuing basis.
When I was at school (bog standard Scottish state comp), girls could drop Home Ec, and boys could drop Woodwork to do Latin at age 14. However in my final year at school I had a short course on "dinner party cooking" on the theory that girls going to university would marry the sort of men who would require a wife who could throw a dinner party. Our "dinner party menu" involved a French sounding soup which contained cream and tinned sweetcorn, a main which involved pastry (Boeuf Wellington?) and Hazelnut Dacquoise.
At that point my only cooking experience had been in billy-cans over an open fire at Guide camp. I arrived at University unable to make e.g. spag bol, but I could whip up a mean Hazelnut Dacquoise.