History of Female Education in British North American Colonies

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Assignment 3
Fadia A. Nahouli
Athabasca University

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Question: Discuss the history of female education in the British North American colonies. What
structural disadvantages did girls face? To what extent have these disadvantages disappeared, and
what factors or individuals were responsible for the change?
Introduction
Colonial education in British North America was majorly restricted to elementary and
grammar schools and the pattern of education depended on the class to which the children
belonged and was more biased toward the male section of the population (Spring, 2014).
Education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was very varied in nature and primarily
consisted of public schooling systems. While the educational systems imparting education
through processes of schooling and formal methods was more focused on men, the women were
imparted other forms of education which were basically and primarily vocational. One of the
most important facts about the imparting of education was that most of the students or the
population was not able to afford higher education or secondary school for various reasons.
Women were imparted education more along the lines of religious matters and household work.
It is also important to note in this regard that in the colonial age the type of education that the
children received for the most part was dependent on the social stratification and the class that
the family of the child belonged. The form and the subjects of education also varied depending
upon the social class. Some of the educational institutions in that era were supported with the
help of taxes and others were private. Moreover women and girls were hardly provided with the
exposure or opportunity of being educated.

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During the colonial period widespread public education was quite slow to develop even
in New England where education was considered top priority. In 1947, Massachusetts enacted a
law that demanded every town comprising of fifty families to contribute funds through taxes to
establish the public schools as most people settled to support for school (Davies & Hammack,
2005). With the increase in population there was a growth in the number of people who were
staying in the villages and they were large enough to support the public education. During the
1700s, the public schools became quite common although the quality of these schools remained
quite questionable. The colonial period witnessed gendered education and the predictable
consequence of the stark gender gap in the education of girls and the boys. It was considered
unprofitable to invest for the education of the girl child, as they were deemed as burden to the
family who would married off and henceforth, their education did not provide any benefit to the
family (Roderick, 2016). Education became the mean for preparing the women to excel in the
public life. Women were not considered as rightful members of the public life and it was
believed that women were intellectually inferior to their male counterparts and therefore, they
were not considered to be educated in the same manner as that of the boys.
The private system of education included the home, the church and the voluntary
associations like the library companies, circulating libraries and the philosophical societies,
apprenticeships and the private study. Those who were associated with education and the private
benefactors primarily supported this system.
Discussion
Most of the essays and studies on the education of women in the early colonial decades
suggest that most of the women who were able to access the opportunities and get exposure to

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the educational options belonged to the middle or upper middle class of the society. This is the
class of women who got extensively educated in the fields of vocational and informal education.
According to a few other studies, women were greatly involved in the processes of cultural
integrity and education and hence in a very indirect manner affected the economic and social
reforms and policies in place at the time (Aikenhead & Elliott, 2010).
As a matter of fact, according to, Stratfordhall.org. (2018), the upper class in the colonial
era of the British North America who were educated primarily received extensive and rigorous
reading lessons, writing lessons, mathematics and poems and prayers. The pattern of education
received by the boys however differed from the type of education and training that girls received.
Girls were primarily required to be educated on the subjects of maintaining household
expenditure, read the Bible, arithmetic, writing and reading. Further, girls were required to be
adept at etiquettes, art, music, French, needle work, spinning, cooking as well as nursing unlike
the boys who were educated in matters of celestial navigation, geography, history and
management. Unlike the boys who were taught by male teachers, governesses who mostly
belonged to England and were educated in the same subjects up to different extents taught the
girls (Davies & Hammack, 2005).
The concept of single education is not that novel and was widely popular during the
colonial period. During the close of the 19th c. most of the boys were enrolled in the dame school
which was defined as a school that was influenced by the English model of home instruction
comprising of small groups of children who were led by the women in their home (Davies &
Hammack, 2005). The schools that were located in New England prepared the boys for town hall
school. Although women were also enrolled in the dame schools but only a small section of them
attended the town hall schools for the purpose of academics. Single gender schools were private

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and exclusive to the wealthy families. This underlines that these schools have both class and
gendered connotations.
The establishment of the dame schools can be traced back to the kitchens and the
community of the older women adults. This is an important period during which women trained
themselves to become teachers. When girls were finally decided to be accommodated into the
town schools, they attended the schools at different times of the day than the boys or during the
time period when boys did not attend the schools like during the summer holidays or during the
vacations.
The education system of Massachusetts had its roots in the Protestant Reformation that
was driven by the belief that education was mandatory for all the individuals in order to
understand the contents of the scriptures. The Massachusetts colonists established the Mayflower
within the 10 to 20 years of their arrival (Davies & Hammack, 2005). The Massachusetts
colonists are credited for building the town schools, the Latin grammar school and the Harvard
College. The blooming and proliferating economy in the colonies led to an additional need for
literacy. It is reported that the colonial women were intimately involved in the commerce and
family business. These colonies became the fulcrum for the equal opportunities rendered to men
and women in the process of education.
The establishment and the proliferation of the co-education schools were aligned with the
single-gender schools that were pioneered by the academy movement or the single-gender
seminary. This was pioneered by the prominent figures of Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and
Mary Lyon who established schools drawing from the model of the previously mentioned
institutions. Apart from these women, the Catholic Church was at the center stage in determining
and informing the discourse of the growing academy movement. Church based education was

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necessary given the boom in population during the onset of 1860 (Spring, 2016). Seminaries
were attended by women to prepare them for being teachers who can perform at the ground level
to cater to the growing demand for the educators in the Catholic Girls Schools. These seminaries
became quite popular as it concentrated on the training of the teachers in an innovative manner
through the promotion of dynamic teaching strategies and the cooperation of students. The
academy movement was revolutionary as it led to the establishment or the foundation of the first
women’s college in the United States that includes the Georgia Female College, Mount Holyoke
Seminary and the Elmira Female College. In the western territories during the early and the mid-
1800’s coeducation was nominal and there were more option available for single-gender
educational institutions (Spring, 2008). This was not the situation in the eastern states that
established the bastions of higher remained considerable financially autonomous. During this
time, the counterparts of the male colleges emerged like the affiliates and they had affiliations
from universities like the Harvard, Brown and Columbia that provided opportunities for women
to participate in limited fashion. The educational opportunities provided to the men could not be
afforded in these prestigious institutions (Roderick, 2016). Within the college premises, women
were closely supervised and monitored and they were segregated from the men. By the end of
the nineteenth centuries, state universities enabled women to apply for degree programs;
however this remained a feature of the state universities as the private universities did not adhere
to this pattern. Consequently Mount Holyoke, Wellesly, Smith, Radcliffe, Vassar, Bryan Mawr
and Barnard established single-gender university environments that are designed to cater to the
specific educational needs of the women. Although, single-gender colleges aimed for women
were growing during the 20th century most of the colleges and the public secondary schools have
become co-educational. Despite the institutionalization and growing popularity of coeducational