Female Education in British North America: History and Disadvantages

This essay discusses the history of female education in the British North American colonies, highlighting the structural disadvantages girls faced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Education was heavily influenced by social class and gender, with women primarily receiving vocational and religious training while formal schooling was prioritized for men. The essay explores the slow development of public education, the gender gap, and the perception of women's intellectual inferiority. It further examines the role of private education, the church, and voluntary associations in providing education to women, particularly those from middle and upper-class backgrounds. The impact of the academy movement, the establishment of women's colleges, and the persistence of gender discrimination in the 20th century are also discussed. The essay concludes by noting that while co-education became more prevalent, it did not guarantee equal opportunities, and traditional gender roles continued to influence educational and career paths. Desklib provides access to similar essays and study tools for students.

Running head: Assignment 3 1
Assignment 3
Fadia A. Nahouli
Athabasca University

Assignment 3 2
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

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system, it did not insure equal opportunity in the education of men and women. During the 1918,
the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education made a case for creation of the
two-track system in education that provided vocational training to the girls which became quite
popular at that time (Spring, 2016). Gender discrimination informed by patriarchal worldview
was illustrated in the incident that even girls who were meritorious and had higher academic
records were expected to train themselves domestic education, as these were deemed compatible
for their future. Although, there was an expansion of the role of women in the society through the
mid-1960s, women were encouraged to veer to occupations that were suitable of their
personality. Therefore, women had limited choices in their careers that in turn restricted their
career mobility. Women were largely concentrated in the occupations of teaching, nursing,
motherhood and secretarial role that were deemed in consonance with her femininity.
Amid the French administration in Canada, the way toward learning was coordinated into
regular daily existence. While the French government bolstered the duty of the Catholic Church
for showing religion, arithmetic, history, characteristic science, and French, the family was the
essential unit of social association and the fundamental setting inside which all learning occurred
(White & Peters, 2009). In the work concentrated economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth
hundreds of years, families depended on the financial commitments of their youngsters, who
were effectively occupied with gainful movement. Youngsters learned abilities, for example,
planting, turning and land clearing from other relatives (Roderick, 2016). Youthful guys were
prepared for different exchanges through an apprenticeship system. Similarly, in light of the fact
that the populace was little and scattered, it was typically the family that gave religious guideline
and, now and again, direction in perusing and composing. In specific territories, area clerics set
up petites écoles in which they showed instruction and different subjects. In the mid seventeenth

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century, around one-fourth of the pilgrims were proficient, yet by the turn of the eighteenth
century, the distraction of survival had incurred significant injury on the proficiency rate and just
a single individual in seven could sign his or her name (Roderick, 2016). The Jesuits, Récollets,
Ursulines, the Congregation of Notre Dame, and different religious requests gave rudimentary
direction in instruction, perusing, composing, and number juggling. Further developed direction
was accessible for young fellows who may progress toward becoming clerics. By the mid-
seventeenth century, a course in traditional examinations, language and religious philosophy was
accessible at the Collège des Jésuites, established in 1635. In the 1660s Bishop Laval established
the Séminaire de Québec, which later progressed toward becoming Université Laval (Genesee,
1998).
Formal direction for females was very constrained and for the most part did not stretch
out past religious guideline and aptitudes, for example, embroidery. In any case, young ladies
who lived in the field may have been exceptional taught than young men because of the
endeavors of the sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, who built up schools in country
zones and in addition in towns, and went as nomad teachers. During the eighteenth and mid
nineteenth hundreds of years, the family remained the unrivaled setting for training; couple of
kids in what was then British North America got formal guideline either from coaches or in
schools. The example started to change amid this period, as the British government looked to
instruction as a method for advancing social recognizable proof with Protestantism, the English
dialect, and British traditions (Roderick, 2016).
In the years after the Conquest of 1759-60, the British experts were exceedingly worried
about the solid French Canadian nearness in the settlement, and they attempted more than once
to aid the foundation of schools that were outside the control of religious specialists. These

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endeavors were undermined by the Catholic Church and, all the more essentially, by the lack of
engagement of nearby networks, in which training was connected more with families than
classrooms.
Be that as it may, the idea of tutoring turned out to be more across the board among social
pioneers during the mid-nineteenth century. In these years, lawmakers, churchmen and
instructors bantered about inquiries of instructive financing, control and interest, and by the
1840s the structure of the cutting edge educational systems can plainly be recognized in a rising
authority accord (Genesee, 1998).
Structural Disadvantages faced by Women
There were various disadvantages faced by women especially in the field of obtaining
and attaining education in this era (Roderick, 2016). However, the major factors of disadvantages
faced by women included both financial and sexual shortcomings and limitations. Thus, the basic
point of differentiation in between men and women comprised of lesser productivity and
capabilities due to lesser strength and the existence of a lot of other household responsibilities
and accountabilities. Due to the heterogeneity in the roles and power of men and women the
structural disadvantages crept up and remained consistent for a long period of time in this era.
Marriages for example had become a form of contract for women and it was very difficult for
them to come out of the same (Roderick, 2016). Even though a number of women rights groups
took up initiatives to fight for justice and equal opportunities for women, the persistence and
depth of structural disadvantages faced by women remained the same and constant. Apart from
the factors of gender inequality and social stratification faced by women in the field of receiving
education, the color of their skin also formed another major factor in obstructing and forming a

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barrier to the education received (Reyhner& Eder, 2017). This in turn created conditions of stress
and mental illness including stances of depression and anxiety which had adverse effects on the
quality and amount of education women were able to receive after overcoming the shortcomings
and limitations of family and gender (Khorsandi Taskoh, 2014).
Restricted open doors for tutoring were accessible to young ladies. Despite the fact that
Protestant conviction recognized a similar course to salvation for people, and in this manner a
similar requirement for proficiency, female training in the mid nineteenth century went from
mediocre compared to nonexistent. As the push for school change expanded in the middle of the
1840s, nonetheless, prevalent mentalities started to move concerning the instruction of young
ladies (Reyhner& Eder, 2017). Despite the fact that ladies' knowledge was viewed as various and
maybe second rate compared to men's, females were trusted able and meriting basic school
instruction with a specific end goal to end up upstanding good natives and more critical in light
of the fact that as future spouses and moms they expected to pass such strong good preparing on
to their families. Benjamin Rush, DeWitt Clinton, Emma Hart Willard, and others took up the
contention that female instruction was important for this vital residential part. In spite of the fact
that imbalance of chance remained an issue, the expanding acknowledgment and arrangement of
training for young ladies brought about a sensational ascent of female enlistments in schools all
things considered. As an ever increasing number of young ladies went through the instructive
framework, an indication of their headway could be found in the expanding level of educated
ladies, which multiplied in the vicinity of 1780 and 1840 (Khorsandi Taskoh, 2014).

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The Distribution of Education opportunities in British Colonial America
In the Colonial Era, the educational opportunities and system was well constructed and
monitored in the region of New England. In fact, majority of the concentration of educational
opportunities was in New England and hardly existed in the other regions and areas. Only a very
small proportion of women and girls had access to educational exposure and opportunities and
mostly received schooling and education at home under the concept of “Dave Schools”. Most of
the states did not have options of taxed schooling like Massachusetts and Northampton as the
privileged and affluent families were too reluctant in paying for education of the poor. Moreover,
even though the concept of taxation and taxed education for the poor was introduced in North
Hampton later on, these funds generated were primarily used for education of boys and their
higher education (Khorsandi Taskoh, 2014). Only in Sutton majority of taxes were collected and
used for purposes of schooling and education of girls and the education of boys and girls was
given equal importance. Reading and writing were considered as separate elements of education
and writing was considered more important. Boys were primarily imparted education in terms of
both writing and reading whereas girls were primarily taught to read, the subjects were mainly
related to household activities and vocational subjects that would require care, and lesser mental
strength as compared to subjects taught to boys. Across the southern region education rates were
essentially low and most children were home schooled (especially girls) and a few others were
sent to very small schools which functioned primarily in the private sector (Reyhner& Eder,
2017).
Education in the colonial North America began with the mother’s knee and it ended in the
cornfield or the barn by the side of the father. The task of teaching and reading to the children
was considered as the duty of the mother as there was a shortage in the supply of papers she had

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to trace the alphabets in the dust and the ashes of the fireplace. Colonial mothers played an
important role in imparting education to the children through simple, time-tested methods of
instruction that are mixed to the old-fashioned hard work.
Apart from the gender-based education in British North America colonies, slavery was
present as well making it difficult for the black women to earn degree. However, there was a
change in the situation following the emancipation in the 1860s (Khorsandi Taskoh, 2014). There
was a burgeoning in the Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that led to the generation of a
large number of Black college graduates. Discrimination for Black women was evident as it was
reported that no faculty positions were available for the Black women during the 1850s (Selman
& Dampier, 1991). Only few Black women could attend the schools and colleges during the
1900 and teaching was the main profession, however employment option was limited for these
women in the secondary and the primary schools (Reyhner& Eder, 2017). The Black women
who had the college degree but were not interested in teaching in the secondary and the
elementary schools, the position of the dean enabled them in advancing their skills. It was by the
1920s, that BA was mandatory in securing the position so that the deans could model the
learning and embolden students to pursue higher education. For the Black women promotion and
pay scale was quite limited therefore underscoring on the discrimination faced by these women
(Khorsandi Taskoh, 2014). They were usually relegated to the lower ranks and were involved in
the invisible work that went largely unrecognized. These activities include counseling,
coordinating the meetings, organization of civil rights campaigns, and in stretching the meager
resources that was aimed in the improvement of the resources of the college and the campus
communities. Although, there was a substantial increase in the number of women in these
teaching positions, it cannot be overlooked that a large section of women were seeping out of