Accessing Equal Education
Résumé
Women in Britain have long experienced a paradox in their relationship to education. Although greater access to education has underpinned almost every feminist claim, girls and women have always found education to be a simultaneously radical and conservative force in their lives. As much as acquiring new skills and knowledge has held the promise of advancement and equality, educational institutions have also worked to curtail and narrow women’s ambitions, and to reproduce existing social orders of gender, class and race. The story of the place of education in women’s lives in modern Britain is about the ongoing struggle to master and overcome this tension.