Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

by Carol Dyhouse

Girls learn about "femininity" from childhood onwards, first through their relationships in the family, and later from their teachers and peers. Using sources which vary from diaries to Inspector’s reports, this book studies the socialization of middle- and working-class girls in late Victorian and early-Edwardian England. It traces the ways in which schooling at all social levels at this time tended to reinforce lessons in the sexual division of labour and patterns of authority between men and women, which girls had already learned at home. Considering the social anxieties that helped to shape the curriculum offered to working-class girls through the period 1870-1920, the book goes on to focus on the emergence of a social psychology of adolescent girlhood in the early-twentieth century and finally, examines the relationship between feminism and girls’ education.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian

241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1981

About the author

Carol Dyhouse is a social historian. Her research has focused on gender, education and the pattern of women's lives in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. Her books include Girls Growing Up in late Victorian and Edwardian England (1981); Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939, (1989); No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities (1995); and Students: A Gendered History (2006). An interest in clothing and material culture, and the ways in which these relate to changing ideas about femininity, led to work on the subject of glamour, its controversial status within feminism, and its meanings to women in history. Carol Dyhouse is currently a Research Professor in History at the University of Sussex.