by Florence Boyle

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) Miss Tilney complains that history is about ‘The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome’.

There are still ‘hardly any women at all’ and since they don’t become popes or lead wars, women’s stories are often regarded as of no importance at all.

Growing up in Dunbartonshire in a family of active citizens, where the six o’clock news was heard in silence and newspapers were read cover to cover, I am surprised how often during my research I have come across names and events I knew nothing about. In this part of Clydeside, a skinny strip squashed between the Kilpatrick Hills and the Clyde, there is an established narrative and it’s overwhelmingly male: shipyards, engineering, on the sea, at war and playing sport, with the occasional story of a painter or writer. Not much room left for the stories of women; but all these stories have contributed to the history of this place.

For many women education was a game changer, but the truth is that, at least in middle and upper-class circles, women’s education was designed to make them more attractive marriage prospects, better wives and mothers. It was not a vehicle for liberation or independence. Enough education to attract but not intimidate men. An academic study into women’s education in the Victorian era, published in the mid-1970s, reported the views of a contemporary male commentator:

‘What we… seek for our children is not a learned machine stamped and ticketed with credentials… but rather a woman endowed with that sound principle, refinement, and sense, which no committee of education in the world could ascertain… all parents of sense must be aware that no governess can teach an… accomplishment like a regular professor, and that her vocation is rather the encouraging and directing her pupils in such pursuits than the positive imparting of them’.

Florence Boyle is treasurer of Open House.