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Gender Struggles

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Gender and Education in England since 1770

Part of the book series: Gender and History ((GAH))

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Abstract

This chapter is about the impact of the Women’s Liberation Movement on the history of education. It uses both public and private memories to map networks of feminist educators in the 1970s and 1980s and outline their educational aspirations and achievements, while showing gendered perceptions and prejudices that trouble a presentation of history as a linear narrative of modernisation. There is a particular focus on the radical innovations of the Inner London Education Authority, led often by feminists. In educational spaces, individual feminist/pro-feminist teachers and groups of feminists/pro-feminists tried to act as change agents, by consciousness raising and encouraging school-based anti-sexist work. In making their case for changing the current state of affairs, they wanted to go beyond equality of opportunity and make a difference with regard to equality of outcome.

When I was a girl I wished dreadfully that I had been born earlier so that I could have been a suffragette. Now I wish I had been born later, to involve myself in the essentially youthful ferment of Women’s Liberation. This seems less odd to many of my contemporaries than to many women young enough to be my daughters, who are apt to mutter that they have all the freedom they need, thank you, and what is there worth fussing about? Well, what is the Women’s Liberation fuss about? It is a search for an identity as a human being; a deeply felt, often inarticulate protest at being typecast by sex from birth to death.

—Mary Stott, 15 January 1971 Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism, ed. Kira Cochrane (London: Guardian Books, 2010), 3.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Diana Leonard, “Teachers, femocrats and academics: Activism in London,” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities in Schools? ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 181.

  2. 2.

    Sarah Olowe, Against the Tide: Black Experience in the ILEA (London: Inner London Education Authority, 1990), 11; Daniel Stilitz, “Sylvia Denman: Obituary”, Guardian, 30 May 2019.

  3. 3.

    See Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-socialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  4. 4.

    Nigel Wright, Assessing Radical Education (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1989), 182.

  5. 5.

    Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).

  6. 6.

    Jill Tweedie, “Why nice girls finish last,” in Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism, ed. Kira Cochrane (London: Guardian Books, 2010), 10.

  7. 7.

    Jill Tweedie, Eating Children with an Unfinished Memoir Frightening People (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 16, 98, 351.

  8. 8.

    David Kynaston, Modernity Britain 1957–62 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

  9. 9.

    Miriam David, Personal and Political: Feminisms, Sociology and Family Lives (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2003), 30.

  10. 10.

    Contemporary interest in feminist history grew after the making of the commercial cinema film Made in Dagenham (2010) (a stage musical version opened at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 2014), and Sarah Gavron’s 2015 film Suffragette.

  11. 11.

    Barbara Castle, “No Kitchen Cabinet,” in Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, ed. Sara Maitland (London: Virago, 1988), 53.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    Mary Stott, Before I Go (London: Virago, 1985), 21.

  14. 14.

    Tony Benn, Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–72 (London: Arrow Books, 1989), 257.

  15. 15.

    Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010 edition), 5.

  16. 16.

    Mary Kennedy, “One Woman’s Reflections on the Ruskin Conference, ‘celebrating the Women’s Liberation Movement thirty years on,’ Ruskin College, Oxford, 18 March 2000,” Women’s History Review, 10, no. 2 (2001), 349–352.

  17. 17.

    Sue Bruley, “Consciousness-Raising in Clapham; Women’s Liberation as ‘Lived Experience’ in South London in the 1970s,” Women’s History Review, 22, no. 5 (2013), 718–719.

  18. 18.

    Sue Bruley, “Consciousness-Raising in Clapham,” 725, 733–734.

  19. 19.

    bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 1–2.

  20. 20.

    Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (London: Serpents Tail, 2007), 3. According to the 1990 General Household Survey, the proportion of lone parents headed by an unmarried mother rose from 4 per cent of all households in 1987 to 6 per cent, from 5 per cent to 7 per cent by a divorced mother and from 2 per cent to 4 per cent by a separated mother. Figures cited in Sue Lees, Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 147.

  21. 21.

    Lynne Segal, Making Trouble, 4.

  22. 22.

    Anna Cootes and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London: Pan Books, 1982), 13.

  23. 23.

    Felicity Hunt, Gender & Policy in English Education 1902–1944 (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 143.

  24. 24.

    R.R. Dale, Mixed or Single-Sex School? Volume 1, A Research Study in Teacher-Pupil Relationships (London: Routledge, 1969), 237.

  25. 25.

    Robin Pedley, “The Comprehensive School: England,” FORUM, 5, no. 2 (1962), 5.

  26. 26.

    Kathleen Ollerenshaw, Education for Girls (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 66–67.

  27. 27.

    Barbara Cowell, “Mixed and Single-Sex Grouping in Secondary Schools,” Oxford Review of Education, 7, no. 2 (1981), 171.

  28. 28.

    Madeleine Arnot, “How shall we educate our sons?” In Co-Education Reconsidered, ed. Rosemary Deem (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984), 37–56; Pat Mahony, Schools for the Boys? Co-education Reassessed (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 48.

  29. 29.

    Interviewed by the author, 1 July 2015.

  30. 30.

    Annmarie Wolpe, Within School Walls: The Role of Discipline, Sexuality and the Curriculum (London: Routledge, 1988), 85.

  31. 31.

    Gaby Weiner, Feminisms in Education: An Introduction (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994), 75; Jane Marshall, “Developing Anti-Sexist Initiatives in Education,” International Journal of Political Education, 16, no. 2 (1983), 113–137.

  32. 32.

    Cited in Kate Myers, “How did we get here?” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities? ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 5.

  33. 33.

    Kate Myers, “Did it make a difference? The Ealing Experience 1987–9,” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities? ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 109.

  34. 34.

    Kate Myers, “Did it make a difference? The Ealing experience 1987–9,” 111.

  35. 35.

    Kate Myers, “Inequality in the Curriculum. How to Fail Most of Our Pupils without Really Trying”, Comprehensive Education, 49 (summer 1985), 17.

  36. 36.

    Richard Harris and Samuel Rose, “Who Benefits From Grammar Schools? A Case Study of Buckinghamshire, England,” Oxford Review of Education, 39, no. 2 (2013), 151–171.

  37. 37.

    Frances Magee, “Working with Boys at Hackney Downs School 1980–4,” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities in Schools? Gender Equality Initiatives in Education, ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 156–165; Lynn Raphael Reed, “‘Zero tolerance’: Gender performance and school failure,” in Failing Boys: Issues in Gender and Achievement, ed. Debbie Epstein, Jannette Elwood, Valerie Hey and Janet Maw (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 56–76.

  38. 38.

    Pat Mahony, Schools for the Boys, 158.

  39. 39.

    Lynn Raphael Reed, “‘Zero tolerance’: Gender performance and school failure,” 68.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Daily Express, 11 January 1983, op cit, 162.

  42. 42.

    Lynn Raphael Reed, “‘Zero tolerance’: Gender performance and school failure,” 70.

  43. 43.

    Maureen O’Connor, Elizabeth Hales, Jeffrey Davies and Sally Tomlinson, Hackney Downs: the School That Dared to Fight (London: Cassell, 1999).

  44. 44.

    Peter Medway, John Hardcastle, Georgina Brewis and David Crook, English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice in London Schools (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 47–48.

  45. 45.

    The Independent, 28 July 1995.

  46. 46.

    (https://www.livingarchive.org.uk/content/local-history/people/geoff-cooksey/geoff-cooksey-1925-2012).

  47. 47.

    Interviewed by the author, 9 February 2015.

  48. 48.

    Jenny Shaw, “The politics of single sex schools,” Co-Education Reconsidered, ed. Rosemary Deem (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984), 21–36; Stantonbury Campus Sexism in Education Group, Bridgewater Hall School, “The realities of mixed schooling,” in Co-Education Reconsidered, ed. Rosemary Deem (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984), 66.

  49. 49.

    Op cit, p. 69.

  50. 50.

    Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990).

  51. 51.

    Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

  52. 52.

    Frances Morrell, Children of the Future (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), 13–14.

  53. 53.

    Beatrix Campbell, “Labouring Women: An interview with Frances Morrell,” Marxism Today, July 1985.

  54. 54.

    Bruegel, I. and Kean, H. (1995) ‘The moment of municipal feminism: Gender and class in 1980s local government,’ Critical Social Policy, 147–169; Cynthia Cockburn, In the Way of Women: Men’s Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

  55. 55.

    Frances Morrell, “An episode in the thirty years war: Race, sex and class in the ILEA 1981–90,” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities in Schools? Gender Equality Initiatives in Education, ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 83–84.

  56. 56.

    Quoted in Frances Morrell, Children of the Future, 17.

  57. 57.

    Frances Morrell, “An episode in the thirty years war: Race, sex and class in the ILEA 1981–90,” 82.

  58. 58.

    Frances Morrell, “An episode in the thirty years war: Race, sex and class in the ILEA 1981–90,” 85.

  59. 59.

    Race, Sex and Class 1: Achievement in Schools (London: ILEA, 1983), 5.

  60. 60.

    Beatrix Campbell, “Labouring Women: An Interview with Frances Morrell,” Marxism Today July, 1985, 37.

  61. 61.

    Ruth Lister, Times Educational Supplement, 11 March 1983, 7.

  62. 62.

    Ibid.

  63. 63.

    Yvonne Roberts, “Carol Adams,” Guardian, 19 January 2007.

  64. 64.

    Carol Adams, “Who did the sewing? The hidden half of history,” Clio 1 (1981), 24.

  65. 65.

    London Women’s History Week 4–9 March 1985 programme, Kate Myers papers.

  66. 66.

    Stephen J. Ball and Sonia Exley, “Making policy with ‘good ideas’: Policy networks and the ‘intellectuals’ of New Labour,” Journal of Education Policy, 25, no. 2 (2010), 151–169.

  67. 67.

    Kate Myers, “Still Watching…’ in Genderwatch: Still Watching…, ed. Kate Myers, Hazel Taylor with Sue Adler and Diana Leonard (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2007), xi.

  68. 68.

    Irene Bruegel and Hilda Kean, 1995, 151; Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves (London: Virago, 2010), 174; George Nicholson and Linda Payne, “Frances Morrell: Politician and activist who worked with Tony Benn and Led the Inner London Education Authority,” The Independent, 19 January 2010.

  69. 69.

    Kate Myers, “Did it make a difference? The Ealing experience 1987–9,” 122.

  70. 70.

    Marina Foster, “A Black perspective,” in Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities in Schools? Gender Equality Initiatives in Education, ed. Kate Myers (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 189–200.

  71. 71.

    Geen Bernard, “The First Black Politician,” in Against the Tide, ed. Sarah Olowe (London: Inner London Education Authority, 1990), 44.

  72. 72.

    Campbell, Marxism Today, 37.

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      Jane Martin

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    Martin, J. (2022). Gender Struggles. In: Gender and Education in England since 1770. Gender and History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79746-1_10

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