Education
Women were not freely offered the opportunity to study subjects of an extended, classical, and commercial nature. This made it difficult for a woman to break free from the societal constraints to achieve independent economical status. Education was specialised by gender. Women were provided with the opportunity to study refined subjects such as history, geography and general literature which would provide them with interesting but noncontroversial topics for discussion. Despite the restrictions and stigmatisation, some women did excel in "male" subjects such as law, physics, engineering, science and art. These women pioneered the path for the much improved gender equality in modern education in the UK. Women were rarely given the opportunity to attend university. It was even said that studying was against their nature and could make them ill. They were to stay more or less an "ornament of society."
Read more about this topic: Women In The Victorian Era
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Whether in the field of health, education or welfare, I have put my emphasis on preventive rather than curative programs and tried to influence our elaborate, costly and ill- co-ordinated welfare organizations in that direction. Unfortunately the momentum of social work is still directed toward compensating the victims of our society for its injustices rather than eliminating those injustices.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)