| Women’s education plays a crucial role in human development. It can not only enhance their sense of worth and accomplishment, but also catalyze the economic and social development. What’s more, women’s education facilitates gender equality, helping eliminate sexual discrimination against women. As a result, it has been an important issue in worldwide educational development and is paid unprecedented attention both in and abroad.The contemporary women’s education in Britain started from the nineteenth century and in which the middle and later period has a historic impact on educational development. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, women’s education, more and more demanding, provided a material base for women’s educational reform. The deepgoing of the political reform and the rise of middle class inspired women’s participation in political society, which provided a drive to the development of women’s education, so did the wake of female consciousness from enlightenment. What gave a huge boost to the development of women’s education is feminists’unremitting effort to the change the inequality situation both in family and education. All the factors I analyzed above contributed to the revolutionary transformation in the middle and later nineteenth century.British previous outdated women’s education form came under attack with the push of the trend in the nineteenth century. Girls’schools sprung up in that period. With the universalization of women’s primary and secondary education, women’s adult education was growing and developing constantly, offering much more chances to women’s education. The rising up of women’s higher education gave female access to colleges and universities, which is only restriced to male before. Althoug it still had a few steps to reach sexual equality in education, the transformation did make a difference to gender equity education.Both women’s personal lives and the society in Britain were also influenced by the women’s educational development in the middle and later nineteenth century. Women’s education provides new opportunity and inspiration for the women’s role transition, urging them to think how to realize self-fulfilment and measure their economic, politicaland cultural status. They tried to free themselves off restrictions of marriage and family and fought for equal sexual social status. A number of women became more talented after education, which raised women’s employment, allowed women to move into higher-level social cicles and gradually eliminated all kinds of discrimination against women. Various circumstances cooperated to make women become more self-relient, self-confident and self-strengthening and also change women’s social status as secondary sex. What’s more, women’s education provided more talents for society, optimizing the human resource allocation, which made an important contribution to British economy and society. It was this success that prepared women for better education.However, such a big change has not revolutionized women’s social status in that period due to special history and time.Their status is still confined within the family and marriage, which reveals the patriarchal ideology in traditional society. Not all women could get education, which leaves a huge education gap between men and women. That’s the reason why the characteristics of women’s education were tender, gradual, inbalanced and halfway. Even so, these changes serve as fodder for improvement of educational equity. |
