Female learning in early modern Europe: Advocates and institutions

Schooling for girls begins in the early modern West as intellectuals make the case that women possess the same human characteristics as men do; that they are capable of rational thought; and that they can and should be educated. Religious and civil officials, founders of schools, teaching orders, school masters and mistresses accept the new characterization of women, finding girls to be worthy of education and apt pupils. They create day and boarding schools for girls across Europe, announcing them as ideal training grounds for literacy, academic training, domestic skills, and quite importantly, religious and moral training. The founding of the first schools for girls follows after more than a century of discussion of women's worth, carried on in a querelle des femmes, a "debate about women," that raised questions about the nature and capacity of women, commonly characterized as the "weaker sex.";In large part, a double-edged fear about endangering female chastity by exposing girls to ideas contained in books and removing them from the home to attend schools was addressed by humanists and other authors to allow for a greater acceptance of female learning, and soon after, girls' schooling. Influential figures, like Juan Luis Vives, Desiderius Erasmus, Johannes Amos Comenius, and Francois de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon wrote against the traditional view that barred women from learning, strongly advocating education for girls and women highlighting many benefits for the individual and society. Many of the first founders of girls' schools and teachers recognized and credited the earlier advocates for their works and ideas, which they implemented in the classroom.;This dissertation examines both the intellectual tradition of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries that opens the way to the schooling of women, and the emergence of the first schools, both religious and secular, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It culminates with the examination of the plan for co-education that the late eighteenth-century advocate, Mary Wollstonecraft proposed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , which forms a bridge between the early modern and modern conceptions of girls' schooling. Her revolutionary call for equal education as a means to human development and a just society, while unpopular in her day, came to fruition in parts of the West in the decades following her death.