Changing social attitudes to the higher education of girls with special reference to Wellington, 1874-1883

Abstract

This thesis is primarily concerned with examining the different social attitudes to the higher education of girls expressed in Wellington, New Zealand during the decade 1874-1883. However, these attitudes cannot and should not be considered in such an isolation of time and place and therefore the thesis also examines both contemporary opinions on the subject from other New Zealand centres and the British background of ideas and practice in girls' higher education which had such an important formative influence on the attitudes of New Zealand colonists. The British background is described through references from contemporary English literature and from the Reports of the Schools Inquiry Commission (the Taunton Commission) of 1868; while the wider New Zealand setting is conveyed through the examination of a number of books and pamphlets on the subjects of girls' education and womens' work published in various New Zealand cities from 1872 to 1884 and the consideration of evidence given to the O'Rourke Commission set up in 1879 to investigate the New Zealand University and its relations with the secondary schools of the Colony. Evidence of the attitudes to girls' higher education prevalent in Wellington during the period 1874-1883 comes mainly from the newspapers of the time and shows that such attitudes closely followed those recorded in New Zealand generally and in Britain, There existed side by side the traditional opinions that higher education should fit girls to be well-mannered, "accomplished" ladies of leisure and the more recent views that girls deserved - and the state should provide them with - every opportunity to extend their academic talents and exercise their brains. Much of the controversy between these differing attitudes as to the purpose and value of higher education for girls came over the effect of study on the physical and mental health of female students, the choice of subjects for a female curriculum and the propriety of educating adolescent boys and girls in the same class or even the same building; but the Wellington scene was dominated, at least from 1879, by a sense of civic shame that the capital was lagging behind the other main centres - and some of the minor ones - in not possessing an efficient, academic high school for girls. Civic cupidity also played its part in that Wellington opinion hated to see government funds assisting girls' education in other centres while the capital's fathers had to bear the full brunt of their daughters' school fees. The establishment of the Wellington Girls' High School in 1883 was in many ways the result of Wellington's parochial determination not to suffer in prestige or pocket because no such school existed in the capital; its outstanding success was a vindication of all those who had claimed that higher education was a girl's right and that it would make, not mar, future generations of New Zealand women.