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The Opening of Higher Education to Women in Nineteenth Century England: ‘Unexpected Revolution’ or Inevitable Change?
Author(s) -
Raftery Deirdre
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
higher education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.976
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1468-2273
pISSN - 0951-5224
DOI - 10.1111/1468-2273.00223
Subject(s) - scholarship , higher education , industrial revolution , new england , subject (documents) , gender studies , perception , period (music) , sociology , formal education , political science , social science , history , pedagogy , psychology , aesthetics , law , art , library science , neuroscience , politics , computer science
The nineteenth century movement to open higher education to women in England has been the subject of much scholarship in the last two decades. Studies of individual colleges have added to the corpus of research on how women were provided with formal higher education at this time. However, scholars offer differing theories as to why radical changes in the higher education of women took place when they did. This paper offers a synthesis of these various theories, and challenges the general perception that the opening of higher education to women was an ‘unexpected revolution’ (Bryant, 1987).