Here in the UK it’s the first day of the new school year today. I can vividly remember the pleasure of the school summer holidays – six weeks off! – lasting from the end of July to the beginning of September, including my birthday and usually a holiday by the seaside. Summer was such a treat in that respect! Then the days would start to shorten and the nights would turn cooler and even if it felt as though it was still summer we knew that autumn and a return to school was on the way. The shops would all go on about “back to school” uniforms and stationery, and my grandfather in particular would tease me about going back to school knowing how much I wanted the holidays never to end. It wasn’t that I disliked school. I enjoyed it most of the time but there was something special about those summer holidays of childhood. Of course I never really thought about how fortunate I was to have an education until I started to study history and realised that girls in particular hadn’t always had those opportunities.
I was reminded of this when I watched the new costume drama that’s on UK TV (another sign that summer is over!) Vanity Fair 
starts with the heroine Becky Sharp leaving her position as a teaching assistant at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. She has been an “articled pupil” who has had to work for her own education by teaching French to other pupils. There is a big social gap between her and the daughters of rich merchant or gentry families who pay for their education. This is emphasised in the early scenes by the young ladies wearing the pastel colours of debutantes whilst Becky is in grey, a colour associated with work and a colour that often forms a part of school uniforms! (Mine was cherry red and grey.)
Schools such as Miss Pinkerton’s Academy feature heavily in literature in, and about, the Regency and Victorian period. The more exclusive seminaries in London and Bath took both boarders and day pupils and were often established by relatively impoverished gentlewomen who had enough money to set up a school but needed to generate an income from it. Cherry Steane in Georgette Heyer’s Charity Girl attended Miss Fletchling’s School in Bath and was very happy there, whilst Jenny Chawleigh, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in A Civil Contract, was sent to Miss Satterley’s Seminary for the Daughters of Gentlemen in Kensington in the hope she might make some advantageous connections with the upper classes as well as gaining what was known as a “comprehensive education.” This comprised decorum and female accomplishments such as drawing and painting, music and French. Manners and etiquette – elegancy of mind, as it was known – were also highly prized, and I think that is fair enough. I loved studying music and languages, but I’m also glad I had the chance to tackle physics!
Interestingly though, the Georgian method of education could be construed as a distinct step back for women. Educational opportunities for anyone in Britain had been small in the medieval period, being provided only by family members or the church. Your best chance of an education as a woman was to become a nun; you could then be paid to teach the children on wealthy families. Teaching within the family home often included girls as well as boys since it was an asset to a woman running her own home. If you were a peasant of either sex, however, which most of us would have been, education was not a priority. The rise of the merchant classes in the Tudor and Stuart era was a giant leap forward for women since giving them an education was seen as beneficial to the family business. Elizabeth Craven was one such woman. After the death of her husband she continued to run both his cloth and his moneylending businesses at vast profit. As a girl she and her sisters had been well-educated alongside their brothers. Aphra Behn, poet, playwright, translator and spy was another exceptionally well-educated and able woman of the times.
The Georgian era was a time of contrasts for women’s education since the Bluestocking movement was sharing and promoting 
educational pursuits and authors such as Mary Woolstonecraft were writing on women’s place in society. However the increasing emphasis on the separate spheres, where men went out to work and women took care of the household and the children, meant that girls no longer received the same education as their brothers but one that was more suited to the domestic sphere. Which brings us back to seminaries and poor Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, who couldn’t wait to leave Miss Pinkerton’s Academy but was then obliged to take a role as a governess.
Sitting here today I’m glad I don’t have to go to school on this first day back, but equally glad that I had the chance to learn when I did. When I was watching the lines of girls in their pastel gowns tripping out of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy I can’t help but wonder whether I would have been satisfied with that sort of education or whether I would have been sneaking into the library to read books that were banned for girls…
Do you have happy memories of schooldays, a favourite subject or activity connected with school, or are you glad that time is behind you?
