Behind the School Walls: The School Community in French and English Boarding Schools for Girls, 1810–1867

Abstract

This article develops a comparative analysis of lay boarding schools for girls in France and England in the first part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that the character of school life in the two countries differed markedly. Contemporary observers such as Matthew Arnold, Henry Montucci and Jacques Demogeot visited boys' schools on either side of the Channel and contrasted the “barrack‐life” of lycées in France with the more domestic arrangements of English public schools, but they did not visit the private boarding schools for girls that were multiplying in both England and France in the first half of the nineteenth century. Evidence collected from inspection records, school memoirs and pedagogical treatises, however, reveals differences between female establishments on either side of the Channel that echoed, but were not identical to, the contrasts between English and French boys' schools. Different ideas on the nature and role of women interacted with the separate educational traditions of the two countries to construct two distinct institutional models of female schooling which could be termed “domestic” for England, and “conventual” for France. The article compares female institutions in the two countries to uncover some of the key features of these distinct models of schooling. In highlighting the way ideas about gender shaped school communities, it points to differences in the prevailing conception of femininity on either side of the Channel.

Jacques Demogeot & Henry Montucci, De l'Enseignement Secondaire en Angleterre et en Écosse (Paris, 1868), pp. iii–iv.

English girls' schools tended to be small in size and self‐consciously familial and homely in atmosphere and organization. Many schoolmistresses deliberately limited the number of pupils they would accept in order to preserve the intimate and domestic character of their establishments. This reflects the influence of a conception of femininity emphasizing women's maternal nature and domestic role, and women teachers' need to conform to this ideal in order to preserve their middle‐class status. French schools, by contrast, were more often large, hierarchically organized establishments. Unlike their English counterparts, they tended to be housed in buildings specially adapted as schools. The institutional character of French schools owed much to the educational patterns of convent schooling and to the powerful position occupied by women in religious orders.

The differences between these two conceptions of the school affected the conditions of school life and relations between pupils and teachers in concrete ways. In England, schoolmistresses tended to cultivate warm relationships with their pupils, and often characterized their role in maternal terms. Naturally, in practice not all relationships between teachers and their charges were as harmonious as the language of motherhood might suggest, yet at a time when spinsters might be labelled “redundant” or “unnatural”, drawing on a maternal metaphor was one of the ways in which schoolmistresses, who were for the most part unmarried and childless, could reconcile their situation with prevailing ideals of femininity. At the same time, motherhood was the only socially legitimate position through which a woman could exercise authority. In keeping with the familial atmosphere, warm relations between pupils were also encouraged in English girls' schools, and girls often enjoyed considerable liberty in the collective “room of one's own” that school could offer. In France, schoolmistresses tended to maintain more distant relations with their pupils, drawing on the precedents established by women in religious orders to develop authoritative public personae. At the same time, pupils were strictly supervised and attempts were made to limit the intimacy of friendships between schoolgirls. Schoolgirl memoirs are peppered with references to “the school walls” that heightened pupils' sense of enclosure and contained them within a rigid system of discipline and order. In practice, girls at school were often able to establish warm friendships with their peers and to circumvent the rules, yet such intimacies and rebellions went against the grain. The school regulations preserved in the archives evoke strictly ordered days and continual supervision of pupils; they reveal a preoccupation with order and discipline and the same suspicion of female autonomy that Bonnie Smith and Gabrielle Houbre have identified in the work of Catholic educators whose central concern was the preservation of a feminine innocence.

The interaction of differing ideas about the nature and role of women with distinct inherited educational traditions and with contrasting ideas about the state's role in education resulted in the construction of two distinct models of female schooling in England and France. The effect was that if, in both countries, the stated aim of the education provided by girls' boarding schools was to educate girls for motherhood, behind the school walls the character of daily life in English and French establishments differed in significant ways. Comparing the structure of schools and experience of schoolmistresses and their pupils in these different institutions highlights the ways in which ideas about gender helped shape the school community and uncovers the roots of the contrasting evolution of female education on either side of the Channel.

Notes

Jacques Demogeot & Henry Montucci, De l'Enseignement Secondaire en Angleterre et en Écosse (Paris, 1868), pp. iii–iv.

Matthew Arnold, “A French Eton” (1864), in Peter Smith & Geoffrey Summerfield (Eds), Matthew Arnold and the Education of the New Order (Cambridge, 1967), p. 79.

Demogeot & Montucci, De l'Enseignement, p. 593.

Arnold, “A French Eton”, p. 121.

Archives Départementales du Nord, Rapport de Debruyne sur l'Instruction primaire dans le département, 1 August 1846, 1T 107/2.

Whittaker's Boarding School and London Masters Directory (London, 1828), pp. 1–27.

Conseil Général du département de la Seine, Résultats de l'Inspection des Pensionnats de Demoiselles (1847, 1864).

National and Provincial directory for Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Monmouthshire, Rutlandshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, North Wales and South Wales (Manchester, 1835), p. 74.

Report of the Manchester Statistical Society on the State of Education in the Borough of Salford (Manchester, 1835), p. 31.

Archives Nationales, Réponses à la circulaire du Ministre concernant le Règlement du préfet de la Seine du 7 mars 1837, F¹⁷ 12432.

Archives Municipales de Douai, Etat nominatif des institutrices employées dans les Pensionnats de Demoiselles, c. 1819, 1 R 32.

Annuaire Judiciaire, Administratif et Commercial du département de la Gironde et de la Ville de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1843), p. 526; Annuaire Général du Commerce de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1865), pp. 217–218.

Annuaire de l'Arrondissement de Lille, du Commerce, de l'Industrie, de la Magistrature et de l'Administration (Lille, 1865), p. 471.

Emma Willard, Journal and Letters from France and Great Britain (New York, 1833), p. 245.

Dorothea Beale, “Girls' Schools Past and Present”, Nineteenth Century, XXV (April 1888), p. 544.

Henry Roby, “Instructions to Assistant Commissioners appointed to examine education in certain selected areas”, in Parliamentary Papers, XXVIII: Reports of the Schools Inquiry Commission, 21 vols (London, 1868), 19, p. 480. Henceforth: Schools Inquiry Commission.

J.L. Hammond, “Report on Northumberland and Norfolk”, Schools Inquiry Commission, 2, p. 24.

J. Bryce, “Report on Lancashire”, Schools Inquiry Commission, 8, p. 830.

Mrs Hugh Fraser, A Diplomatist's Wife in Many Lands, 2 vols (London, 1910), 1, p. 223; William Henry Herford, In Memoriam. Louisa Carbutt and Brooke House, 1860–1870 (Manchester, 1907), p. 44.

Biographical sample of English schoolmistresses born between 1780 and 1860, compiled from correspondence, memoirs and biographies.

Advertisement from Jackson's Oxford Journal, 17 January 1818, quoted in Susan Skedd, The Education of Women in Hanoverian Britain, c. 1760–1820 (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford, 1996), p. 183.

Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987).

Quoted in Herford, In Memoriam, pp. 27, 45.

Fraser, A Diplomatist's Wife, 1, p. 223.

H.A. Giffard, “Report on Sussex and Surrey”, Schools Inquiry Commission, 9, p. 211.

“Report of the Commissioners”, Schools Inquiry Commission, 1, p. 560.

Anna Stoddart, Life and Letters of Hannah E. Pipe (London, 1908), p. 58.

Fraser, A Diplomatist's Wife, 1, p. 220.

Journal entry 5 November 1872, Alice Whichelo's Journal, Kings Modern Archives Centre, Kings College, Cambridge, Forster papers.

Bessie Rayner Parkes, “My Childhood, my Schooldays”, 1849, Girton College Archives, Cambridge, BRPI 1–3.

Christina de Bellaigue, “The Development of Teaching as a Profession for Women before 1870”, Historical Journal, XXXXIV (2001), pp. 963–988.

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Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Pensions et Institutions de Demoiselles, 16 March 1851, 6T 12.

Jeanne Campan, De l'Education, 3 vols (Paris, 1824), 1, p. 313.

Margaret Bryant, The London Experience of Secondary Education (London, 1986), p. 70; Martine Sonnet, L'Education des Filles au Temps des Lumières (Paris, 1987); Philippe Savoie, Les Enseignants du Secondaire, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, 2000), p. 21.

Rebecca Rogers, Les Demoiselles de la Légion d'Honneur (Paris, 1992), p. 69.

Hazel Mills, Women and Catholicism in Provincial France c. 1800–c. 1830, (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford, 1994); Emily Clark, “ ‘By all the conduct of their lives’: a laywomen's confraternity in New Orleans, 1730–1744”, William and Mary Quarterly, LIV (1997), p. 773.

Joséphine Bachellery, Lettres sur l'Education des Femmes (Paris, 1848), p. 61.

AD Seine, Règlement pour les écoles de filles du département de la Seine, 20 August 1810, VD4 21/5496. Though the prefects of the Seine were the most assiduous in setting out and enforcing such regulations, similar rulings were gradually instituted throughout France. They are reproduced in the Revue de l'Enseignement des Femmes, I and II (jan.–fév. 1845).

AD Seine, Bulletin d'Inspection de la pension de Mme Achet, 1846–7, VD6 158/1; dossier de Mme Achet, c.1842, DT Supplément/1.

Antoine Caillot, Tableau des Exercices et des Enseignements en Usage dans un Pensionnat de Jeunes Demoiselles, 2 vols (Paris, 1816), 1, p. 221.

Archives Nationales, Règlement concernant les Maisons d'Education de Filles dans le Département de la Seine, 1 December 1821, F¹⁷ 12341.

Mme Brada (Henrietta Puliga), Souvenirs d'une Petite du Second Empire (Paris, 1921), p. 15.

Winifred Gerin, Emily Brontë (Oxford, 1967), p. 497.

M.E. James, Alice Ottley (London, 1914), p. 71.

Annie Ridley, Frances Mary Buss and her Work for Education (London, 1895), pp. 63, 76.

Everilda Gardiner, Recollections of a Beloved Mother (London, 1842), p. 27.

Stoddart, Life and Letters, p. 47.

Charlotte Brontë, “Roe Head Journal”, quoted in Clement Shorter (Ed.), The Brontës. Life and Letters, 2 vols (London, 1929), 1, p. 143.

Georgiana Burne‐Jones, quoted in John Van Aikin Burd (Ed.), The Winnington Letters of John Ruskin (London, 1969), p. 33.

John Ludlow, review, North British Review, XIX (1853), pp. 151–174, quoted in Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell (London, 1993), p. 317.

William Rathbone Greg, “Why are Women Redundant?”, National Review, XIV (April 1862), pp. 433–435.

Frances Paget‐Hett (Ed.), Memoirs of Susan Sibbald (London, 1926), p. 84.

Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London, 1965), p. 40; Bessie Rayner Parkes, “My Childhood, my Schooldays”.

Bessie Rayner Parkes to Kate Jeavons, March 1849, Girton College Archives, Cambridge, BRPVI 52/4.

Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by herself (London, 1894), pp. 62–63.

Quoted in Henry Maclachlan, Records of a Family (Manchester, 1935), p. 75.

John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852), quoted in Gillian Sutherland, “ ‘The plainest principles of Justice’: The University of London and the Higher Education of Women”, in F.M.L. Thompson (Ed.), The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986 (London, 1990), p. 37.

Miriam Lerenbaum, “Education in the Lives and Works of Late Eighteenth Century Women”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CXXI (1977), p. 300.

Bessie Rayner Parkes to Kate Jeavons, 24 January 1847, Girton College Archives, Cambridge, BPRIV 50/1. Rayner Parkes, “My Childhood, my Schooldays”.

Marie Sincère (pseudonym of Marie Romieu), Les Pensionnats de Jeunes Filles (Paris, 1853), p. 20.

AD Seine, Rapport sur l'Institution de Mme Garnier, mai 1823, VD6 158/3.

Riobé, Notice Sur Ma Fille (Le Mans, 1863), p. 179.

Campan, De l'Education, 2, p. 25

Sophie de Renneville, Lettres d'Octavie (Paris, 1806), p. 213.

Brada, Souvenirs, p. 29.

Campan, De l'Education, 2, p. 25.

AD Seine, Règlement de Mme Bazin, c. 1842, VD6 650/1.

Sonnet, L'Education, pp. 140–69.

Campan, De l'Education, pp. 314–315; AN, Règlement de la Seine, 1 December 1821, F¹⁷ 12341.

See for example, AD Seine, Règlement de la maison de Mme Bazin, c. 1842, VD6 650/1, and AD Seine, Règlement du pensionnat de Mlle Viard, 26 August 1841, VD6 649/1.

Quoted in Josephine Kamm, How Different From Us. A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale (London, 1958), p. 26.

AD Seine, Bulletin d'Inspection de la pension de Mme Villeneuve, 1838, VD6 158/3.

Archives Municipales de Bordeaux, Règlement, 1840–41, Fonds Ploux/8.

Ibid.

AD Seine, Bulletin d'Inspection de la maison de Mme Achet, 1845–7, VD6 158/3.

Adèle Esquiros, Histoire d'une Sous‐Maîtresse (Paris, 1861), p. vii.

Quoted in Riobé, Notice, p. 179.

Mme Picanon (Henriette Berthoud), Mon Frère et Moi. Souvenirs de Jeunesse (Paris, 1876), p. 12.

Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class (Princeton, 1981), p. 174; Gabrielle Houbre, “Les Influences religieuses sur l'éducation sentimentale des jeunes filles dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle”, in Brigitte Maillard (Ed.), Foi, fidélité, amitié en Europe à la période moderne. Mélanges offerts à Robert Sauzet, 2 vols (Tours, 1995), 2, p. 345.

James, Alice Ottley, p. 72.

Blanqui (aîé), “Des demoiselles et des dames en France et en Angleterre”, Journal Des Femmes, I (1832), p. 246.

Rebecca Rogers, “Boarding schools, Women Teachers and Domesticity: Reforming Girls' Secondary Education in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century”, French Historical Studies, 19 (1995), pp. 153–183.

Françoise Mayeur, L'Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1977), p. 108.

Sara Delamont, “The Contradictions in Ladies' Education”, in Sara Delamont & Lorna Duffin (Eds), The Nineteenth Century Woman. Her Cultural and Physical World (London, 1978), pp. 134–163.

* The author has been awarded the ISCHE prize 2002 for this article.