Women and Education, 1800-1980 examines and celebrates the lives, aims, and achievements of six British women educational activists within nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: Elizabeth Hamilton, Sarah Austin, Jane Chessar, Mary Dendy, Shena Simon and Margaret Cole.
Employing a biographical approach, Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman adopt existing feminist and historical models to explore how these women resisted gender roles and combined their public lives with private commitments. As individuals, these women were very different personalities: as a group they show how organised women made a substantial contribution to public life and changed philosophy, policy and practice.
Women and Education is situated within the tradition of feminist engagements with recovering and reclaiming 'forgotten' female figures in history. By bringing the lives and actions of these female reformers to the forefront, Martin and Goodman not only offer fresh perspectives on the relation between theory and practice in education, but also give a critical new insight into the accomplishments of women in the past.