Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England by Carol Dyhouse

Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England by Carol Dyhouse

Girls learn about femininity from childhood onwards, first through their relationships in the family, and later from their teachers and peers. Using sources which vary from diaries to Inspector's reports, this book studies the socialization of middle- and working-class girls in late Victorian and early-Edwardian England. It traces the ways in which schooling at all social levels at this time tended to reinforce lessons in the sexual division of labour and patterns of authority between men and women, which girls had already learned at home. Considering the social anxieties that helped to shape the curriculum offered to working-class girls through the period 1870-1920, the book goes on to focus on the emergence of a social psychology of adolescent girlhood in the early-twentieth century and finally, examines the relationship between feminism and girls' education.

Carol Dyhouse is a history professor at Sussex University. Her primary research interests are on the history of women and gender, as well as the social history of education. No Difference of Sex? is her first book.