Feminist pushback to such ideas was already beginning to emerge and from the late 1960s onwards, teachers – many influenced by the growing women’s liberation movement – sought to challenge sex-based stereotypes and sexist assumptions about girls’ ambitions, expectations and life chances. Schools were expected to prepare ‘less able’ girls for domestic roles because, ‘their needs are much more sharply differentiated from those of boys of the same age than is true of the academically abler groups’. The Crowther Report, published by the Ministy of Education in 1959, contains a lengthy section on ‘Women’s Education for Marriage and Employment’. Unequal educational opportunities, driven by a notion of inherent sex-based differences, continued to shape schooling well into the second half of the twentieth century. This suggests girls needed prompting to undertake the training in domestic service which prepared them for later employment and, in a circular argument, then justified future gendered educational inequalities. As Jane Martin notes in Gender and Education in England since 1770, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the government provided financial incentives for schools to increase the teaching of domestic science to girls.
(1) In the classroom, this meant differential access to the curriculum and distinct behavioural expectations, with girls taught cookery and domestic economy, for example, and boys woodwork and metal work. Schooling girls and boysįor two centuries, sharp distinctions in the schooling of boys and girls reflected the ‘broad acceptance of natural, inherent, differences between the sexes’ and the subsequent unequal position of men and women in society. Meanwhile, parents are left increasingly alienated from the process of raising their own children. This has led to demands for gender neutrality (as opposed to sexual equality) while also creating the troubling prospect that outdated sexist stereotypes are rehabilitated in the guise of transgender inclusivity. But changes in elite thinking about the meaning of sex have detatched gendered socialisation from both biology and broader social norms. Schools, as social institutions, reflect and shape our assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman.
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