Girls at school in nineteenth-century Ireland

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the formal education of girls in Ireland, both working and middle class, in the century between the 1801 Act of Union and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Historians such as Mary Cullen, Susan Parkes and Deirdre Raftery have established that gender-as a social and cultural determinant of what, where, why and how girls were educated-was a key influence on female education in Ireland. Their work has also revealed that, while gender was not the only, or always the primary, factor affecting girls’ education, it was almost always in the mix with religion, politics, social class, and family values and needs.