Education Feminism, Gender Equality and School Reform in Late Twentieth Century England

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discover what we have learnt about gender inequalities in society from the ways in which such inequalities have been addressed by policy makers, teachers and one of the major social movements of the twentieth century, education feminism (Stone 1994). Historical analysis of the gender reform movement exposes the complex interface between economic and political structures, macro and micro educational structures and processes and cultural movements, and the nuanced engagements between social class, ethnicity and gender inequalities. We learn how gender inequalities operate differently in different contexts and spaces and therefore remove the possibility of generalisations and simplistic policy approaches. We see how the search for measures of gender equality in education reflects differences of perspective, purposes and assessments.