Page 257 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

246 ENGLISH STUDIES

The implicit contradiction between the vital importance of women fulfilling
their ‘natural’ role and the stress on training for it was contained within
educational practice in the 1930s by the notion of education for citizenship, to
which all, as citizens, were entitled but which was different in nature for girls
and boys. After the First World War the state education system underwent a
gradual and regionally uneven process of restructuring and transformation, which
included some expansion in the secondary sector. Behind these shifts lay ideas of
equal educational opportunity for all, which were both a labour movement ideal
and, more generally, a part of the ideology of the rights of citizenship. There
were two main strains of educational theory—multilateralism, which
corresponded to comprehensive education policy today (Tawney, the National
Union of Teachers and the Trades Union Congress), and a system including a
range of secondary schools with selection at the age of eleven on the basis of
intelligence testing. This second strand, advocated by the psychologist Burt,
influenced official Government policy in the Spens Report (1938). Whatever
their differences, both were aimed at diversification within education according
to the ability of the individual child and specialization along traditional gender
lines. Equality served as a formal criterion beneath which the dominant modes of
gender differentiation established in the home were reinforced. Thus
diversification of the educational programme entailed for girls the teaching of
subjects deemed suitable for their ‘natural’ profession as wives and mothers. In
relation to the teaching of English, it is significant to note that ‘literature’ is
categorized by Burt as a subject that girls are good at. This coincides with a
move in the teaching of literacy from the use of literature to the English subjects
(history, civics and geography) through which literature becomes marginalized
within nongrammar school curricula.
For the small majority of girls who had the opportunity of secondary and
further education, teaching was geared towards the requirements of the
expanding female professions of, for example, secretarial work, nursing and
teaching. Access to other professions was limited, and women were barred from
teaching and the Civil Service upon marriage. University education was still
unavailable to most women, and in the field of literary production men occupied
the positions of power within the universities and publishing. Openings for
women were, on the whole, limited to journalism and jobs as literary agents,
which were low-status professions within literary production. However, while
marriage continued to be regarded as the only true and natural profession for
women, to which they should devote their energies exclusively, there was an
increase in the number of professional women, if not a revaluation of their status.
‘It may be love that makes the world go round, but it’s spinsters who oil the
wheels.’ 57