Ireland and Australia I: Female Education
As women took up the pen as educators and authors of children’s literature, many also began to specifically comment on and advocate for the education of girls. Much of this writing forms an important narrative which goes against the grain of the more conservative and traditional ‘lessons for girls’ contained in the textbooks which circulated throughout Ireland’s and Australia’s school systems.
The Commissioners of Education in Ireland produced several editions of their reading books especially for girls. Like other texts in the collections at Queen’s and UFTM, examples of the Irish National School Girls Reading Book have been inscribed by the children that owned them and these inscriptions demonstrate how those texts were passed down from one generation of girls to another. The preface to the 1889 edition posits that the book ‘is not intended to supersede’ the use by girls of the third and fourth book of lessons, but to ‘convey information, which will be found more generally useful for Girls than that contained in the Fifth Book.’ The prose sections of the book provide practical lessons on a variety of largely domestic subjects, including cookery, household management, the duties of female servants, and management of the sick. The poetry sections include poems of women as mothers and daughters, as well as verses on women’s beauty and chastity.
Many female educationists in both Ireland and Australia, however, advocated in their writing a much more equal education for boys and girls including Irish writer, Maria Edgeworth. Edgeworth is now recognised as one of the leading writers for children and of educational treatises for adults working in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As well as publishing popular moral tales for children, Edgeworth also published several significant tracts espousing her ideas on, and practical experimental approaches to, education for children.
Edgeworth’s emphasis in these publications is always on a combination of instruction and amusement, as well as nurturing independent rational thinking rather than promoting rote learning. As Susan Manly comments in her introduction to Edgeworth’s volume, Practical Education (1798), the stress for Edgeworth is always on ‘equipping children so that they can think beyond existing parameters of knowledge, and to do so in ways that make experiment and exploration pleasurable, and independent discovery possible.’ Some of Edgeworth’s stories for children were edited and reproduced in school textbook series in Ireland, such as ‘The Stoppage of the Mill’ and ‘The Young Miner’s Fortune’ published in Browne & Nolan’s ‘Sterling Stories’ schoolbook series in 1860.
Edgeworth was also an influence on other writers. Australian writers, Catherine Helen Spence and Hannah Villiers Boyd both cite Edgeworth as recommended reading for parents and children alike, and library-borrowing records demonstrate that Edgeworth’s works circulated with some popularity in Australia. In an article for The Adelaide Observer in 1884, Spence hailed Edgeworth as ‘the almost creator of child literature’ and maintained that Edgeworth’s ‘influence extends to this day in several directions.’ Spence’s educational philosophies, like Edgeworth’s, promoted rational thinking in children. ‘Education’, wrote Spence, ‘has a twofold aspect … it is meant to teach many things necessary to be known, and it is meant in a still higher degree to train the mind.’
Like Edgeworth, Spence was also passionate about equal education for boys and girls. She echoes Edgeworth’s educational sentiments in Helen (1834) when she writes in her economics primer for children, The Laws We Live Under (1880), that ‘there can be no greater mistake for girls to make than to suppose that they have nothing to do with good citizenship and good government.’ Many of Spence’s stories for children adopt the didactic style of Edgeworth’s moral tales and many also feature strong and intelligent female protagonists, though Spence’s Christian morality often overwrites Edgeworth’s more secular tone. As in other children’s literature of this period in Australia, female heroism and learning is often framed within discourses of Christian goodness, such as the popular retelling of the Duff children lost in the Australian bush. Robert Richardson’s A Little Australian Girl, or, the babes in the bush (1881) is just one example of this.