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James C. Albisetti, Joyce Goodman, and Rebecca Rogers, eds., Girls' Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 223 pp., US$85.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-230-61946-3.
This important and stimulating volume brings together specialists in the history of girls' secondary education in more than thirteen European settings. It should com- mand the attention of historians of education and historians of women, as well as historians of the individual nations treated. Many chapters in the volume also offer valuable comparative perspectives. The first eleven essays treat Great Britain and Ire- land; France; German and German Austria; Italy; Spain; Portugal; the Netherlands; Belgium; Sweden, Denmark, and Norway; Bulgaria (presented with background on Greece and Serbia); and Russia. The twelfth essay examines European reactions to an American model of secondary schooling, and the last considers how some European models crossed borders. Much of the scholarship presented has not been available previously in English, and the editors-who are American, English, and French-have admirably assembled contributions from colleagues in Continental Europe and en- couraged contributors to address certain common themes, presented in the "Histori- cal Introduction." The editors cite as forerunners to their volume the treatments of secondary education in two collaborative efforts produced by late nineteenth-century feminists: The Woman Question in Europe (1884) edited by Theodore Stanton, son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and Der Stand der Frauenbildung in den Kulturländern (The po- sition of women's education in the cultured countries; 1902), part of a multivolume work edited by Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer. Contributors to this new volume begin their chapters with historiographical introductions and then treat public and private schooling; teachers, students, and administrators; paths to equalizing male and female secondary schooling; and, where appropriate, the exporting of educational practices to overseas colonies.
The history of education...