Red Ajah's International Women's Week: Women in Education [Discussion]

[Moon Sedai]

Welcome to the Red Ajah Celebration of International Women’s Week!

In this thread, we celebrate Women as Teachers and Educators!

 

 

Over the next few weeks, we will be discussing the various Women in History who have contributed to Education, either though the building of schools, the specific Education of their children, or other contributions to Education.

 

 

Today, I introduce Fatima Al-Fihri (c. 800 AD, the European Middle Ages).

 

 

 

Fatima Al-Fihri was a well-educated Muslim woman born to a prestigious famil. When she inherited a fortune from her father, she and her sister decided to spend their money to improve their communities. Instead of seeking a husband or wasting her fortune on luxuries, Fatima founded the University of Quarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Mariam built a mosque, Al-Andalus with her inheritance. This university is the oldest academic degree-seeking university in existence today. The University trained a number of renowned scholars, including Ibn Khaldun and Ibn al-Arabi and the Jewish scholar Maimonedes.

 

 

I invite you to not only add and discuss historical women, but women in your life that have influenced your education!

[poetstorm]

I just love this topic being a former educator myself. :D

 

I don’t know if you had planned to cover this one, so sorry if I give anything away. My current favorite is Anne Sullivan the woman who taught Helen Keller. She lived here on Long Island which is where I am from. Her patience and persistence was a great help. And through her help, Helen Keller herself be came an activist and a lecturer.

[Moon Sedai]

Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan were on my list, but by all means, don't worry about who I will talk about when discussing!

 

I find it amazingly awesome that Annie Sullivan discovered a way to communicate with Helen Keller. It's a triumph of education!

 

 

 

And, I'm kinda an educator as well [an unemployed but certified teacher. No jobs in my area. :(

[Torrie]

The story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan has always amazed me. Could you imagine not being able to see, hear, or speak? It is a scary thought. Then one day someone helps you and you both come up with a way to communicate. What joy Helen must have felt to finally be able to voice that she was hungry or was happy. It is amazing how animal like we become without simple communication.

 

One of my favorite women teachers is M. Carey Thomas. Despite her fathers wishes and the school board making her sit behind a screen so she would not distract the males in the class, she graduated from the University of Zürich with a PhD and became the first woman and foreigner to do so.

She then went on to become president of Bryn Mawr, an Quaker womans school, she also helped ensure women were allowed access to the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

[Moon Sedai]

In the interest in spurring the idea of Women in Education, I will now talk about Women’s education during the Renaissance/Reformation period.

 

 

By the 1500s, women’s education consisted mainly of things that were seen as important for her position as wife and mother. She would learn how to take care of the house, raise and care for children, and the domestic skills necessary for her household to function. She might also learn how to do the trade of her father or husband, and assist her family in earning money in that fashion. The noblewoman fared better in education than the “common” woman.

 

Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536).

She was the Daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and the first wife of King Henry VIII. She commissioned a book titled “The Education of Christian Women,” which influenced the idea, in England, that women should get an education. She also donated money to colleges in England. She learned to speak, read, and write in Spanish, Latin, and English, but also to speak French and Greek.

 

 

A contemporary of Catherine of Aragon, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) the writer of Utopia.

I include More here, because, even though he was a Man, he also saw the importance of Education for his daughters, and even his wives. More undoubtedly knew Catherine of Aragon, he was considered a friend by her husband Henry. He ensured his daughters received the same classical education as he gave his sons. The education of his eldest daughter, Margaret, was so impressive that other philosophers and nobles began to see the Merit in the education of girls.

 

 

[Mystica]

this is quite informational and interesting to read. Looking forward to what you have in store further :D

[Moon Sedai]

I realized that I have skipped forward in history without explaining the education of western women in the middle ages.

 

Let me introduce

 

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

 

 

 

Hildegard was a Christian mystic, an abbess, writer, composer, and philosopher.

 

 

 

From a very young age, Hildegard experienced holy visions. When she was around 8 years old, Hildegard lived in the church, and was taught to read and write by an elder nun named Jutta and a monk named Volmar.

 

She wrote music, plays, poems, letters and books throughout her cloistered life. She also founded 2 monasteries.

 

As an abbess, Hildegard had an extraordinary amount of independence and power.

 

While living in a cloister might seem to be confining or restraining to the modern woman, life as a nun offered some women more power than they might have experienced outside the Church. Hildegard, and many nuns like her, wielded power in their own religious life unknown to many lay women.

 

 

[Moon Sedai]

Now I would like to introduce

 

Judith Sargent Murray

(1751-1820)

Judith Sargent Murray was born in Colonial Massachusetts to a wealthy family. Throughout her childhood, she became angered when her younger brother received a higher education than she did. Where her brother learned Latin and Greek and got to attend university, she was taught to read and write, a little bit of French, and the basic domestic skills required to run a household.

 

Judith’s first husband, John Stevens, was not the provider she needed. In fact, he squandered away his own money and abandoned her. While they were together, he constantly reminded her that he was in charge of the finances, and would not allow her to help him in any way. The poverty that her first husband drover her two was a major concern for the child of privilege. He fled to the Caribbean to escape debtor’s prison and died without returning home.

 

 

After she received news of her first husband’s death, she married John Murray, a Universalist minister. Her second husband allowed her to retain control of her own finances. Her heavy involvement in the Universalist church, including her assistance in publishing his works and memoirs, helped influence the church to give women a stronger position of authority than in many other Christian denominations.

 

Judith Sargent Murray was a well-known published writer in her own lifetime. Her works included “Constansia” and “the Gleaner” essays. She also wrote the essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” two full years before Mary Wollenstonecraft’s famous A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

 

As an Educator, Judith struggled. When she tutored her brother’s sons, they were rude to her. They felt that she, an uneducated woman, had no business tutoring them, Harvard boys, and were disrespectful to her and her assistance. For her own daughter, and her brother’s daughter, she arranged Latin and Greek tutors and encouraged the girls to have a stronger choice in their husbands than she had in her first marriage. She founded a female academy in Dorchester, MA in 1802.

 

 

[Moon Sedai]

In the post-revolutionary era, women stressed the idea that is now called "Republican Motherhood." They argued that in order to be proper wives and mothers to citizens of the new nation, they needed to be educated. Mothers, who spend the time teaching young children, needed education to help their children to be good American citizens.

 

Antebellum women (1820s-post civil war) were part of a movement called the "cult of true womanhood" by modern women's studies scholars. Women's publications encouraged women to be Pure (sexually and spiritually) Pious, Domestic, and Submissive (To God, and their husbands). This was the attitude that influenced women to join the abolition movement. Through the Abolition movement, the American suffrage movement was born.

 

During these time periods, women had a difficult time achieving more than basic education. In order to establish an institution of higher learning, there was a need for wealthy contributors and state sponsorship. WIthout the vote, women could not get their states to sponsor colleges. Because women could not legally own or control their own wealth, there were few wealthy women who could contribute to the establishment and maintenance of colleges. Most men would donate money only to their particular alma maters.

 

However, it happened. Widows would use some of their funds to invest in schools. Some women formed schools for girls [even slave girls] and ran them out of their inheritances. Many of these early institutions failed. Some of them were successful.

 

Education of women today has come a long way since the times when we had to fight just to get funding!