French Egalitarian Education Reforms

During most of the nineteenth century, many French women continued to be educated according to models long established by custom and religious tradition. One recent observer has termed the failure to institute real and lasting educational reform at the end of the eighteenth century a "missed opportunity"—for in spite of the egalitarian in particular attempted to institute educational systems for women that were, to a great extent, egalitarian.

The first of these proposals endeavored to replace the predominantly religious education that women originally received in convents and at home with reformed curricula. More importantly, the proposal insisted that, because education was a common good that should be offered to both sexes, instruction should be available to everyone. By the same continued to define women in terms of their roles in the domestic sphere and as mothers.

That neither proposal was able to envision a system of education that was fully equal for women, and that neither was adopted into law even as such, bespeaks the immensity of the cultural and political obstacles to egalitarian education for women at the time. Nevertheless, the vision of egalitarian educational reform was origin, as doing so allowed them to appropriate the legitimacy conferred by tradition and historical continuity.