The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women's Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914 [Hardcover]

The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on womens higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of womens nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.

Introduction: Womens Higher Education and the Female Mind and Body.  Part 1: Britain  1. Science, Feminism, and Sexual Difference: Moulding Female Nature through Higher Education, 1860s1890  2. The Politics of Reproduction and Womens Higher Education, 18851914  Part 2: Germany  3. Women, Bildung, and Culture, 18651900  4. Die akademische Frau: Motherhood, Race, and Culture, 18901914  5. Masculine Minds in Female Bodies: Sexology and Womens Higher Education, 18691914  Part 3: Spain  6. Educated Women Give Birth to Advanced Nations, 18681900  7. After 1898: Degeneration and Regeneration.  Conclusion.

'...this book is an impressive piece of work. By examining scientific and medical theories about womens higher education, Katharina Rowold illuminates two key themes. In the first place, she shows how social Darwinist and eugenic thought was shaped and reshaped by different national contexts  and how this process helped to frame debates about the admission of women to universitylsÔ