School Board Women and Active Citizenship in Scotland, 1873-1919
Introduction
Throughout the nineteenth century, the ideology of separate spheres for the sexes
informed the expansion of the boundaries of the public sphere. Middle-class women in
particular ‘mobilised the idea of themselves as a moral vanguard to justify their entry into
public campaigns’. 1 The two movements for citizenship and education were closely
united, and as will be demonstrated, many women who served on school boards in
Scotland between the two education acts of 1872 and 1918 both supported women’s entry
to the universities and devoted themselves to public service, ‘counteracting the tendency
to prefer narrow private ends to the public good’. 2 Eleanor Gordon has pointed out that
although the un-salaried work of women in local government did not challenge the notion
of separate spheres for the sexes, it provided them with ‘the opportunity to carve out a
public space, and to push back the boundaries of their lives’. 3 Rather than see the home
as a haven in a heartless world, they believed that the interaction of the public and
private, so long as it was guided and managed by virtuous public-spirited women and
men of their class, would promote the good of both.
In particular, female school board members in Scotland shared this belief with
their counterparts in England: children needed women on school boards, and the
community needed women in public service. School board women in both countries had
a common vision of promoting women’s claim to a respectable place in public and
political life and thereby demonstrating their right to the franchise and full citizenship. As
Laura Mayhall has pointed out for the Edwardian period, although there was still no
consensus on what citizenship for women entailed, it was not viewed by feminists as an
abstract concept; rather, the emphasis was on civic virtue, on women’s duty to act for the
public good and challenge the artificial divisions between public and private spheres. 4
Set up in Scotland with the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act, school boards were
elected every three years by voters who were owners or occupiers of property above £4
annual rental; each had as many votes as the board had members (between five and 15). 5
Women were eligible to vote and to stand for election. The women who stood were
already involved in a wide range of social and charitable activities and in the women’s
movement. 6 Yet they have appeared only briefly in histories of Scottish education and
have generally been dismissed as both exceptional and restricted by their gender. 7 A
large majority certainly championed the domestic education of working-class girls and
insisted on the need for ladies to oversee it, a discourse which highlighted the social
differences between women. Many school board women additionally declared themselves
to be guardians of the interests of women teachers, which some at least appreciated.8 The
following discussion will show, however, that once on the board, women were able to
influence the general work through the committee structure.
More generally, it is argued that school board women made the domestic sphere a
political issue and helped define ways in which women could become citizens. Indeed,
throughout Britain, education was a key area where women could achieve a measure of
status and authority, and the work of women on school boards set an important precedent
for women holding public office. Feminists generally tended not to claim rights but to
define a public role for women in terms of duties owed to others, especially the poor.
This notion of ‘women’s mission’ certainly confirmed gender differences mediated by
social class; but accepting such a distinctive role was not seen as a barrier to equality.
Citizenship was about service and participation in public as well as in private life. As
Jane Martin has shown for London, whereas school board women did not challenge
assumptions about femininity, they did alter them through their public work. 9
School board women in both Scotland and England believed that schooling
should lead to the construction of active citizens, but as this article will also reveal there
was a common belief among Scots that the education system was central to a sense of
Scottish identity and of worth within the Empire. Since Scotland did not have a
government separate from Westminster, local politics played the biggest part in the lives
of most Scots. Moreover, Scottish education, the Kirk and the law were recognised as the
three foundational guarantees of national identity within the Union of 1707, with the first
two as key institutions for local involvement. In a society which valued its ‘democratic’
tradition in education, school boards became key sites for the coming together of the
public and private spheres. 10
School board women
Initially, these female activists were a tiny minority: in the first election (1873), 5,645
men compared to just 17 women were returned to the country’s c.980 school boards. 11
The latter included Miss Flora Stevenson and Miss Phoebe Blyth, both suffragists and
philanthropists, who were elected to the Edinburgh School Board; and Mrs Jane Arthur,
another wealthy philanthropist who served on the Paisley School Board until 1885,
advocated health education in board schools, campaigned for women’s entry into
Glasgow University and, on the death of her husband, set up the Arthur Fellowship to
promote the medical education of women. 12
Thus, women’s work on the school boards was not just an extension of their
charitable activities. Certainly, they continued to visit schools, inspecting the girls’
industrial work and encouraging other female philanthropists to follow their example and
serve as a ‘civilising’ influence. As Louisa Stevenson reported to the Women’s
Conference held in Aberdeen in October 1881, a board without women members
represented a definite loss to the children, depriving them of:
the influence of cultured ladies who would take an interest in their manners and
morals in a way that no man could do. [Applause.] These lady members would
also charge themselves with the appointment of recognised lady managers who
would regularly visit the girls’ schools, become the friends and trusted advisers of
the women teachers and of the children and take supervision of such subjects as
sewing and domestic economy. [Applause.] 13
Thus, while making the case for women having a public role on the basis of their
domestic skills, Louisa Stevenson did not see the latter as limiting the domestic sphere to
the home: rather, women should be active in civic society and domestic issues should be
on the political agenda. 14 She remarked that much was heard about woman’s sphere, yet
only occasionally, and usually in a casual way, was anything said about the man’s. She
professed sympathy with the ‘witty lady’ who declared that whereas she was content to
occupy her own sphere, she would not be relegated to her own bedchamber. After twenty
years of public work, Stevenson had come to the conclusion that ‘the work of the world
was best done by men and women working together – not by men alone, nor by women
alone’. 15
Despite the small numbers, the election and re-election of these pioneering
women encouraged others. Thus, in Fife two women from prominent local families were
returned in 1876, and by the final decade of the school board, a total of 21 women in the
county had campaigned successfully. 16 By the time of Jane Arthur’s retirement from the
Paisley School Board after four successive terms of service (1873-85), more women were
standing. Their numbers were never huge: twenty years later, only 76 were elected. 17
Still, reports reveal that school board campaigns were often lively, with women as well as
men in the audience prepared to heckle contestants. Women continued to be elected to
school boards in Scotland until the 1918 Education Act, whereas women in England and
Wales lost that right with the 1902 Act. Indeed, the education authorities which replaced
school boards in Scotland after the 1918 Act were still elected until their functions were
finally absorbed into local government in 1929. Thus, for almost half a century school
board women in Scotland participated in public debates on education, communicating
their ideas to a wide audience at public meetings and through the local press, not only
during the triennial election campaigns but in the regular reports of board meetings. In
the process, school board women helped shape public opinion as well as establish
women’s right to an active role within civic society.
Initially, there was some resistance to the entry of women into local politics.
Thus, during the first election for the five-member board of Thornhill, one man, who was
himself standing, brought five women to cast their vote, but they were rejected as legally
incapable because they were married. In response, one declared that she ‘never kent a
husband did a wife so much harm’ and another supposed that this decision meant her
‘husband’s worth mair than the vote’. 18 More typical were reports that many ladies
voted, even if few stood, and that those ladies who were elected often had organised
support which sought to promote the involvement of women in the public sphere more
generally. Thus, the ‘ladies’ platforms’ in both Glasgow and Edinburgh were supported
by the Association for Promoting Lady Candidates at School Board and Parochial
Elections, which included male academics, clergy, professionals and businessmen. It
backed the 1885 campaign of two feminist philanthropists, Grace Paterson and Margaret
Barlas, who became the first female members of the School Board of Glasgow. Two
ladies were also returned for the first time that year to the large neighbouring board of
Govan.
One of the latter, Mrs Dinah Pearce, declared that the election of women
established the principle of female representatives, and indeed after her success the
Govan electorate regularly returned two women to the board. 19 This did not mean equal
representation with men: larger school boards generally had only two women members.
Thus in the 1903 election, when three ladies stood in Govan, one, Jane Findlay who had
served four successive terms, was defeated. 20 There were, however, three women on the
Edinburgh Board from the mid 1880s until 1905. 21 From Flora Stevenson’s death that
year during her eleventh term of office until 1914, female membership was reduced to
two, but on the final board, there were again three. 22 In Glasgow, at the last election
(1914) when the board had been expanded to 25 members, five women were elected. 23
It took longer for women to break through in the smaller cities and towns. Two
women stood for the Polmont Board (which had seven members) for the first time in
1891, but failed to be returned. 24 Where women stood for election to smaller boards, they
relied on the support of local individuals, rather than organised ladies’ platforms; indeed
men (usually local businessmen and professionals) formed the bedrock of those
campaigns. This was the case in Ardrossan, another seven-member board, where Miss
Jessie Moffat, daughter of a prominent local industrialist, was the first woman to stand
and be elected in 1888. 25 Even on the larger board of Dundee, which was regarded as a
‘woman’s town’ due to the high proportion of female workers in the dominant textile
industry, the first woman was returned only in 1894. 26
Religion, politics and social class
The churches tended to dominate small boards, which had an insignificant number of
female members, especially in the tiny parishes of the Highlands where few men or
women qualified for the franchise. The voting system, according to Robert Anderson,
was ‘a crude form of proportional representation designed to give places to religious
minorities’, among whom Catholics were the largest. 27 Under the school boards, no
woman was put forward as representative of any church. Thus in Aberdeen, the clergy (of
the Church of Scotland and the Free Church as well as the Catholic and Episcopalian
minorities) dominated the School Board so that women only gained representation in
1894, with the election of Mrs Isabella Mayo. 28 While the women generally worked
harmoniously with Catholic board members, having the common aim of ‘civilising’ the
poor, particularly through a domestic education for the girls, some could be as prone to
anti-Catholicism as the men. This was reflected in the controversy over providing ‘free
books’ for Catholic schools in Edinburgh which dominated the 1909 election. Of the
three female candidates, one, Lady Steel, declared that although her preference was for a
national over a denominational system of education, it was a fact that the Board itself was
overwhelmingly Protestant. She reasoned that it would thus be impossible for Catholic
publications to be included among the free books, and argued against penalising the
poorest children on the grounds of Scotland’s historic tolerance of freedom of
conscience. She failed, however, to convince either the other two lady candidates or the
electorate. 29
Nevertheless, in contrast to the men who stood for election, the women were not
identified by religious denomination. 30 Generally, women had a considerably broader
constituency than men representing minority religions, while the voting system could be
used to favour female candidates. It appears to have achieved similar, though fewer,
results for female candidates as for Catholics; and though the latter fared better than the
ladies outside of the main cities in the west of Scotland, each regularly had two or three
candidates elected in the major cities and one in some of the small towns. In east-central
Scotland, Andrew Bain has shown that in Fife women were more likely than Catholics to
be elected and occasionally women were asked to take the chair, whereas in West
Lothian, where more Catholic than female candidates were elected, no such invitation to
chair was extended to a Catholic board member. 31
Although their religious beliefs often led them into the public arena, female
candidates were welcomed as a non-sectarian balance to the churches. 32 In the 1879
election to the Edinburgh Board, concern was expressed that if the ladies were defeated,
the board would be composed ‘of ministers and men who are ready to do what the
ministers bid them to do’. 33 This was a view shared by some clergy. At a meeting in
support of the two lady candidates in Govan in 1885, the Reverend Robert Howe
declared that their lack of ‘selfish or sectarian aims’ meant they would represent the
whole community. 34 Very occasionally, a church candidate stood down in favour of a
woman, as was the case in Ardrossan in 1891 when one of the five Church of Scotland
candidates withdrew to secure Jessie Moffat a second term. 35 Moffat may also have had
encouragement from the feminist movement in the west of Scotland: she was associated
with the Glasgow School of Cookery whose honorary secretary between 1876 and 1907
was Grace Paterson. Thus, women who did not stand on a declared ladies’ platform still
tended to be feminists or have feminist connections. Another example is Mary Burton, a
Quaker who was nominated in 1888 for a second term on the Edinburgh Board as an
Independent, not as a Ladies’ Committee representative, by Phoebe Blyth who sat on that
Committee. 36
In the smaller towns at least, such women might be regarded as exceptional. In
Ardrossan, for example, no woman followed Jessie Moffat after she retired in 1901 until
1919 when the board was subsumed into the much larger Education Authority of
Ayrshire, which had 42 seats. The results of the first election showed that Moffat had in
fact been atypical in the county as well as her home town: only one of the four women
candidates was returned to this Authority. By the final election, however, seven of the 72
candidates were women, of whom three were successful. 37 Two of the latter stood on a
Labour Party platform, of whom one at least, Mrs Clarice McNab Shaw, was also a
feminist and had been a school board member in Leith in 1911. She was a mark of
continuity between the boards and the authorities, and also reflected the fact that, while
the numbers of women on school boards remained small, by the early twentieth century
they were no longer limited to the upper middle class. Some were or had been working
women, such as Agnes Husband in Dundee who ran a dressmaking business with her
sister, while a significant number had been schoolmistresses. An early example was Jane
Hogg, who had been a teacher in Stirling before marriage in 1858; widowed in 1876, she
became a journalist and newspaper proprietor. She was elected to the Stirling School
Board in 1888 and went on to serve three terms. 38 More former schoolmistresses were
elected in the early 1900s: in Paisley Miss J. Stuart Airlie, in Dundee Lila Clunas, in
Leith Clarice McNab and in Aberdeen Mrs Isabella Mayo and Mrs Christina
Farquharson-Kennedy. 39 Christina Jamieson, who had trained as a pupil teacher before
becoming a writer, was a member of the last Lerwick School Board from 1916 and its
chair in 1918. 40
Though not politically affiliated, Jamieson was sympathetic to the left. Whereas
most early women members were supporters of the two main political parties, by the turn
of the century a few were committed socialists. Both Clunas and Husband, for example,
were socialists who became full-time political activists, the latter the first of two women
elected to Dundee Parish Council in 1901 on which she served until 1928, the former
elected to the Dundee Town Council in 1943, serving until 1964. Clarice McNab
continued to be active after her marriage in 1918: in 1921, as Mrs McNab Shaw she was
elected to Troon town council and, as noted above, became a member of the Ayrshire
Education Authority in its last term. 41
Whatever their political persuasion, most school board women were supporters of
the female franchise. Indeed, Mary Burton, who had also served on St Cuthbert’s
Parochial Board and Edinburgh Parish Council, bequeathed £100 to the Edinburgh
Women’s Suffrage Association in 1908 ‘to be expended in any movement which may be
made for the admission of women to sit as members of parliament, either at Westminster
or in a Scottish Parliament’. 42 Most female board members, however, were Unionists
who believed that while education was a local responsibility, it was one with national
significance and, according to Flora Stevenson, ‘quite as important as the other great
Departments of Imperial Administration’. 43 Moreover, many school board women,
including Minna Cowan, Christina Rainy and Jane Hay in Edinburgh, were not only
involved in a number of local public bodies but were committed imperialists, some
having engaged in missionary work. 44
After her tenth successive campaign in 1900, Flora Stevenson was also elected
unanimously to chair the Board itself. 45 In this, she was unusual but not unique. 46 And
while many women served only one or two terms, a significant number were members of
between three and seven boards, and, as noted above, a few went on to serve on the
education authorities. These included Clarice McNab Shaw in Ayrshire, Kathleen
Bannatyne and Nora Allen in Glasgow, Minna Cowan in Edinburgh, Christina Jamieson
in Lerwick, and Agnes Husband in Dundee. Moreover, in Scotland the experience of
school board women in elections as well as on committees was not lost with the
replacement of boards by local education authorities, at least until the Local Government
Act of 1929 abolished the latter. Thereafter, the Scottish situation resembled that in
England: while a few women who had been elected to the boards and their successors
continued to have a role in the governance of local schooling through being co-opted to
the education committees of local councils, such as Minna Cowan in Edinburgh, their
role was diminished. 47
School board women and domestic education
Grace Paterson’s 21 year career on the Glasgow School Board (which was responsible
for around 20 per cent of all Scottish school-children in that period) confirms that, while
most female board members concentrated on the domestic education of girls, the scope of
their activities in the general working of the board was much wider. Paterson, for
example, chaired the committee on industrial classes but she was also a member of the
committees for teachers and teaching, pupil teachers, evening and science classes, school
attendance, educational endowments, religious instruction, and physical training. 48 Her
successors and her counterparts on other large boards served on a similar variety of
committees: for example, Jane Arthur in Paisley sat on the committees for finance, school
management, school statistics, and pupil teachers, and like Paterson convened the
committee for industrial and domestic economy classes from her second term. 49 Most
small boards, however, did not have such elaborate committee structures, and some did
not even have a committee for industrial work. For example the nine-member Cathcart
School Board, to which Mrs Isabella Pearce was elected in 1894, had a standing
committee for each of its four main schools while there was an over-arching finance
committee. In her second term Mrs Pearce chaired the finance committee, as Flora
Stevenson did in Edinburgh, as well as one of these school committees. 50
Of course, women’s status as board members was ‘special’ in that they were
seen as representing a particular interest, similar to the various clerical board
members. However, though women standing for the first time tended to emphasise
their commitment to the domestic training of girls, it subsequently became one of a
number of policies on which they campaigned. Thus, when Jessie Moffat stood for a
fourth term on the Ardrossan Board, she pointed to her proven experience over nine
years in the general work of the board, and a ‘willingness to grasp the question of
higher education and deal with it in a broad and liberal way’. 51 And whereas the
majority of school board women championed a domestic curriculum for workingclass girls, they also favoured the traditional system of mixed-sex education. Some
historians see this as poor compensation for the loss after the 1872 Act of separate
girls’ schools with their ladies’ departments. 52 Certainly, before the establishment of
school boards, ladies had been involved in the provision of education for the poor,
particularly sewing for girls. 53 Yet there were complaints about both the efficiency
and the quality of such charitable schools, again particularly for girls, by the 1860s. 54
As we have seen, moreover, women on school boards did not supplant, but rather
promoted and sought to professionalise the involvement of female philanthropists in
the schooling of poor girls.
Flora Stevenson was in a minority in her criticism of the emphasis on
domestic subjects for girls, but she was careful to refute the charge that a board
school education ‘destroys and discourages the desire for domestic service in our
girls’. 55 Nevertheless, she criticised the expectation that they spend up to three years
on domestic economy ‘when the requirements of the Code might be satisfied by any
ordinarily intelligent girl in one year’. In her view it was harsh that a girl should thus
be precluded from entering more than one of the higher subjects, while the supposed
moral benefits derived from domestic economy, such as learning how to avoid debt,
could apply to boys as well as girls. 56 Miss Dougall, elected to the Falkirk Parish
School Board in 1914, agreed with Stevenson that boys should be taught cookery. 57
Mary Burton, who served four terms on the Edinburgh Board from 1885, went
further, arguing for ‘the desirability of having boys taught to work a sewing machine,
and the girls to hammer nails’. 58
This position was not shared by the majority of school-board women. In terms of
appeal to the electors, most female candidates differed from Burton, Dougall and
Stevenson in the emphasis they put on declaring themselves the champions of the
domestic education of poor girls. Thus, in her first election campaign Grace Paterson said
that since working-class women had little time for their daughters’ domestic education,
school board women should devote themselves to it. She claimed that male-dominated
school boards were apathetic about domestic training and relied on untrained teachers. In
her view, teaching cookery should include more than showing how to prepare dishes
economically; it had a role to play in public health generally. 59 School board women
were concerned with improving the lives of poor families, but they conceived the aim of
domestic education as more than making competent housewives: a girl was to be
educated for the domestic sphere but her schooling was not to be sacrificed to the family.
School board women’s wider concern with public health and well-being was reflected in
their aim to have a domestic curriculum which went beyond the basics of cleaning,
cooking and sewing to cover hygiene, nutrition, health and welfare. Hence they supported
the introduction of physical education, including swimming lessons by the late nineteenth
century, for girls as well as boys. While school board women accepted that domestic
duties were above all female responsibilities, they insisted that the domestic sphere was
not simply a private affair: it had public consequences and value. Hence, whereas they
did not advocate specific classes in citizenship, they saw a schooling for girls which
included domestic subjects as essential for working-class women to make a positive
contribution to civic society, whether from their own homes or in paid employment.
Paterson, moreover, strove to have the training received in cookery schools and
later domestic science colleges accepted as a form of higher education, opening up to
middle-class women an increasing number of ‘caring’ professions related to public health
as well as education. 60 Through such work, middle-class women would make a vital
contribution to the wealth as well as the health of the nation. Like most school board
women, Paterson was critical of the bias toward more narrowly academic schooling, and
sought parity between the academic and the practical, reflected in her insistence on the
employment by boards of professionally trained cookery teachers as well as in the
campaign for the appointment of qualified female inspectors of domestic subjects. Thus
the interest school board women took in the syllabus was more comprehensive than their
declared focus on domestic economy. It was, they insisted, crucial for girls, but not at the
expense of academic learning. Talented girls should have the opportunity to advance their
education as their male counterparts did, and school board women campaigned for the
development of secondary education as well as the opening up of the universities to
women.
They recognized that in practice few would be able to climb the educational
ladder and insisted that for most girls a domestic education should prepare them for
employment as well as the home. School board women saw such an education as
imparting skills which were to raise standards not just of housekeeping but also of
women’s employment position, and not simply by training them to be domestic servants.
While none contested the notion of separate spheres, they expressed concern that girls in
board schools were being prepared for low paid, routine jobs when a domestic education
should impart skills which were valuable on the labour market. Thus, Minna Cowan
reflected in 1914 that ‘among women the drift seemed rather to be an underpaid typist
than a skilled dressmaker or an efficient cook’. 61
Domestic education was, therefore, not just for the family but for the community,
for the public as well as the private good. School board women accepted both the
gendered division of labour and the social hierarchy, but they disagreed with what they
saw as the English notion of an elementary education for the working class. Hence Flora
Stevenson declared to the Congress of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) in
1900: ‘We in Scotland have not been brought up to measure out our education to suit the
requirements of any particular class or community.’ 62 School board women interpreted
the national democratic tradition as encouraging a meritocracy which should include
talented poor girls as well as boys. As Robert Anderson has noted, Scottish women
adapted the classic ‘lad of parts to dominie’ route both to improve their own education
and to become respectably self-supporting. 63 School board women helped pave the way
for them.
Nevertheless, as had been the experience of the lad of parts, such a meritocracy
could affect only a minority, while school board women did not challenge the notion of
separate spheres. Instead, they sought to extend the boundaries of the domestic for both
middle and working-class women, though in their different, and unequal, social spheres.
They recognised that the subordination of women in the private sphere constrained their
participation in the public; but they did not equate the domestic with the private. Instead,
they saw the former as laying the basis for the exercise of an active social citizenship. In
pursuit of that, they manoeuvred within a patriarchal system, working with men rather
than against them. Often forceful personalities, school board women generally recognized
the need to persuade both the electorate and the other board members. As has been
shown, those who served more than one term broadened the scope of their remit from
domestic training of girls into general welfare issues which affected the whole
community.
School board women and social citizenship
Of course, however active school board women were, without the franchise they were not
recognised as full citizens. 64 Nevertheless, they had a role in the education of children
which, according to T.H. Marshall, had ‘a direct bearing on citizenship’ and was
recognized to be increasingly important as the electorate expanded. 65 Moreover, while
there was controversy over the issue of married women and the franchise, in school board
elections any woman who met the property requirements could vote and, as has been
noted above, there were considerable numbers of married and widowed female board
members. Indeed, of the four women who stood for election to the Glasgow School
Board in March 1911, only one was single. 66 Married women had the support of their
husbands: for wealthy couples, the wife’s school board work was an extension of their
philanthropic commitment, and for socialist couples, it was integral to their political
activities. 67 Whereas at least half of the female board members included in this study
never married, contemporary accounts, notably obituaries, show that they were not
considered ‘redundant’. 68 School board women were acknowledged as not just meeting
the expectations of service expected of middle-class women, but also making the case for
a larger female representation on public bodies. 69 At their deaths a number of these
women were publicly mourned as a loss not just to their local community but to the
region (such as Grace Paterson and Christina Jamieson) and the nation (notably Flora
Stevenson and Agnes Hardie), while a few were internationally renowned (for example
Christina Rainy and Minna Cowan). 70
School-board women were part of larger networks of feminists and reformers who
reached out to the rest of the country: their contribution to education was local, but they
sought to extend their influence to a national level. Thus Flora Stevenson’s sister, Louisa,
who was one of the first two women elected to the Edinburgh Parochial Board, spoke at
that Women’s Conference in Aberdeen in 1888 in an effort to persuade local women to
campaign for female representation on both school and parochial boards. 71 She deemed
such work an aspect of women’s contribution to ‘public spirit’ which she defined as
‘recognition of individual responsibility with regard to the interests of our country
generally and more particularly of the town or district in which we live’. 72 True, men
continued to dominate public life, but school board women show that women were not
confined to the private sphere. Indeed, they embodied the permeability of the latter.
It is, of course, difficult to assess the influence of so few women on public life.
Lindy Moore contends that such women were exceptional, and that however significant
they might have been as role models they nevertheless give ‘a misleading impression of
the presence and influence of women in Scottish local educational governance in
general’. Yet while, as she argues, they were ‘perceived and grouped in terms of gender
and allocated responsibilities accordingly’, this article has shown that in practice their
contribution to the boards was broader than that. 73 They certainly had a gendered
construction of citizenship which appeared to restrict what they could do, yet it was also a
challenge to the supposed gender neutrality of existing definitions of citizenship. In
particular, school board women contributed to the development of ideas of social
citizenship, which as Ruth Lister has shown linked social reform to arguments for equal
rights. 74 As Patricia Hollis has demonstrated for their counterparts in England, school
board women in Scotland began by establishing their credentials in ‘womanly work’ but
were soon contributing to the full range of educational policy. 75 The ladies’ platform in
school board elections may indeed have reinforced traditional notions of women’s place,
but their work through the committee structures firmly brought what were considered
private concerns into the public sphere. They thus pushed forward the social element of
Marshall’s definition of citizenship concerning welfare and security and the right ‘to live
the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in society’, standards
which they strove to improve. 76
Conclusion
Until 1902, when school boards in England were replaced by appointed local education
authorities, female board members in both England and Scotland pursued similar goals
by similar means, working within a patriarchal system to enlarge the opportunities for
women. In both countries, women were a minority of board members: in fact,
proportionately there were slightly more women on boards in Scotland by the time they
were replaced in England with unelected bodies. 77 School Boards continued in Scotland
for another 16 years, and in contrast to England the authorities which replaced them were
also elected, allowing women a continuing role in Scottish school governance based on
the legitimacy of the ballot box over a period of nearly six decades. When education
finally became the responsibility of local authorities in Scotland under the Local
Government Act of 1929, women at least had won the franchise on the same basis as
men. They had still not achieved equal citizenship with men, but as the English
experience since 1902 had shown, co-option onto local education bodies still left women
some room for manoeuvre.
Nevertheless, while school board women in Scotland had much in common with
their counterparts in England, the former also believed that their country was
distinguished by its democratic tradition in education. It was a patriarchal tradition, but
whereas in England the schooling of the poor was held in low social esteem, in Scotland
it was seen as a key means of cementing the national community and preserving its
identity within the Union. As Lindsay Paterson has argued, Scotland had a degree of
autonomy within the Union in the form of what he terms ‘domestic sovereignty’. 78 He
sees middle-class women contributing to the development of a national system of
education after the 1872 Education Act by championing domestic economy in the
schooling of working-class girls, thereby attaching educational value to women’s
traditional activities. 79 While continuing, even reinforcing, both the social hierarchy and
the ideology of separate spheres, their actions led to some positive benefits for women
through improvements in their education and incorporation into the teaching profession,
albeit in a junior role. Indeed, the president of the EIS observed at the 1894 annual
conference that the recent admission of women to the universities potentially had such an
impact on the training of schoolmistresses that ‘in a few years we hope the sexes may be
practically on the same platform’. 80 Although the EIS had itself only admitted women as
members in the wake of the 1872 Education Act, it acknowledged, in terms which would
have been acceptable to school board women, ‘the right of women to receive an
education essentially and substantially equal to that of men (however one may differ from
the other in subordinate details)’; and while it was not in favour of school boards,
preferring education to be under local government, the EIS welcomed the elected women
as allies of the profession, and made a number honorary fellows, including Margaret
Black of Glasgow, Flora Stevenson of Edinburgh and Mrs Carlaw Martin of Dundee. 81
School board women became accepted and even lauded as active citizens in the
local community long before women in general were accorded the status of political
citizenship. Moreover, women’s work on school boards was complemented by other
public activities: on parish and town councils, in church committees and charitable
organisations, for imperial causes and feminist campaigns, in professional associations as
well as the labour movement. Thus, however numerically insignificant, the example of
female members of school boards helped secure women, especially but not exclusively
from the middle class, a respected and valued place in public life and within the national
system of education.
Notes
1 Eileen Janes Yeo, ed, Radical Femininity: women’s self-representation in the public
sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 8. For the seminal discussion of
separate spheres see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and
Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London: Hutchison Education, 1987).
See the introduction to the second edition (London: Routledge, 2002), xiii-l, for the
authors’ reflections on the reception and impact of their arguments about the centrality of
the notion of separate spheres to middle-class identity. For an examination of the
limitations of the separate spheres thesis which focuses on Glasgow, see Eleanor Gordon
and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
2 Barbara Bodichon, Reasons for and against the Enfranchisement of Women (London:
National Society for Women’s Suffrage, 1869), 6.
3 Eleanor Gordon, ‘Women’s Spheres’, in People and Society in Scotland. Volume 2,
1830-1914, ed. W. Hamish Fraser and R.J. Morris (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 20635: 225-26.
4 Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in
Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5, 6.
5 Robert D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 1750-1918 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 313.
6 Ibid., 171.
7 See Lindy Moore, ‘Education and Learning’, in Gender in Scottish History since 1700,
ed. Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen J. Yeo (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 111-39. Some local studies overlook women
completely: see James Roxburgh, The School Board of Glasgow 1873-1919 (University
of London Press: London, 1971). For a local study which provides an examination of
women’s role on boards in east-central Scotland, see Andrew Bain, ‘The Beginnings of
Democratic Control of Local Education in Scotland’, Scottish Economic and Social
History, 23, no.1 (2003): 7-25.
8 See for example The Educational News, 14 April 1888, for a plea by Edinburgh
schoolmistresses to Flora Stevenson that she contest the board election again. See also
Edinburgh Central Library (ECL), XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 2,
171: The Evening News, 19 January 1897 and The Scotsman, 20 January 1897 for
complaints to the Board that Stevenson was too close to the schoolmistresses. See also
the successful campaigns of Mrs Helen Ross in 1911 and 1914 for a place on Falkirk
Burgh School Board: Andrew Bain, Ancient and Modern. A Comparison of the Social
Composition of the Burgh School Boards of Stirling and Falkirk from 1873 to 1919
(Polmont: Falkirk Council Education Services, 2006), 45.
9 Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education, 1800-1980: educational
change and personal identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 90. See also
Jane Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999).
10 See G.E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the
Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961). For more nuanced
views of the ‘democratic tradition’ see Robert Anderson, ‘In search of the “Lad of Parts”:
the Mythical History of Scottish Education’, History Workshop, no.19 (Spring 1985): 82104; Lindsay Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the gender inequality in the
Scottish educational tradition, see Jane McDermid, The Schooling of Working-Class Girls
in Victorian Scotland: Gender, education and identity (London: Routledge, 2005), 114-
18; Helen, Corr, ‘Teachers and Gender: Debating the Myths of Equal Opportunities in
Scottish Education 1800-1914’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 27 (November 1997),
no.3: 355-63.
11 Lindy Moore, ‘Women in Education’, in Scottish Life and Society, Volume 11:
Institutions of Scotland: Education, ed. Heather Holmes (East Linton: Tuckwell Press,
2000) 316-43: 331.
12 See the entry on Flora Stevenson in The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women.
(BDSW), ed. Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2006), 337. For Jane Arthur, see ibid., 18. See Helen Corr on Phoebe
Blyth and Flora Stevenson, and Maureen Donovan Lochrie on Jane Arthur, in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-07).
13 The Aberdeen Journal, 11 October 1888, 7.
14 For the discourse on ‘civic maternalism’ see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds.,
Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. See also Jane Rendall, ‘Women and the Public
Sphere’, Gender & History, 11, no.3 (November 1999): 475-88.
15 The Aberdeen Journal, 11 October 1888, 7.
16 Bain, ‘The Beginnings of Democratic Control of Local Education in Scotland’, 18.
17 Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 170.
18 The Glasgow Herald, 14 April 1873, 4. Their male companion was successfully
elected.
19 Glasgow City Archives (GCA), DED1/4/1/5, Govan Parish School Board Minute
Book, 5, entry for 8 November 1886.
20 GCA, DED1/4/1/5, 8, 10, 13, 16 & 19, Govan Parish School Board Minute Books.
21 ECL, YAY764, New Edinburgh Almanac (1886), 1033; (1888), 1069; (1891), 1075;
(1894), 1009; (1904), 1144.
22 Ibid (1906), 1156; (1910), 1259; (1915), 1143.
23 GCA, DED1/1/1/9-22: Minutes of the School Board of Glasgow.
24 Andrew Bain, Three Into One: significant changes in representation and leadership
related to the amalgamation of the School Boards of Bothkennar, Polmont and
Grangemouth (Polmont: Falkirk Council Education Services, 2003), 21.
25 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 30 March 1888, 7.
26 For Dundee as a ‘woman’s town’ see The Life and Times of Dundee, ed. Christopher
A. Whatley, David B. Swinfen and Annette M. Smith (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1993),
113. There had been calls in Dundee for female representation on the school board since
the beginning: The Dundee Advertiser, 18 February 1872.
27 Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 166, 170. See also Robert Anderson,
‘The History of Scottish Education pre 1980’, in Scottish Education, ed. T.G.K. Bryce
and W.M. Humes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1999), 220.
28 T.R. Jamieson, Aberdeen in the 1880s: A View from Within (MLitt thesis, University
of Aberdeen, 1996), 120. For Mayo see the entry in the BDSW, 261-62.
29 ECL, XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 4, 26-27: The Evening
News, 16 March 1909. The other two ladies were elected.
30 Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 170.
31 Bain, ‘The Beginnings of Democratic Control of Local Education in Scotland’, 19.
32 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 25 March 1876, 5.
33 ECL, XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 1, 65, The Scotsman, 7
April 1879.
34 The Glasgow Herald, 18 April 1885, 7.
35 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 17 April 1891, 7.
36 ECL, XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 1 , 248, The Scotsman,
March 1888.
37 The Irvine & Fullarton Times, 18 April 1919, 2; The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald,
30 March 1928, 3.
38 See the BDSW, 167-68 for Hogg, 175 for Husband.
39 The Educational News, 16 May 1903 for Airlie; BDSW, 17 for Clunas, 261-62 for
Mayo, 318 for McNab Shaw; The Aberdeen Journal, 17 July 1917, 2 for FarquharsonKennedy.
40 See the BDSW, 182-83.
41 See the BDSW, 77 for Clunas, 175 for Husband, and 318 for McNab Shaw.
42 The Scotsman, 4 June 1909, 8. See also ECL, YDA1818, Press Cuttings on Notable
Victorians: The Weekly Scotsman, 20 February 1932.
43 ECL, YLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 3, 58: The Evening News, 7
March 1903.
44 For Cowan, see the entry in the BDSW, 81; for Rainy, see The Scotsman, 22 May
1908, 10. For Jane Hay who worked with the Scottish Armenian Association before
standing successfully for the Edinburgh School Board in 1897 see The Scotsman, 10
March 1897, 12; and ibid., 2 November 1901, 12, where it was reported that she was
standing in the parish council elections and had been a member of the Lunacy Board 24
years earlier; and ibid., 24 October 1913, 1, where it was noted that she was giving public
lectures on ‘The Child and the State’ and had been a member of the Coldingham Parish
Council.
45 ECL, YAY764 New Edinburgh Almanac (1901), 1162.
46 See for example Bain, ‘The Beginnings of Democratic Control of Local Education in
Scotland’, 18, for an example in Fife.
47 See Sue Innes on Cowan in the ODNB.
48 GCA, DED1/1/1-9 Minutes of the Glasgow School Board; Mitchell Library Glasgow
room, School Board of Glasgow General Summary of Work 1873-1903.
49 GCA, CO2/5/8/15/1 Paisley Burgh School Board Minutes.
50 GCA, DED1/2/1/2-3 Cathcart Parish School Board Minutes.
51 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 26 March 1897, 1.
52 Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 171; Moore, ‘Education and Learning’,
127.
53 See Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from
1080 to 1980 (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1983), 252-56.
54 See PP, XXV, Education Commission (Scotland), Report on the State of Education in
the Country Districts of Scotland, A.C. Sellar and C.F. Maxwell (Edinburgh: HMSO,
1868), 98.
55 The Educational News, 30 March 1900.
56 ECL, XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 1, 22 for The Scotsman, 6
December 1877; and 25 for The Scotsman, 14 February 1878.
57 Bain, Ancient and Modern, 55-61.
58 ECL, XLYA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 1, 199 for The Scotsman 21
January 1888.
59 The Glasgow Herald, 7 April 1885, 3.
60 See Willie Thompson and Carole McCallum, Glasgow Caledonian University: Its
Origins and Evolution (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 5-14 for Paterson and also
for Mrs Margaret Black who taught at the Glasgow School of Cookery when it first
opened, before leaving in 1878 to set up her own West End School of Cookery; she was
elected to the Glasgow School Board in 1891, serving two terms.
61 ECL, XYLA659, Edinburgh School Board Press Cuttings, 4, 235 for The Evening
News, 1 March 1914.
62 The Educational News, 3 March 1900.
63 Anderson, ‘In search of the “Lad of Parts”’, 84.
64 See Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003, 3rd ed).
65 T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1950), 25-26.
66 The Glasgow Herald, 24 March 1911, 13.
67 See for example the entries in the BDSW on Agnes Hardie, 159, and Isabella Pearce,
290-91. See also the Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography 1860-1960, ed. Anthony
Slaven and Sidney Checkland (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, two volumes,
1986-1990), 1, 337-38 for James and Jane Arthur.
68 See for example, The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 28 November 1902, 6, for Jessie
Moffat; The Educational News, 30 September & 7 October 1905 for Flora Stevenson;
The Glasgow Herald, 27 May 1907, 10, for Jane Arthur and 30 November 1925, 6 for
Grace Paterson. For a discussion of the ‘redundant woman’ question see Gordon and
Nair, Public Lives, 167-98.
69 See for example Jane McDermid, ‘Place the book in their hands: Grace Paterson’s
contribution to the health and welfare policies of the School Board of Glasgow, 18851906’, History of Education, 36, no.6 (2007): 697-713.
70 The Educational News, 30 September 1905 & 7 October 1905 for Stevenson; Glasgow
Evening News, 1 December 1925, 3, for Paterson; BDSW, 81 for Cowan, 159 for Hardie,
183 for Jamieson; The Scotsman, 22 May 1908, 10 for Rainy.
71 The Aberdeen Journal, 11 October 1888, 7.
72 Ibid.
73 Moore, ‘Education and Learning’, 127.
74 Lister, Citizenship, 4, 11.
75 Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 153.
76 Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 11.
77 Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 170; Hollis, Ladies Elect, 130, 133: see
also chapters 2 and 3 for a detailed discussion of women’s work on school boards in
England.
78 Lindsay Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1994), 65-66.
79 Ibid, 70.
80 EIS Annual Reports Proceedings, Scottish Record Office, GD342/1/9, 1894, 65.
81 The Educational News, 6 May 1876.