This article presents an understanding of the context, nature and significance of Mary Gurney's educational career during the years 1863 to 1917. It is assisted in part by the conceptual lenses of feminist thinking and network theory. Despite neglect by past historians, Gurney's work was seen by contemporaries as equal in significance to that of…

This article concerns the educational philosophy of S. Margery Fry (1874-1958) and its impact upon the design, organisation and functions of university residences for women in the twentieth century. According to Carol Dyhouse, Fry, the only woman on the University Grants Committee from 1919 to 1947, 'exerted considerable influence over the shape…

This article addresses the life and educational thinking of Victor Lytton, second Earl of Lytton, who not only involved himself in a wide number of social causes but was instrumental in contributing to the development of progressive education in the early decades of the twentieth century. This he did through his work with the New Ideals in…

The History Workshop movement took its stance on the democratisation of history making, becoming notorious for its exuberant gatherings and impassioned "histories from below". At the centre of the early Workshop was the British historian Raphael Samuel, who has been described as the personification of its intellectual and ethical…

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least...I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and "A" levels, there was almost a sense…

Notwithstanding over 20 years of propaganda promoting board school teaching as an ideal career for upper-class women, it appears that in the 1890s it was still unusual for "girls of good family" to go in for it. Therefore, it was an eccentric plunge in 1898 when Eglantyne Jebb, an Oxford student from a prosperous land-owning family,…