… one of the considerations which mainly influence parents of the middle class when selecting a school for their daughters is that instrumental music is to be the leading subject of instruction for women except in the lowest ranks of life. It is said to be seldom more than the acquisition of manual skill, to be taught without intelligence, and too much confined to instrumental music … A clear summary of reasons against the pianoforte for educational purposes; from the undue consumption of time, the impossibility of simultaneous teaching, its expensiveness, the embarrassment it causes in school arrangements. But no one would recommend its abandonment, through judicious heads of schools may be able to modify its use….. (Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission (London: HMSO, 1868),  Vol.1 Chapter VI: Girls’ Schools, p.552).

“Accomplishments” have an important place in the history of sociability in which women played a key role. And an undue emphasis on the deleterious effects of “accomplishments” in the history of women’s education runs the risk of hiding the efforts of women like those of the Society for Women Musicians who worked to advance women’s musical careers. Their efforts meant that a career in music was seen as a more acceptable path for girls by the time I was accompanying the choir in the 1960s. It also obscures the efforts of music teachers, like Annie Warburton, to reform music teaching for girls along more inclusive and professional lines.

But there is more to this photograph than simply an iconic image or an indication of changes in girls’ schooling. In Thinking Through Sonorities in Histories of Schooling, I ask questions about how researchers might approach sound, sight and touch to tap the memories that images like this evoke. What of the sounds of singing, the physicality of playing the piano, the emotions that accompany musical performance, or the sounds that reverberate through spaces and escape the confines of halls and classrooms into corridors and crannies in unsettling ways? And I ask what “bodily readings’ of such images might suggest, not just about the struggle of the rights of women for musical careers, but also about a politics of possibility for girls at school.

For nore on researching sonorities see:

Goodman, Joyce. “Thinking through Sonorities in Histories of Schooling: Schulgeschichte Als Rekonstruktion Von Klangbildern.” IJHE Bildungsgeschichte/International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 7, no. 2 (2017): 277-88.

Goodman, Joyce. “Experimenting with Sound and Silence: Sonorous Bodies, Sonic Selves, Acoustic Topographies and Auditory Histories of Schooling.” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 5 (2017): 528-41.

For more on the history of music teaching see:

Goodman, Joyce, and Andrea Jacobs. “Musical Literacies in the English Inter‐War Secondary‐School Classroom.” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 1-2 (2008): 153-66.

Goodman, Joyce, and Andrea Jacobs. “The Music Teacher in English Girls’ Secondary Schools before 1939.” Women’s History Magazine 55, no. Spring (2007): 12-20.

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In some cases the experiments deal more particularly with problems relating to household matters, and are not performed in the Chemical Laboratory, but form part of the work in the Kitchen Laboratory. This work is carried out in conjunction with the work in Applied Chemistry to meet the special needs of students of Household Science (Tinkler and Masters, Applied Chemistry: A Practical Handbook for Students of Household Science and Public Health. Volume 2 Foods (London: The Technical Press, 1926), p.vi

During the inter-war period Kings College of Household Science developed a strong emphasis on nutrition and dietetics as a branch of household science, along with the comparatively new science of bacteriology. As a prospective teacher she also took vacation courses in needlework (at the Royal School of Needlework) and in food preservation before undertaking teacher training at the Manchester School of Domestic Economy.

As a graduate, Winifred was unusual in working in the state elementary sector. Her first post was at Trafalgar Square Cookery Centre in the Mile End Road in the East End of London, where girls aged 11 to14 attended from surrounding schools. Having been evacuated with Trafalgar Road School she gave food demonstrations to mothers of schoolchildren and local Women’s Institutes, and teaching at Sale Girls’ High School in 1940 (and later at Liverpool’s Fanny Calder College) she juggled rationing in her cookery teaching. In 1944 Winifred moved to Liverpool’s City Technical School for Women / F.L. Calder College of Domestic Science, where she lectured on dietetics, cookery and housewifery, trained first year students in practical demonstrations prior to their practical teaching in schools, and  engaged with local schools and local works canteens.

For more on Winifred’s life and work see

Bridget Egan and Joyce Goodman. “Household and Domestic Science: Entangling the Personal and the Professional.” History of Education 46, no.2 (2016): 176-91

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It is striking how the Woman Teacher took every opportunity to link diverse messages to a rights-based commitment to advance the emancipation of women generally and of women teachers in particular, despite shifts in its rhetoric around married and unmarried teachers in the 1930s. The journal communicated messages about the need for teachers to work for peace in order to achieve equality, to argue for equitable finance for state-maintained education and for equal pay, and to issue warnings that women lost all rights under fascist regimes. Editorials and articles argued that all these situations heightened the need for equality as well as vigilance in civil and academic freedom.

The diversity of views about peace activism and empire in the Woman Teacher illustrates alternative diagnoses of the politics of peace, empire and fascism did also caused a measure of dissent. But shared everyday experiences of teaching in the state elementary sector were important as the journal sought to build professional women teachers into a community of teachers upholding feminist ideals.

For more see

Goodman, Joyce. “Internationalism, Empire and Peace in the Women Teacher, 1920-1939.” Chap. 22 In Edinburgh Companion to Women’s Print Media in Interwar Britain (1918-1939), edited by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney, 348-61. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

All blog posts on this site are my copyright and may not be reproduced in any medium without my permission and full acknowledgement. You are welcome to cite or quote from the material on the site provided you acknowledge the source fully

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