Practical Visionaries : Women, Education and Social Progress, 1790-1930

This book examines women educationists within nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual history.

Working with new paradigms opened up by feminist scholarship, the book reveals how and why women leaders engaged with issues of power and influence.

Specific women leaders are shown to be concerned with questions of citizenship and social justice and engaged in transforming education in the quest for a better society.

Previous scholarship has either neglected the contributions of these women altogether or has misplaced them and consequently intellectual histories of education have come to seem almost exclusively masculine.This book presents a legacy of feminine progressive ideology and action.

Taken together, these women leaders' habits of travel, their public appearances, their political activism and their acknowledged intellectual and cultural authority challenges the idea that middle-class Victorian women were confined to a private sphere.

All these women were household names in their local communities, while several were national and international figures.The contributors are: Anne Bloomfield, Kevin J.Brehony, Norma Clarke, Peter Cunningham, Mary Jane Drummond, Elizabeth Edwards, Mary Hilton, Pam Hirsch, Jane Miller, Hilary Minns, Wendy Robinson, Gillian Sutherland and Ruth Watts.

MARY HILTON is a Senior Lecturer in Education and PAM HIRSCH is a Senior Research Associate at Homerton College, Cambridge.