Educated Woman

<p><em>The Educated Woman</em> is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s 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 women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.</p> <p>Introduction: Women’s Higher Education and the Female Mind and Body. <strong>Part 1: Britain </strong>1. Science, Feminism, and Sexual Difference: Moulding Female Nature through Higher Education, 1860s–1890 2. The Politics of Reproduction and Women’s Higher Education, 1885–1914 <strong>Part 2: Germany</strong> 3. Women, <em>Bildung</em>, and Culture, 1865–1900 4. ‘<em>Die akademische Frau</em>’: Motherhood, Race, and Culture, 1890–1914 5. Masculine Minds in Female Bodies: Sexology and Women’s Higher Education, 1869–1914 <strong>Part 3: Spain </strong>6. Educated Women Give Birth to Advanced Nations, 1868–1900 7. After 1898: Degeneration and Regeneration. Conclusion.</p>