Women's education

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Three women of the "educated classes" in the horticultural school in Kiel-Holtenau (around 1900)

In the broadest sense, women's education refers to any form of higher education accessible to women. In a narrower sense, women's education describes special support measures for women within the general education system, as they have developed since the end of the 19th century.

History of girls and women education

Chemistry lessons at one of the Reifenstein schools in Maidhof in 1926

In the early Middle Ages, the opportunity for women to acquire education was almost exclusively limited to monasteries . Girls from rich and noble families were mainly trained in reading there. From the 16th century onwards, women's orders such as the Ursulines , the Catharines and the English Misses were founded based on the model of the Jesuits and others. a. with the aim of setting up educational institutions for girls and teaching them reading, writing, handicrafts and household skills. A specialty is the education of Jewish girls, which they - like their brothers - received within the family initially from the father, later outside the family from the rabbi. Corresponding regulations have been given by the religious rules of Judaism from time immemorial, evidence can be found in Germany as early as the 4th century AD.

The demand for compulsory schooling , which was made with the Reformation, related to boys and girls. The decisive factor was Martin Luther's writing to the councilors of all cities in Germany, that they should set up and maintain Christian schools from 1524. This demand was heard primarily in the Protestant parts of the country, i.e. in the mostly Protestant imperial cities and in the Lutheran principalities. In many German regions, girls received schooling at an especially early age. Under Johann I, who converted to Calvinism , the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken was the first in the world to introduce compulsory schooling for girls and boys in 1592.

18th and 19th centuries

Lessons at the Reifensteiner Schule Beinrode in the 1930s

As in other countries, however, the higher education system that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries with the establishment of grammar schools was an educational system that was intended for boys. The higher education of girls remained a private matter of the mothers, aunts and grandmothers and in Protestant congregations a matter of the respective pastor's wife.

The girls' educational path was short. Even in privileged layers, i. H. in (large) bourgeois and aristocratic circles, it usually ended with a so-called “ Higher Daughter School ” (up to around 15/16 years of age), in which the upbringing of “compliant wives” and “skillful and chaste housewives” continues to be in the foreground stood. The only option for further training and professional qualifications in the education sector was for young women to attend a teacher’s seminar , which qualified them to teach at elementary schools , boarding schools for girls or secondary schools for girls . For girls from underprivileged classes, the educational path generally ended with the “consecration” for confirmation or confirmation at the age of 13 or 14. After that, the girls mostly went to other households as housemaids or maids, or married immediately, industrial work also became increasingly important, which was seen as a problem at the time.

Rural women's education (or its deficiencies) had been a problem area for a long time during the German Empire and was an important topic of the early aristocratic and bourgeois women's movement . At the German Women's Congress in Berlin in 1912, inadequate training for rural women was also criticized as an economic problem and cause of the backwardness of agriculture in Germany.

Joachim Kramer's dissertation on rural home economics education in Germany, published in 1913, already summarized corresponding reform approaches. He mentions various efforts of the German women's movement for better vocational training. As early as the 1870s, some women's associations had set up so-called household institutions. The Baden women's association , which Grand Duchess Louise co-founded in 1859, was considered to be groundbreaking in the relationship. In 1886 the first housekeeping school was set up in Pforzheim . A measure that promoted vocational training for women for the first time was already carried out in 1863 by the Central Polytechnic Association in Würzburg , which set up an accounting course for women and the daughters of tradespeople.

An important pioneer was Ida von Kortzfleisch . In 1894 she published a memorandum under the title The female service obligation in the economic women's college in the daily newspaper Daily Rundschau . She was reacting to a series of articles by the writer Otto Leixner on the question of women in Germany , who had attacked political striving , the false concept of education of women rights activists and their alleged increasing patriotism . The memorandum and the controversy were fundamental for the establishment of the economic women's schools (cf. Reifensteiner schools ). With the economic women's schools, von Kortzfleisch intended to build up a previously non-existent higher education system for young women in rural areas and to establish this (quite successfully) more broadly in society. The Reifenstein schools enabled admission as a home economics teacher, but they also systematically conveyed a number of new job profiles, for example in estate management, social work and land care. The Association of Reifenstein Schools also acted as a job agency and as a professional network.

Role of the women's movement

It was not until the end of the 19th century, when the women's movement saw higher education for women as an instrument of the struggle for civil equality , that so-called “ women's education associations ” emerged, which not only fought for the granting of higher educational opportunities for women, but also against the wrong arguments for their own goals, such as B. in an official announcement from 1872 showed:

The aim is to enable the woman to develop an education that is equal to the man’s mental education in general in terms of type and interests, so that the German man is not bored with the domestic herd and paralyzed in his devotion to higher interests through the intellectual short-sightedness and narrow-mindedness of his wife that rather the woman with an understanding of these interests and the warmth of feeling for them stand by his side.

On her initiative, new training opportunities for young women, such as special “high school courses” for girls, were created. The providers of such advanced training courses were again private institutes and were therefore only open to the daughters of wealthy families. The first German girls' high school was opened in Karlsruhe in 1893 by the “ Frauenbildungs-Reform ” association. Although grammar school courses and girls’s grammar schools were designed as preparation for university studies , subsequent admission to a German university did not go without saying. Women’s studies were only hesitant and only prevailed throughout Germany after the First World War .

In the first half of the 20th century in the old Federal Republic of Germany, girls and boys were only educated in separate institutions, for girls in so-called “ Lycees ”. In contrast to the GDR, gender segregation was still predominantly the case in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the principle of co-education gradually gained acceptance between 1950 and 1980 , but girls' high schools did not die out. Towards the end of the 20th century, there were repeated debates as to whether a gender-segregated school education might not be the better way, since one can better address gender-specific skills and development phases. The once precarious asset of equal opportunities and equality in educational issues seemed fundamentally secured, pedagogical issues of optimal and therefore also gender-specific support now increasingly came to the fore.

Modern advancement of women

As a result of the beginnings of higher women's education in private initiatives and so-called women's education associations , in addition to the general improvement of female educational opportunities in the public school system, support initiatives specializing in women within the framework of adult education continued to be established , as they continue to exist mainly in the form of adult education courses and additional offers for professional qualifications.

development

In the course of the “ New Women's Movement ”, self-organized women's groups emerged from the 1960s, which wanted to enable women to defend themselves against discrimination in all areas of society. In some cases, these discussion groups developed into autonomous women's education institutions , some of which were converted into recognized adult education providers from the 1980s onwards. Today there are only a small number of educational institutions whose addressees are exclusively women. Some, but not all, of the feminist-lesbian scene.

At the same time, women's education work found its way into official adult education from the 1970s and developed there with its own offers for women and, to some extent, its own methodology and didactics . Through funding programs of the federal states (e.g. Lower Saxony, women's model courses) or the European Union (measures for vocational integration according to the ESF ), women's education work was further developed in adult education, especially from the beginning of the 1990s. The number of offers by and for women showed a temporary increase and conceptual considerations for taking into account the needs of women in mixed-sex courses were included in the funding applications for measures.

Offers of modern adult education for women include, for example, further training for women returning to work , management women , mothers and child minders . Surveys show, however, that women - v. a. higher qualified women’s courses are ambivalent. This attitude may be due in part to the low valuation of traditional women's education as education in typical women's characteristics such as domesticity, adaptability, etc. More decisive, however, is probably the reservation against treating women as a special social group that in a certain sense needs special "tutoring". In terms of gender mainstreaming, efforts are therefore being made to better take into account women-specific aspects in all main programs and standard offers instead of offering women-specific education programs and thus to compensate for any disadvantages in the general education system due to gender roles.

Gender-specific learning behavior and situation conditions

However, recent gender research has shown that there are gender-related / stereotypical differences in learning behavior. For example, it has been observed that women are more likely to dare to ask questions in courses than men; that women - in same-sex groups - tend to prefer holistic approaches to learning that bring together both emotional and rational aspects; that they maintain a more cooperative way of working and a supportive culture of argumentation and that they act in an awareness of interdependence, empathy and support for the weaker; and that they are able to admit deficits and their own shortcomings.

In addition to these differences in the learning behavior of the sexes, there is the special situation of women between household, family, children, partner, job and self-fulfillment. Such double and multiple burdens often represent a major obstacle to professional activities, further training and the realization of career opportunities that are hardly considered in mixed-sex groups. Biographical drafts of identity at the interface of various institutionalized requirements and in the midst of processes of social change have therefore become a focus of women-specific educational offers. Experience from educational work with women shows that women discuss their problems very quickly and openly among themselves, while in mixed groups they just as quickly fall into the habitual behavior of restraint, verbal support of others, supplier positions, being instructed and taking back their own positions.

At the current status

The heterogeneity of the approaches and offers in educational work with women as well as their decline in recent years reflects the various historical currents and opposing tendencies in the women's movement; general statements about effective advancement and education of women can hardly be made. Even the temporarily highly praised key qualifications that women acquire in the family phase and that are supposed to be required in the modern world of work are again suspected of having 'soft' qualities, at best to improve the working atmosphere in male-dominated professions, but not to improve the chances of Lead women to rise to leadership positions. Improved education and training has not yet led to a significant change in the distribution of career choices , income, career opportunities and leadership positions. Even enacted quota regulations bring only slow changes in the status quo of the world of work.

See also

literature

General

  • Elke Kleinau, Claudia Opitz (Hrsg.): History of girls and women's education. 2 volumes. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1996. (standard work)
    • Volume 1: From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
    • Volume 2: From March to the present.
  • Wiltrud Gieseke (Ed.): Handbook for women's education. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2001.
  • Juliane Jacobi: Girls and Women Education in Europe. From 1500 to the present. Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-593-39955-3 .

Early modern age

  • Andreas Rutz: Education - Denomination - Gender. Religious women's communities and Catholic education for girls in the Rhineland (16th-18th centuries). Institute for European History, Mainz 2006.
  • Andreas Rutz: Girls' education between gender segregation and co-education. Educational ideals and school practice in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period , in: Historisches Jahrbuch 136 (2016), pp. 177–198.

18th century

  • Christiane Brokmann-Nooren: Feminine education in the 18th century: "learned woman" and "agreeable wife". (= Contributions to the social history of education. 2). Library and information system of the Univ., Oldenburg 1994. (Zugl .: Oldenburg, Univ., Diss., 1992) (online)
  • Ulrike Prokop : Practical cleverness, grace and wit. Civil education for girls around 1750. In: Catharina Elisabeth Goethe. Free German Hochstift, Frankfurt am Main 2008

19th century

20th century

  • Girls school story (s). The Prussian girls school reform and its consequences. (= Ariadne. 53/54). Archive of the German women's movement, 2008.
  • Paul Ciupke, Karin Derichs-Kunstmann (ed.): Between emancipation and the 'special cultural task of women'. Women's education in the history of adult education (= history and adult education. Volume 13). Essen 2001.
  • Dietlindeführungberg, Gisela Koch, Josefa Redzepi: From women for women. A manual on political education for women. Ed. Ebersbach at eFeF-Verlag, Zurich 1992.
  • Elisabeth de Sotelo (Ed.): Women's training. Innovative educational theories and critical applications . (= Introduction to educational research on women. Volume 4). Weinheim 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Emil Sehling (initial): The Protestant church regulations of the 16th century. Volume 18: Rhineland-Palatinate I. Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, p. 406.
  2. ↑ a b Kramer, p. 16.
  3. ↑ Kramer, pp. 30-35.
  4. ^ Sybille Grübel: Timeline of the history of the city from 1814-2006. In: Ulrich Wagner (Hrsg.): History of the city of Würzburg. 4 volumes, Volume I-III / 2, Theiss, Stuttgart 2001-2007; III / 1–2: From the transition to Bavaria to the 21st century. Volume 2, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-1478-9 , pp. 1225-1247; here: p. 1229.
  5. ↑ Both titles in Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Noble women as pioneers of vocational training: rural housekeeping and the Reifensteiner Association. kassel university press, 2010, pp. 245–246. Wörner-Heil quotes Leixner's title Zur Frauenfrage in Deutschland 1893. which appeared in several episodes of the Daily Rundschau (from No. 220).
  6. ↑ Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Women's schools in the country. 1997, A History of Female Awakening and Pioneering Spirit, pp. 9-17.
  7. ↑ For the professions that were already established in 1915, also as management personnel, cf. Reifensteiner Verein: General club publication. Schmidt & Thelow, Gotha, August 1915, p. 5, more from Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Women's schools in the country. Reifenstein Association (1897–1997). Kassel 1997 and aristocratic women as pioneers in vocational training. University press, Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-89958-904-7 .