women's education. Throughout the Middle Ages women were almost wholly excluded from the cultural and intellectual life of both Anglo‐Irish and Gaelic Ireland. Sixteenth‐century humanist influences promoted a more positive attitude to their schooling; in the 17th century, on the other hand, there are signs that opportunities narrowed again as part of a general conservative response to the weakening of traditional structures. By the mid‐18th century female writers and intellectuals from a wider range of middle‐ and upper‐class backgrounds, such as Mary Delany and the poet Mary Barber (c.1690–1757), had begun to make their mark.

From the late 18th century the education of poor females in virtue and industry was a dominant concern of philanthropists of all religions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the right of access to the same educational facilities as men was one of the main planks of the western feminist agenda. These two tendencies informed most developments in women's education. However, the provision of free primary education in the national school system from 1831, which offered both sexes the same core curriculum and enabled them to win scholarships to train as teachers, must be seen, along with the enforcement of compulsory education in 1892, as the key development in women's education in the 19th century.

Up to the last quarter of the 19th century fee‐paying schools, for daughters of the upper middle and upper classes, still concentrated on reading, writing, and accomplishments suitable to a ‘lady’. The establishment in 1878 of a standard school‐leaving examination, the Intermediate, open to both boys and girls, forced curriculum change in many girls' schools, as did the demand, from the 1880s, to prepare pupils for university matriculation. By 1892 the Queen's Colleges in Belfast, Galway, and Cork were admitting women to all courses; the Dublin universities were slower but were admitting women by 1910. The first generation of women university lecturers and professors were prominent in political life in the first half of the 20th century. University education, however, was for many years open to only a small minority of women, owing to the cost, not only of university itself, but of the secondary schooling preceding it. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that sweeping reforms in Northern Ireland, and more gradual progress towards public funding for secondary and third‐level study in independent Ireland, made equal educational opportunity for females a reality.

Bibliography

Cullen, Mary (ed.), Girls Don't Do Honours (1987)

Caitriona Clear

WOMEN'S EDUCATIONAL EQUITY ACT

WOMEN'S EDUCATIONAL EQUITY ACT (1974), passed as part of the Special Projects Act contained in the Education Amendments of 1974. The purpose of the act was to promote educational equality for women in the United States, an equality that Congress had mandated two years before in Title IX of the 1972 Education Act Amendments. The act also authorized federal grants to develop and evaluate curricula and textbooks; to promote educational equity for disabled women and girls; to help unemployed women and female dropouts; and to encourage women to develop math and science skills. In 1991 Congress appropriated about $2 million to achieve these goals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U.S. Department of Education. Women's Educational Equity, Act Program: Report of Activities, 1988–1992. Washington, D.C.: 1992.

Irwin N.Gertzog

See alsoDiscrimination: Sex ; Women's Rights Movement .