Women and Comparative Education, 1800- 1960

Women and their education have often formed the comparative ground through which nations have positioned themselves historically from the eighteenth century onwards. While women are largely missing from comparative education’ s historiography, they have also used comparative accounts of education to pursue their ideals for women and girls and more generally and to pursue ideals of democracy, albeit at times in contradictory ways.

This project has a number of objectives: first, to map a research agenda that opens a space to incorporate women into comparative education’s historiography; second, to consider the potential of ‘gender trouble’ for developing alternative ways of imagining new historical journeys of educational change involving comparative education; and third to develop an approach to analyse historical accounts of comparative education that sheds light on the “work” of comparative education today.