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Chapter 6 considers the impact of western movement on northern Virginia's Quaker women. Migration disrupted economic bonds forged by Quaker merchants and farmers and produced a growing gender imbalance as single male Friends moved west. In response, more women-buoyed by Friends' belief in gender spiritual equality-took on positions of responsibility within the local, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and more women attended and became teachers of Quaker schools. By the 1860s Quaker women demanded full gender equality within the meetings. At the same time, women's social networks and association building helped sustain the bonds of northern Virginia's Quaker community. Still, Quaker women could not escape entirely the pervasive gender and racial values of the region, which limited their social activism and shaped relations with their black domestic servants.

Chapter 4 examines the case studies of three new primary schools for non-elite girls in and around late-colonial Guatemala City, as locals called the recently relocated capital. These educational initiatives illustrate both change and continuity, blurring the perceived battle lines between baroque and enlightened pieties. Enlightened feminine ideals based on the social utility of educated mothers and Bourbon reform efforts operated in conjunction with on-going alliances between laywomen and clergy and an attachment to monastic models of feminine piety. These schools also show how laywomen acted as pioneers and innovators, shaping educational reform through creative engagement with Bourbon reforms, Enlightenment ideas, and progressive Catholicism. The formation of Guatemala City’s “Teacher’s College” for native women in the Beaterio de Indias also challenged entrenched racial ideologies and illustrates a critical shift toward acknowledging native laywomen’s capacity to serve as teachers and spiritual leaders.

In various ways, the wide range of schools in Hong Kong – some secular, others run by a variety of religious organizations - represented a new frontier to girl students, and the cultural exchanges that took place there were multidimensional. Apart from contact with new knowledge through book learning, Chinese girls gained access to other unfamiliar activities such as choral singing, playing musical instruments, sports, and girl guiding. Equally importantly, in some schools girls encountered and mingled with others from very different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds, forming an important socializing experience. The first generation of ‘accomplished women’ from such schools contributed to the redefining of women’s space in prewar Hong Kong. The turbulent years of the 1920s and 1930s also provided unprecedented opportunities for them to exercise their language skills in networking and organization of charity and relief work. This chapter argues that for those women who excelled in public service it was not only the academic training but the all-round education in a multicultural setting that equipped them with discipline and determination, and a vision to build international connections in their service for the common good.

Benjamin Rush, an influential physician from Philadelphia and an educational reform activist, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, he delivered a speech entitled Thoughts Upon Female Education at the Young Ladies’ Academy in Philadelphia, arguing that education for women was a patriotic necessity. Rush’s advocacy of women’s right to education was part of the middle-class ideal of “republican motherhood.” This chapter features excerpts from Rush’s speech.

In order to contextualise texts produced by upper-caste, middle-class bhadramahila, and to get an overview of the condition of women in general in the Bengal Presidency, this chapter uses the conventional archive—official records, censuses, contemporary newspaper reportage, and excerpts from journals. Dealing with the social and cultural base and materialist background that gave impetus to women to write, this chapter will try to provide a holistic picture of similarity and difference between the sensibilities, cultural idioms, lifestyle, and living conditions of women of various strata. In general, though the bhadramahila’s social location and individual positioning in the household differed from that of the lower-caste/class women, they shared cultural experiences and social and domestic conditions that find reflection in literary productions. The trajectories of colonial modernity, conjugal conditions, caste system, female education, and the emerging public sphere are negotiated to highlight the complex manner in which the bhadramahila began to assert her self-identity in print.

This chapter highlights the central place of debates over education in Enlightenment thought, with particular attention to the interweaving of political and pedagogical concerns in the mid-eighteenth century. Influenced by sensationist theories of mind and of the self, thinkers during this period came to see education as formative of the individual character and of the social collective. This contributed to a deeply ambivalent strain in Enlightenment thought, one wherein the possibilities opened up by new ways of thinking about education were undercut by a sense of social, political, and institutional inertia. This ambivalent Enlightenment is analyzed in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and in debates over female education.

This chapter explores the contribution of Anglican women, Chinese and British, in the promotion of welfare for women and children in Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The narrative covers four areas of progress in chronological order, which include: Elevating Social Status through Education, Advocating Women’s Rights through Social Movements, the establishment of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Women’s League, and women leaders in social services. It presents an account of change and continuity in the development of women’s work for women: from British women’s work of charity and evangelism to Chinese women’s assumption of leadership roles; from protection of girls and women in the nineteenth century, to pioneering nursery and child care in postwar rehabilitation, and providing holistic care to the elderly and marginalised in twenty-first century.

The development of English-language girls’ schools in Malaya and Singapore began with their origins as providers of social welfare services and was tied to their role in overseas Chinese socioeconomic mobility. This chapter looks at the role of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, particularly the Order of the Infant Jesus, as well as the British administration in founding a large network of English girls’ schools. Although they introduced new possibilities for women, these schools also reinforced imperial hierarchies of gender, class, and race. While significant portions of the overseas Chinese community saw these schools as opportunities for improving their social status, other factions saw them as foreign institutions that undermined the integrity of Chinese identity. English-educated overseas Chinese women became committed to a path of linguistic and cultural transmission that led them closer to a new hybrid colonial identity and further from their Chinese-educated peers, causing the growth of intra-ethnic tension.