The Quaker and Moravian communities, at that time, advocated that both women and men should be cultivated and schools for both sexes were started to set up. Unfortunately, though they believed the gender equality in education, the ultimate goal for women’s education remained unchanged. That’s why the focus on the women education still was domestic skills and girls and boys were taught separately.
However, here came the turning point. After the Revolutionary War, getting the national independence, it was widely believed that cultivating talents for the newly independent nation with many things waiting to be completed, should depend partly on educating women and more educational opportunities that can realize this goal should be provided. That is to say, in order to build up a stronger country, women were treated as the nations who should and could do contributions to the US. It’s also believed to be reasonable enough for the women to participate the civic culture so that they can educate good citizens and leaders by passing the republican values in the future, which was call Republican motherhood (Nwhm.org). The allowance for the women to step into the civic culture justified the women’s education. With the establishments of women’s colleges, the curriculums that the girls studied were generally similar to that in the men’s colleges. Only after the Vassar College was established, can the women get the curriculum “which was comparable to that of the men’s colleges” (Nwhm.org).
Women’s education in Japan
In the Meiji restoration, enormous changes happened both in the political and social structure. At the same time, the education in Japan went through dramatic change, too. However, women, according to the traditional gender role, were expected to obey the wishes of their husbands and take care of the housework so that the road for them to get the equal chances on education was very difficult (Wikipedia). Although some of them can get educated, the focus was always on the domestic arts rather than comprehensive curriculum similar to what the men received.
In fact, the traditional idea about the unequal gender roles in Japan was affected greatly by the introduction of Confucian and Buddhism from China. To be more exactly, without the Confucian and Buddhism, in Japan’s history, male and female were fairly equal (Kincaid). Since the Confucian emphasizes that women should be loyal to their husband and family while the Buddhism treats women with evil nature (Silva-Grondin), all of these led female into submissive and founded the idea that men were superior to women and naturally this became the origin of the inequality of education between the women and men.
Before discussing the argument about the right of education between men and women, another fight between the conservatives who favored the Confucianism and nativism and the pragmatists who wanted to build independence and encourage practicality was intense. From the point of the pragmatists like Mori Arinori (1847–1889), they stood for the western idea of the gender equality. In their opinion, the women had exactly the same rights with men no matter in what field in the society. That is to say, they emphasized that the rights in women’s education and even the freedom in marriage should be achieved by passing some laws to some extent. On the contrary, under the Confucian influence, conservatives tended to take it for granted that a woman should stay at home and care for their families rather than receiving education with men (Taylor & Francis).
The development in women’s education in Meiji period was similar to the way in America. Actually, before the Meiji period the chance to learn how to read and write was only limited in those ladies in upper class. Even so, the purpose for those educations was to find a desirable and decent husband and be a better wife in the future. This view was not changed until the late Meiji period.
Even though developing the popular education was the main goal in Meiji period, the financial support was not enough since it was known that the government was facing the financial distress. Moreover, with the goal of building stronger military force, Japan paid lots of attention on the training of the army. Some army leaders even claimed that “It is the duty of the preparatory school to educate the people in such a way that they can be educated easily when they arrive at the main [army] school.” (Jansen). So it was undoubtedly that the women’s education can’t get enough attention since they were less likely to become the soldiers after received the education and some people thought that women’s education was a waste of money.
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