Chapter Unfinished Business: Forgotten Histories of Women’s Scholarship and the Shifting Status of Women’s Education

Abstract

Lalage Bown championed women’s education for women’s personal empowerment and social progress. She insisted that such empowerment and progress always risk being lost and must be continuously defended and fought for. Part of this project involves remembering past creative achievements and struggles for women’s rights to education and scholarship. The chapter therefore begins with a brief biography of Mary Somerville, the Scottish born scientist after whom the Oxford College attended by Lalage is named. Her name is now unknown to most people. This leads into a discussion of Lalage’s history of Women’s scholarship, past and future and belief that it has flourished where structures are less formal and there is a loosening of the ‘strange clerical culture of science’. A case study of women’s education in the West of Scotland in the 1980s follows to illustrate this view. Current narrowing of Adult Education’s horizons, alongside threats to women’s rights worldwide, is counterposed to Lalage’s and bell hooks’ vision for Adult Education as the ‘practice of freedom’.