| Summary: | Over the course of the twentieth century Icelandic girls and women progressed from enjoying very limited formal schooling beyond compulsory education, far less than their male contemporaries, to clearly outdoing boys or men at every level of academic study, secondary as well as tertiary. The article traces this development stage by stage and endeavors to explain it in terms of a dialectic interplay between (a) girls being no less (eventually even more) interested in education; and (b) society (authorities, schools, parents) providing and advocating shorter and more practical study for girls than boys.Discrimination, however, only kicked in at post-compulsory level. In Iceland, part of the strictly Lutheran Danish kingdom, compulsory education grew out of the substantial religious instruction considered essential for confirmation into the state church. Salvation was seen as an individual matter, making religious instruction equally important for both genders. The same applied to reading, which was made compulsory as a skill to be used in acquiring the religious knowledge, and eventually to writing and arithmetic which for practical reasons were annexed to the compulsory home schooling provided under the supervision of the parish minister. When primary schools (at first typically arranged as itinerant teachers) gradually supplemented and then replaced home schooling, gender discrimination in academic subjects was out of the question, making girls as well prepared as boys for further study.Post-compulsory education in Iceland had been male only (with the exception of practical training in midwifery) until a school for girls was established in Reykjavík in 1875, offering an essentially secondary modern course of study. Similar schools were established in rural districts while a slowly increasing number of girls attended other secondary modern schools (including Scandinavian style “folk high schools” for rural students), the Reykjavík gymnasium (open to girls from 1904), a teacher training school (1908) and even the ...
|
|---|