Search

Private schools have long played a crucial role in male elite formation but their importance to women's trajectories is less clear. In this paper, we explore the relationship between girls' private schools and elite recruitment in Britain over the past 120 years -- drawing on the historical database of "Who's Who," a unique catalogue of the elite. We find that alumni of elite girls schools have been around 20 times more likely than other women to reach elite positions. They are also more likely to follow particular channels of elite recruitment, via the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, private members clubs and elite spouses. Yet such schools have also consistently been less propulsive than their male-only counterparts. We argue this is rooted in the ambivalent aims of girls elite education, where there has been a longstanding tension between promoting academic achievement and upholding traditional processes of gendered social reproduction.

This article uses rare and detailed data on matriculants to the University of Oxford during the middle decades of the twentieth century as a prism through which to consider gendered processes of recruitment to elite institutions. The article makes four key claims. First, the broader shifts in middle‐class women's labour market participation in the mid‐century are reflected in patterns of maternal occupation among matriculants, shifting from being predominantly housewives to professionals across the period. Related to this, the fathers of matriculants had similar professions whether their child was male or female, but mothers’ professions varied much more between male and female students. There was much more variation between mothers and fathers of students who attended what we term ‘elite’ schools. Finally, across the mid‐twentieth century, the number of male students from elite schools declined significantly, whereas the number of women students who had attended an ‘elite’ school was much steadier. Given the centrality of Oxford for processes of elite recruitment, these trends in their matriculants will have far wider implications for who gets access to elite positions in the decades after these shifts were occurring, revealing in some ways the continuity of class privilege and the increasingly salient role of mother's occupation in processes of elite reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a major intervention in the historiography of elites through analysis of the experience of women occupational elites born in post-war Britain. The paper draws on a new set of oral history interviews recently conducted with women born in the post-war decades with an entry in Who's Who which is the leading biographical dictionary of 'noteworthy and influential' people in the UK. The women we interviewed were all highly occupationally successful and those analysed here also attended one of twelve elite girls' schools. This article argues that our interviewees can be separated into two distinct post-war cohorts: one born between early 1940s and mid-1950s and the other born late 1950s to late 1960s. The shape and structure of the cohort's trajectories were different, their relationship to their careers were different, and, even though both groups faced sexual discrimination and unequal divisions of labour, the nature of these gendered inequalities changed too. By foregrounding elite women within this shifting historical context, this article illuminates broader trends in both classed and gendered experience and how this related to the changing nature of the economy in recent history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women's intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education. This article develops a historically informed gauge of educational attainment—the Educational Cohort Code (ECC). Applying that gauge to the experiences of women in twentieth-century UK, we make two key claims: first, that despite the prevalence of narratives of progress and mobility in individual and collective accounts of women's education, there were considerable intergenerational continuities in women's educational status across the period. Second, that the expansion of educational opportunities across the twentieth century had a differential impact for women and for men and that this differentiation destabilizes categorizations of class solely based on male occupational hierarchies. By applying the ECC method to family data, rather than focusing only on individuals, the article identifies trends within families and the possible influence of family cultures of education and employment on intergenerational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women's intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education. This article develops a historically informed gauge of educational attainment-the Educational Cohort Code (ECC). Applying that gauge to the experiences of women in twentieth-century UK, we make two key claims: first, that despite the prevalence of narratives of progress and mobility in individual and collective accounts of women's education, there were considerable intergenerational continuities in women's educational status across the period. Second, that the expansion of educational opportunities across the twentieth century had a differential impact for women and for men and that this differentiation destabilizes categorizations of class solely based on male occupational hierarchies. By applying the ECC method to family data, rather than focusing only on individuals, the article identifies trends within families and the possible influence of family cultures of education and employment on intergenerational mobility., (© The Author(s) [2022]. Published by Oxford University Press.)