Gender and 'method' in eighteenth-century English education

There was very little in common between Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More. For More and Wollstonecraft, and for many of their contemporaries, what women?s education lacked most significantly was order, method and system. Recent scholarly work on the Enlightenment has identified changes in attitudes towards women?s education, epitomized in the celebration of ?learned ladies? and women writers. This article describes the historical debate about whether children should be educated at home or in schools, and how gender influenced the debate. The article concludes that more research is needed on the influence of women's education during the era of the Enlightenment.