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<title> Why Spoil a Good Mother to Make an Ordinary Grammarian? </title>
In the first half of the nineteenth century in Victorian England, schooling for middle-class girls was still unsystematic and irregular. It was mainly due to the need of girls to help their mothers with household duties, in the homes of the lower middle-class. Higher education for women was non-existing, and not until after the middle of the nineteenth century were women able to pursue their studies. The late development of women's education was partly due to people not thinking women to have the same intelligence as men, and that they should concentrate on being good mothers and wives instead of studying.
	It was the growing middle class that started the debate on schooling for girls. It had up to the middle of the nineteenth century been sporadic and insufficient. Instead of obtaining intellectual skills, girls learned mostly how to gain social capacities, to become a good wife and hostess. Many mothers did not want to let their daughters to go to school, since they were needed at home. If there were many girls in the family they might take turns on attending school so the mother still could get help with household duties. Lower middle class women were often reluctant to the idea of schooling, because they were stuck in old traditions and did not want their daughters to waste their time on books instead of doing household work. The girls who did go to school often suffered from ill health because of badly heated schools and long journeys. That could have been relieved to some extent by letting girls participate in physical exercise as boys did, but that was seldom the case. 
	The parents who could afford it, had the choice of sending their daughters to private schools or to employ a governess. The education among governesses was mostly poor and therefore Queen's College in London opened in 1848 where they could get a good education. This action was probably taken because that boys as well as girls were educated by governesses, not merely by concern of girls getting an insufficient education. Some people who were in favour of girl education were of the opinion that the family should encourage girls to participate in family discussions and conversations, while being taught about household accomplishments by her mother. The improvement of governesses also led to the progress of female school teachers of middle class children, and opened a discussion about that the structure of girls' education should be changed. In 1863 women were allowed to do the Cambridge Local Examinations on trial, and four years later it was made permanent. This advancement meant that female teachers could improve their teaching skills. 
	That development in turn led to the establishment of the Girls' Public Day School Company in 1872. In those schools girls would get the same education as boys. Some of the girls who attended such schools wanted to continue their education to the higher levels and in 1869 an experiment had begun where a women's college was opened at Hitchin (which later became Girton College). There women took the same courses as men under the same conditions. Although it never reached the official status of university, it was a successful experiment. In spite of the success, the experiment was opposed by many. 
	There were those who claimed that women never could reach the same intelligence as men. Women were not capable of reasoning and they lacked depth. Women possessed an intuitive power that men lacked, and that meant that women could not reach conclusions by reasoning, but by jumping to them instead. There were those who turned this argument around by claiming that since girls were better on receiving impressions than boys, they would benefit more from pursuing their studies. Even people who favoured women's education thought it unquestionable that women were weaker than men, had different intellectual skills and should not get a degree so they could compete with men at the job market. Women were also thought of having less potential and creativity than men. Therefore, since education was expensive, it was no idea that women attended school and spent time learning the creative subjects men did. It was even thought that too much education might affect women's fertility. 
	To change these clear natural facts that women were inferior to men would be to deny the natural laws: "We believe that to apply the same systems of education and training to both sexes alike, and to open the same paths for both, would be to act in defiance of natural laws..." (Burstyn p 17). There were scientific evidence that women differed from men in intelligence. In connection with Darwin's theories of evolution, measurements of human brains were conducted by anatomists in the 1860s, and anthropologists took the liberty of interpreting the results in their own way. They claimed that the size of the brain and intelligence were connected, and since women's brains and skulls in general are smaller than men's they came to the scientific conclusion that females were less intellectual than males. Women's brains were more like a child's which proved that women had not come as far in the evolution as men. That was why men and women could not be educated in the same way. There were objections to this statement as well, John Stuart Mill opposed that brain size and intelligence were connected.
	Despite these "scientifical proofs", higher education of women continued to progress. In 1878 women were allowed to take any degree at the University of London. Furthermore, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville were two women's colleges that were established in Oxford in 1879, and these proved that men and women could study at the same university level as men without bad effects on the women. This development led to an expansion of women's colleges and by the end of the nineteenth century more and more women obtained a higher education.
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