Education and Empowerment: Cosmopolitan Education and Irish Women in the Early Nineteenth Century

Traditional studies of elites, both sociological and historical, have focused on male elite schooling to the exclusion or elision of female elite schooling. This leaves us with subtly different literatures on female and male lines of both contemporary elites and their forebears, and this represents a challenge for those working on elite education. Judith Okely noted back in 1978 that even if the education of boys and girls can be separate and asymmetrical, they are nevertheless 'ideologically interdependent'. Likewise, Claire Maxwell and Peter Agglestone advocate the study of reproduction and privilege in contemporary British elite education for girls within a holistic framework that seeks to understand the complex relations between each student's home, social milieu and school. Taking the idea of ideological interdependence as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the history of nineteenth-century Catholic female education in Ireland, drawing on feminist critiques of power theory, to move beyond current narrowly defined debates on the utility and purpose of elite female education. An exclusive focus on the disempowering effects of official curricula obscures other socialising aspects of the schooling experience, especially those that enabled or empowered. This article takes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the benefits accompanying an education at a Catholic convent boarding school in Ireland. The graduates of these schools could lay claim to an associational culture maintained in adulthood through intermarriage, alumna clubs and charitable associations. The evidence of cosmopolitanism, real or imagined, within conventual schools manifested itself in curricular choices, public exhibitions and the cultivation of refined dress, accent and manners.