Though girls received little intellectual training until comparatively recently, their education has been a cause of argument through the centuries. The advocates of education for girls have been few, the enemies many, and the arguments against have been variously women's immorality, women's virtue, women's fragile bodies, women's feeble minds. One age fears that if you teach a girl to read she will give herself to unbridled sexual license, another that if you let her go to college she will never be able to bear children. This book, the first history of women's education, charts its course in the Western world from the Renaissance to the present, examining the curricula and institutions (with their limitations and discriminations in favor of boys), the intellectual arguments, the social, religious, economic and political influences, the pioneers, the prodigies, the breakthroughs, the legislation--the long struggle to obtain an equal education for women. It begins with a survey of women's education from antiquity to the Middle Ages and continues with a detailed account from the Renaissance through the Reformation, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution to the 20th century. The major countries covered are France, Germany, Russia, England, Italy, and the United States. Dr. Stock does two things with this hitherto neglected subject: she disinters the historical facts and development country by country and century by century, and she looks for answers to certain fundamental questions. What types of education have been available to women in the past? Under what conditions are women likely to be offered education, and why? How is women's education related to the social structure and to women's relations with men? In conclusion, Dr. Stock sums up present conditions and points out the distance yet to go. It is her belief that women's education will come to full flower when it is realized that a society benefits from developing the abilities of all its members.--Adapted from book jacket.