Abstract
This article argues that discussions about and plans for female education emerged in early nineteenth-century southeastern Europe in connection with broader programs of modernization. It suggests that when officials and educators in the early Greek state and Danubian Principalities created curricula for women, they seldom took regional realities or the needs of potential pupils into account. Rather, the courses of study they proposed more closely reflected the aspirations these regional elites had for their communities. The article explores how education helped (re)inscribe gender roles within modern institutions and allowed state officials and educators to formalize boundaries between the public and private spheres. Modernization, primary instruction, and gendered hierarchies were intimately related.
In the 1810s, reform-minded Orthodox elites in southeastern Europe began looking for means to expand access to elementary education. Among other projects, they introduced the mutual method of instruction to the region. By the 1830s and 1840s, this pedagogical approach, alternatively called the monitorial or Lancastrian system, 1 formed the basis of nascent primary school systems in both the newly independent Greek state and the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The notables who promoted this didactic technique viewed it as a tool for rapidly modernizing southeast European society and quickly aligning it with west European social, technological, and economic practices. The organization of mutual-method schools along with key aspects of the curricula regularly adopted and adapted from foreign, often French, models became instruments to reconfigure and formalize distinctions between the public and the private as well as male and female spheres. By reconceptualizing and reinscribing administrative, productive, and social norms and codes, primary instruction generally and monitorial classrooms specifically helped entrench a set of interconnected ideas that shaped both definitions of modernity and gender roles in the region.
In this article, I first situate efforts to expand access to elementary instruction, beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in a larger modernizing ethos that many regional notables shared. I discuss how elites imagined these institutions would remake society and sketch out to what extent they functioned properly. My focus rests on establishments that serviced children from modest to middling backgrounds, particularly those that used the mutual method, rather than the elite academies, boarding schools, and private tutors that educated the wealthy. Next, I examine the curricula envisioned for male and female students, exploring how these courses of study encouraged the development of certain professions, promoted a gender-specific division of labor, and regulated the transmission of particular types of knowledge (heretofore routinely learned in the home). Finally, I consider how state officials and educators in Greece and the Danubian lands attempted to exceed the institutional boundaries of the schoolhouse, employing male students as intermediaries who might teach their (female) family members basic skills in their homes. I suggest that by assigning this authority to these young men, mutual-method schools reinforced gendered social hierarchies.
Here, I do not offer an exhaustive study of monitorial education or female instruction in either Greece or the Principalities, but instead I seek to present some, albeit occasionally speculative, conclusions by placing these histories and historiographies into dialogue with one another. Three key factors dictate my focus on the Principalities and Greece. First, the origin of mutual-method instruction in all three locales can be largely traced back to a single Greek-language school in Iași (discussed below). Second, all three territories underwent radical administrative transformations during the period. Greece gained autonomy in 1828 and then independence in 1831. Moldavia and Wallachia received organic regulations—quasi-constitutional regimes—during a Russian occupation that lasted from 1829 to 1834. These state structures facilitated the implementation of centralized educational policies and projects. For instance, authorities in Moldavia and Wallachia enacted educational regulations in 1831 and 1833, respectively. In Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias, acting as the state’s first governor, issued decrees on education throughout his tenure (1828–1831). The Othonian regency, which came to power in 1832, passed a comprehensive law on education two years later. As a point of comparison, the first Serbian law on education dates to 1882. In the Bulgarian-speaking lands, schooling remained largely a private or Church matter until late in the nineteenth century. In these places as well, state-led educational initiatives often appeared following greater autonomy or independence from the Ottoman Porte. 2
Throughout my narrative, I reference the Moldavian writer and educator Ion Creangă’s autobiographical novella Memories from Childhood. Creangă was a fierce critic of the educational system that developed in Moldavia during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. In particular, Creangă, who had studied in more than one mutual-method school, despised the monitorial system, ridiculing it in his story. In 1867, working with a handful of like-minded colleagues, Creangă introduced the “new method” (metodă nouă) of primary instruction into Romanian schools. Though fictionalized, Creangă’s telling of his early education is a particularly useful source for discussing popular instruction in the early and mid-nineteenth century. It addresses how elementary schools functioned during the period, individuals’ attitudes toward instruction, and the changing place of popular education in southeast European society. As I concentrate here on institutions that largely catered to lower-class children, few other written records convey these experiences. A single, novelized account, Creangă’s exposition is not a definitive analysis of these issues, but his text nonetheless furnishes a rare, first-hand glimpse into this history. 3
Schooling and Modernization
During the final years of the eighteenth century and the two decades that followed, reform-minded elites in and from southeastern Europe displayed a keen interest in education. The roster of such men included luminaries like the Bucharest-based revolutionary Rhigas Velestinlis Feraios and the more conservative Adamantios Korais in Paris, as well as Kapodistrias, then an Ionian aristocrat in the service of the Tsar, and the young Moldavian boyar Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu in Iași. These men understood themselves as members of a broadly defined omogeneia or genos, a vast confessional community bound together by a shared Grecophone Orthodox culture. They did not anticipate the establishment of nation-states or the rise of nationalism, though a number of the reform projects they supported during this era would later be repurposed to advance such designs. Rather, southeast European public figures like them often envisioned supplanting the Ottoman Sultanate and replacing the Porte with a resurrected Byzantium, Orthodox empire, or a pan-Balkan commonwealth. 4 Most of them were not radicals, and they expected to achieve their goals incrementally via efforts to modernize the region and reform administrative and economic structures. 5 For many, education was a lynchpin in their plans to remake southeastern Europe. 6
Korais, for example, wrote at length about how instruction would prepare Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman lands to forge a new political system and society for themselves. Kapodistrias encouraged educational reform in the Russian Empire and even helped fund a school for Greek-speaking merchants in Odesa, which would allow them to engage more expeditiously in commerce across the region and the continent. Simultaneously, these notables also understood greater access to education as a crucial element in advancing specific agendas in their individual patrias (their cities or regions of origin or attachment). They sought to amplify their own political and economic power in these localized spaces. For instance, Rosetti-Roznovanu and his father, Iordache, often complained to contacts at the Russian court about the acute lack of well-trained administrators in Moldavia. 7 The pair likewise anticipated the rise of industry and advocated for the liberalization of commerce, notably of the grain trade, in the Principality. Greater instruction would supply Moldavia with a pool of competent administrators, able managers, and eventually skilled workers for the industries that the Rosetti-Roznovanus forecasted would develop in the near future. 8
In the Orthodox lands under formal Ottoman control, elites concerned with enlarging access to education could not count on the Porte for material or political support. As an institution, the Orthodox Church tended to treat popular instruction with suspicion and provided little encouragement for lay leaders’ educational reform endeavors. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in Istanbul developed a cohesive position on and program for primary schooling only in the mid-1830s. This was, moreover, a defensive move made largely in reaction to an uptick in the instructional activities of Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire and the formation of a school system in an independent Greece beginning earlier in the decade. Responding to these pressures, in 1836, the Patriarchate established a central commission to monitor the schooling of its flock. Church officials co-opted many pedagogical innovations, some of which are discussed below, that secular elites had already pioneered in the region, including the mutual method. Like their lay counterparts, Church leaders encountered difficulties enacting the policies and projects they proposed. In particular, the lack of a sufficiently trained corps of pedagogical personnel remained a persistent problem throughout the nineteenth century. This was especially true outside of urban centers, where village priests, whom the Church’s educational apparatus routinely sought to recruit as teachers, were often marginally educated or outright illiterate. 9
In the nominally autonomous Danubian Principalities, geographically removed and politically insulated from both the seat of Ottoman power and the Orthodox hierarchy in Istanbul, lay and religious leaders had more room to experiment with educational reform. In 1817, for example, the Wallachian Eforia Şcoalelor, essentially a school board comprised of both Greek- and Romanian-speaking notables, concluded it would be useful to introduce free elementary education to the Principality. To expand access to schooling, as elite institutions offered instruction in Greek (the regional lingua franca of culture and commerce), the Eforia Şcoalelor hired the Transylvanian pedagogue Gheorghe Lăzar to open a Romanian-language school. The Eforia Şcoalelor also sent a handful of scholarship students off to Italy and then France with the aim of crafting a more elaborate Romanian-language curriculum upon their return. Members of the Eforia Şcoalelor did not intend the courses that they planned to create as competition for the prestigious Hellenophone Academy of Bucharest, where well-to-do students received an elite education in abstract subjects like philosophy. Instead, they viewed them as new sites for giving pupils of more modest means practical, skills-based training in literacy, basic math, linear drafting, and civil engineering. Graduates would work as administrative cadres and technical specialists charged with creating modern cadastres, roads, and other types of infrastructure. 10 In his novella, Creangă repeatedly links schools and instruction to modernizing ventures such as the construction of hospitals and roads, as well as the centralization of the state and ecclesiastical administrations. 11
In Moldavia, Rosetti-Roznovanu introduced the mutual method. He discovered this approach during an 1818 trip to Paris when he frequented several members of the Parisian Society for Elementary Instruction (SIE). Founded by a group of liberal public figures in 1815, the SIE was an organization dedicated to promoting the spread of the monitorial system in France and abroad through private philanthropy. This association provided members with a pedagogical technology—its variant of the mutual method—and encouraged them to open schools across the country and around the world. 12 Inside the SIE-endorsed monitorial classroom, long tables split up the space where the approach was implemented, dividing students into groups for each subject. Novices sat at the front, more advanced pupils to the back, arranging themselves at their desks based on previous performance. Advancing through the materials, students moved closer to the head of the table. After mastering a particular lesson, a pupil joined the class below to serve as its monitor, using hanging charts to teach their peers. The monitor moved on once another child advanced enough to replace him. In Creangă’s narrative, the protagonist, Nică al lui Ștefan, routinely sat at the beginners’ end of the table, which the narrator attributes to the character’s profound laziness. 13 Other youngsters, theoretically more assiduous students than the fictional Nică, sometimes worked as permanent or semi-permanent monitors. The use of monitors, charts, and other communal materials allowed one instructor to oversee potentially hundreds or even thousands of students at once, making the technique supremely cost-effective. Members of the SIE described this method as the application of liberal principles in education as pupils took turns teaching one another and, in theory, earned leadership positions in the classroom based on merit. 14 They additionally noted that the mechanized movements of students around the schoolhouse mimicked those of the factory floor, preparing them for jobs in industry. 15 The pedagogical technology and the organization became important tools for promoting the liberal opposition’s agenda in Restoration-era France. 16 The technique, as well as the worldview that underwrote it, also neatly fit the modernizing ethos embraced by Balkan innovators like Rosetti-Roznovanu. 17
With the blessings of the Moldovan Hospodar (or Porte-appointed prince) and the Principality’s Eforia Şcoalelor, Rosetti-Roznovanu set out to launch a mutual-method school. 18 In France, the SIE depicted the monitorial system as a tool to expand working-class instruction. The organization’s southeast European members, including, in addition to Rosetti-Roznovanu, Korais, Kapodistrias, and the Metropolitan Veniamin Costache, 19 however, saw it as an educational technology that they could use to teach children from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. In the Moldovan context, for example, as the inaugural course was in Greek, it most likely catered to urban, relatively affluent children. Some of them might later continue their studies at the Princely Academy of Iași or its sister institution in Bucharest. Servicing reasonably well-to-do pupils was a step toward producing the personnel needed for a modern bureaucracy. Rosetti-Roznovanu did not simply intend to provide rudimentary instruction to the sons of boyars, however. The decision to adopt the mutual method implies he planned for the school to instruct a wide swath of the population, as the technique’s appeal lay in its capacity to cheaply educate a significant number of students at once. Soon after the Greek-language course got off the ground, Rosetti-Roznovanu began translating the SIE’s charts into Moldovan (or what we would recognize as Romanian today, an idiom that had yet to be codified as a literary language). Géōrgios Kleóvolos (or Yorgos Cleobolos as he transliterated his name himself), the school’s instructor, traveled to Bucharest during this period as well, sharing his pedagogical practice with colleagues in the Wallachian capital, who, shortly afterwards, undertook their own translations of the charts. 20
In parallel with regular classes, Kleóvolos offered a teacher-training course. Its graduates left Iaşi to open their own schools throughout the region. Before departing, Rosetti-Roznovanu furnished them with copies of the charts as well as a small sum of money and arranged for them to receive letters of recommendation from Metropolitan Costache. Instructors then welcomed students in classrooms on the Aegean islands of Hydra, Sifnos, and Patmos. On Chios, Korais recruited Frenchmen and locals trained in France as teachers. Lord Guildford, founder of the University of the Ionians, consulted the charts and corresponded with Rosetti-Roznovanu before opening a monitorial school on British-controlled Corfu. 21
By many measures, the school, which opened in 1820, was extraordinarily successful. During its first week of operation, eighty children enrolled in the Greek-language course in addition to the dozen or so teachers-in-training Kleóvolos supervised. The institution’s existence, however, was ephemeral. When the Greek War of Independence irrupted in Moldavia in early 1821, Rosetti-Roznovanu, his father, and Kleóvolos fled the Principality, closing the school. This interruption of the technique’s spread was nevertheless temporary. Rosetti-Roznovanu’s school served as a regional model. The teachers trained there continued to practice across southeastern Europe. Importantly, the charts that he had funded furnished the basis for both Greek- and Romanian-language monitorial schools in the decades to come. 22
Indeed, when the war finally drew to a close in 1828, Kapodistrias accepted a position as the first governor of an independent Greece. He made the development of a school system one of his top priorities. The mutual method became the state-approved pedagogical technique. Official decrees and directives required instructors to use Rosetti-Roznovanu’s charts. The Greek administration translated an SIE-approved pedagogical manual, written by Jacques Sarazin, and mandated that teachers adhere to the instructions outlined in it. This would ensure schools in Greece followed a uniform model and conformed to west European instructional norms and practices. Normal, or teacher-training, schools focused on this approach appeared. For instance, the orphanage Kapodistrias established in Aegina housed a Lancastrian school and a mutual-method teacher-training course where Kleóvolos briefly taught. The Greek army also ran a monitorial program. In the long run, Kapodistrias promised that the Greek state would give all children access to elementary education. The mutual method was an important tool for efficiently fulfilling this pledge. 23 Following Kapodistrias’s assassination in 1831, the Othonian regency that came to power the next year continued many of his educational initiatives. The 1834 law on education that this government enacted laid the foundation for an even more extensive school system and introduced the concept of mandatory schooling in Greece. The Greek state retained the mutual method as the principal approach to elementary education. 24
In the Principalities, the Organic Regulation regimes put in place by the Russian occupation mandated the establishment of a school in the capital of each județ, or county. In Moldavia, the administration required pupils to follow a course of mutual-method instruction during their first year of schooling. In Wallachia, the technique was applied even more extensively. Projects to translate French-language teacher manuals began during this period, though they were not completed until the late 1840s and early 1850s. In Wallachia, villages selected candidates to enroll in normal programs. In Moldavia, local leaders also created scholarships for students to attend these courses. Count Pavel Kiselyov, the Russian plenipotentiary who led the occupation administration, and his collaborators in the Principalities connected access to education, generally, and the mutual method, specifically, to a broader program of modernization. For instance, as all public affairs (and church services) would now be conducted in Romanian, the Wallachian statutes stressed the importance of offering instruction in this language. They additionally noted the need for a “college” to accommodate one hundred pupils “in order that the [Principality’s] sons may be groomed for public office, in a manner congruent with [Wallachia’s] future state.” Similarly, a scholarship program would cater to talented students interested in careers in pedagogy. The administration supervised the establishment of teacher-training schools in strategically located towns and cities. These ventures aimed to ensure a steady supply of instructors and fostered new avenues for social mobility. In 1838, the Wallachian administration began organizing a system of village schools that relied on monitorial instruction. 25
In short, the new administrations in the Principalities and Greece facilitated the expansion of primary education via mutual-method schools on a scale heretofore unseen in the region. According to some statistics, in Greece, by 1828, ninety-two schools were operational with approximately 2,300 pupils. In 1830, enrollments rose to 6,000, and in 1831, to 7,834. Between 1832 and 1848, following certain accounts, forty-eight mutual schools operated in Wallachia and Moldavia. During the 1838–1839 academic year, 32,521 students attended primary school in Wallachia. By 1846–1847, the number increased to 48,545. 26 In both Greece and the Principalities, only a handful of institutions were specifically intended for girls; many were philanthropic, private, missionary, or boarding schools, such as the school founded by female survivors of the Chios massacre with the support of west European philhellenes. 27
While these statistics represent an important upswing in access to elementary education, the new school systems did not always function smoothly in practice, nor did they reach most of the population. In both Greece and the Danubian Principalities, the bureaucratic apparatuses that emerged to supervise and fund schools, including a system of inspectors and schemes for regulating instructor salaries, proved unwieldy. In Wallachia, efforts to employ clergymen and trained teachers as paid pedagogues were unworkable, and where there were instructors, they did not always have materials, suitable schoolhouses, or receive their salaries on time. Creangă’s novella additionally notes the reluctance of older clerics, often co-opted into these systems in both Greece and the Principalities, to follow state mandates and procedures. The sheer difficulty the Greek state had in collecting revenues during its first few years of existence, moreover, inhibited the regime’s application of its social reform agenda, including its educational endeavors. 28
Monitorial institutions functioned best in urban areas, where large numbers of students could enroll at once and turnover remained high throughout the school’s life cycle—insuring full classes and a constant supply of monitors. It was not necessarily a method well suited to the sparsely populated, rural Balkans. 29 Thomas Wyse, a British diplomat in Greece, described visiting a rural mutual-method school in the mid-nineteenth century. He noted the liberal and meritocratic ethos of the establishment, which brought all the village’s children together regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status. He wondered, nonetheless, in his memoires, whether the pupils he met understood the lessons they had learned or simply repeated them from rote. 30 Creangă similarly described Nică’s classmates mindlessly regurgitating the text on the charts, even joking that some grew dizzy and fainted as they replicated sounds, syllables, and words. 31 In both Greece and the Principalities, attempts to purify the local vernacular further complicated matters, presenting students with an ever-changing vocabulary and even requiring them to master new alphabets. 32 Across the Danubian lands and Greece, literacy rates remained abysmal throughout the nineteenth century. In the Principalities, for instance, they hovered between 10 percent and 15 percent at the end of the nineteenth century. 33
Teachers often resorted to using mixed methods, marshaling whatever materials they had at hand. For example, Nică attends four different schools over the course of Creangă’s narrative. The protagonist mockingly describes the syllabary exercises conveyed on charts and discusses being sat in a specific, yet changeable, order at the tables. The portrayal of these schools suggests that at least two of these institutions were ostensibly mutual-method establishments. At the same time, the author depicts partaking in lessons and didactic practices that strayed from this approach. 34 The variations Creangă presents in his account recall both the scant pedagogical resources that teachers had access to and the state’s inability to monitor and control the actual functioning of these establishments.
Individuals and families also resisted these new institutions, as well as the costs associated with sending children to them. 35 At the start of Creangă’s novella, for instance, Nică’s grandfather, David, arrives for a visit. David’s stay occurs at a crucial moment in the narrative. The village school has recently closed following the forcible conscription of its sole teacher. Nică’s parents are at odds with one another. Smaranda, the protagonist’s mother, who hopes her son will become a priest, pushes her husband to enroll Nică in a nearby boarding school. Worried about the expense, Nică’s father, Ștefan, questions the utility of further schooling. The couple represents traditional peasant views of education. On one hand, poor boys, as Smaranda’s aspirations for her child suggest, might improve their socioeconomic lot by joining the clergy. On the other hand, outside of entry into the priesthood, peasant families did not necessarily prize instruction beyond the practical skills learned in the home or the moral education imparted at Mass. Intervening in the dispute, the character of David projects shifting views on formal instruction. David waxes admiringly about literacy’s ability to open new spiritual and moral vistas. More importantly, David stresses the growing need for a basic education to engage with the state or in commerce. He complains, for example, that he never learned rudimentary mathematical operations. When he found himself in the role of his village’s tax collector, consequently, David had to rely on an inefficient and time-consuming tally system. 36 Even among the elite, an impetus to systematically send children to school developed only in connection with the slow professionalization of the administration during the nineteenth century. 37
The new schools that the Organic Regulation regimes and the early Greek state organized did not always function according to their designers’ plans. The educational systems these administrations cobbled together remained far less expansive, furthermore, than many of their architects, like Kapodistrias, had imagined. Yet by midcentury, as Creangă’s largely autobiographical account indicates, peasant and working-class families’ attitudes about instruction had begun to change. Like state actors and other regional elites, average people started to associate instruction with larger projects of modernization, often perceived as a greater need for literacy and the other skills that schools cultivated in children. These experiences formed part of a broader reconfiguration of both the public and private spheres and the relationship between the state and society, one that solidified modern gender norms and impacted women in specific ways; here too, schools played an important role. 38
Reinscribing Gender Roles: Regulating the Public and Private
In both Greece and the Principalities, novel discussions of female education accompanied the construction of modern school systems—a subject that up to this point southeast European elites had rarely broached. Aside from a handful of radical writers, such as Rhigas, who proposed supplying all children with basic, though gender-specific, instruction, the previous sparse talk of girls’ schooling had focused on upper-class women. 39 The daughters of wealthy merchants and well-placed boyars might receive training at home from a private tutor or a governess, often a woman from abroad whose lessons emphasized foreign language acquisition and music. The quality of these courses of study routinely left much to be desired, however. An even smaller number of elite women attended female boarding schools in western and central Europe. 40 Women from society’s lower ranks had minimal access to education or instructional institutions, and in the Principalities, for instance, among the ten to fifteen percent of literate individuals in 1900, the vast majority were men. 41
The laws that the leaders of the Organic Regulation regimes in Wallachia and Moldavia and the early Greek state enacted reveal that these men intended to provide women with basic education. In Greece, Kapodistrias vowed to build schools designed for girls, just as soon the financial situation permitted his administration to create enough establishments to service boys. 42 The 1834 Greek law on education, which the Othonian Regency modeled on the 1833 “Guizot” law in France, required parents to send their daughters to school, opening them up to potential legal action for failure to do so. Girls were to attend facilities for boys if their commune lacked a gender-specific institution. The Greek state formally banned coeducation facilities only in 1852, shortly after its rapprochement with the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul. 43
In the Danubian lands, calls for a specific right to education for both genders appeared during the 1848 revolutions. Before then, only a handful of female institutions functioned, and like their Greek counterparts, some girls in Wallachia and Moldavia studied in schools for boys. In 1839, sixty out of 148 pupils attending school in Iaşi were girls. In 1842, female students made up thirty-six of the 148 children enrolled in the Moldovan schools run by priests. Curiously, in the Principalities, administrators around the midcentury mark expressed (or feigned) surprise to discover girls had been attending educational establishments alongside boys. 44 An 1864 Romanian law, which rendered schools free and compulsory, formally allowed female pupils to study in boys’ schools if their village or town had no separate facility for girls, but only up to the age of twelve, when intermixing with boys supposedly posed a risk to their virtue. 45 In Creangă’s narrative, the priest’s daughter is among his protagonist’s classmates at the first village school he frequents. Institutions in which Nică later studies appear to be all-male; for example, the author describes only boys filling up the seats of the fictional monitorial school that opened near the character’s home in 1852. 46
While the structural and material emphasis remained on boys’ schooling, a reconceptualization of female instruction accompanied southeast European leaders’ increased concern with popular education. Administrators and educators began to discuss female instruction as a means of producing good mothers, encouraging modern household organization, and pointing women toward gender-appropriate professions. Their familiarity with well-known west European pedagogues, including the Swiss educators Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg—whom Kapodistrias, for example, knew personally and other Balkan public figures read and wrote about—as well as instruction-focused associations, like the Parisian SIE, informed their perspective. 47 Southeast European elites also continued to rely to a large extent on the mutual method for schooling girls. Indeed, as the technique began to fall out of favor with educators in the Principalities later in the nineteenth century, some officials in the Danubian lands asserted it remained the best approach for instructing female pupils. 48
Many of the aims of female education reinforced long-standing gender roles, which derived from Church doctrine and tradition. They stressed women’s roles as obedient wives and dutiful mothers. 49 In southeastern Europe, most of the responsibility for childrearing and other forms of family care fell on women. Creangă, for example, depicts Nică’s mother as overwhelmed and exasperated as she tries to reign in her misbehaving children while seeing to the family home and working on her loom. Her husband, by contrast, conducts his daily affairs outside the house, and Smaranda admonishes Ștefan for the way he indulges their youngsters, noting that he does not have to spend the whole day with them. Creangă additionally credits Smaranda with teaching Nică right from wrong and encouraging him to build a relationship with God in the novella. 50
Southeast European officials and teachers sought to use the public institution of the schoolhouse to shape how women interacted with their children and family members. 51 Pestalozzi, for example, charged mothers with the moral and civic education of their sons and daughters. He argued that by schooling girls, entire families, even whole societies, would grow more enlightened. Greek leaders echoed these ideas, describing female education as a method for “sweetening” the nation’s morals, transmitting patriotic sentiments, and disseminating proper social behaviors. 52 Balkan pedagogues and officials planned to additionally instruct women in good hygiene procedures and train them as home economists, modernizing their domestic activities and rendering the household, the basic unit of these agrarian economies, more efficient. 53 Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, advocates of female education in the Balkans stressed that schooling would not lead to female “independence” but prepare girls to be fit mothers for the male citizens and subjects of modern states. 54
Schools similarly furnished a mechanism to institutionalize and regulate forms of knowledge traditionally transmitted in the home from one female family member to another. For instance, where formal programs or hypothetical designs for girls’ schools existed, they often emphasized productive skills, especially those related to work in textiles, deemed gender appropriate. In Greece, for example, where the state adopted Sarazin’s guidelines for mutual-method instruction, girls and boys would receive the same basic training in reading, writing, and simple mathematics. Male students had additional courses in subjects like geometry, linear drafting, and iconography—a program of study, again, meant to support a wide variety of modernization projects. 55 For female pupils, Sarazin counseled the application of a second SIE-approved manual, specifically for girls, by Madame Quignon. This curriculum offered training in needlework and weaving. 56 In France, Switzerland, and England, these occupations, which neatly overlapped with female domestic activities, were considered acceptable for women. Southeast Europe was no different. 57 In the novella, for instance, Creangă depicts Nică assisting his mother with her loom work as transgressive of gender norms. 58 Traditionally, however, women would not have needed schools to learn to stitch, weave, and knit, as they could acquire these skills from their mothers, female relatives, or neighbors. School programs for girls effectively removed this form of training from the home and standardized it within the confines of the classroom.
Thus, some of the norms that gendered curricula reinforced dovetailed with traditional views of women, for example, the primacy of their roles as mothers and their suitability for specific trades such as the textile industry. At the same time, the courses of study that southeast European pedagogues and officials put in place, or in many cases simply imagined creating, ignored the local context. In the Balkans (as in other parts of the world), where subsistence agriculture remained the principal form of productive activity in the nineteenth century, most women toiled alongside their male relatives on the land. Instructional programs scarcely, if at all, accounted for this reality. Whereas boys might learn about innovations in agriculture and agronomy in school, these lessons did not enter the female curricula. Educational policies reflected the societies and economies southeast European public figures envisioned developing, rather than those that actually existed. 59 Female curricula functioned as a site to express gender difference through the lens of west European modernity, reinscribing certain traditional behaviors and rendering others aberrant. Creangă’s novella points to this shift. After leaving home to continue his schooling, Creangă describes the daughter of Nică’s landlady assisting her father with work in the mountains. The narrator ridicules the female character for laboring “like a man.” 60 Women assisting their male relatives with this type of work would have been far from unusual in the rural Moldavia where the author grew up and set his story. The comment, consequently, implies a modern, or west European, view of femininity and gender in which such labor was coded as masculine. 61
Schools additionally allowed administrators in Greece and the Principalities to more tightly police the limited careers available to women. Midwifery, for example, gradually became a recognizable, regulated profession. In Greece, a country struggling to overcome the loss of life engendered by the war, a school for midwives was founded soon after the conflict ended. Individual communities nominated candidates for admission. Potential pupils had to prove that they possessed good mental, physical, and moral health. Selection committees expressed a preference for girls who could read (having possibly learned this skill in a mutual-method classroom). While this institution (quite literally) licensed women to participate in the paid workforce, professionalization came at a cost. For example, by gatekeeping entry into the field, mandating specific training requirements, and even dictating the fees midwives were allowed to charge, the state encroached upon women’s already limited ability to earn an income. 62 In Wallachia and Moldavia, at least one text circulated, Neculai Kiriacopol’s Twelve Teachings of Use to Women, that offered advice on childbirth and nursing. It suggested opening a school for midwives in the Danubian lands, removing the transmission of this knowledge from the private sphere of the family home and resituating it in a modern disciplinary institution. The first training program for midwives in the Principalities opened in Bucharest in 1839. 63
As plans to extend instruction to girls in Greece and the Danubian lands multiplied, women gained access to teaching jobs. In Moldavia, after Prince Mihai Sturdza opened the first elementary school specifically designed for girls in 1834, his associate, the engineer, writer, and educator Gheorghe Asachi, established a handful of scholarships for female pupils to attend the normal school in Iași. In Greece as well, a limited number of young women studied to become teachers. Opportunities for employment in education remained relatively scarce, however, as the founding of institutions for girls, where female instructors might practice, continually lagged behind the creation of facilities for boys. 64 In this domain as well, the state closely regulated training requirements, moral qualifications, and even the income female (and male) instructors might earn.
The regulation of professions, including midwifery and teaching, fell under a larger umbrella of administrative reform. This course of modernization increasingly required individuals to have a basic level of education to engage with the state. These changes broadly impacted women in ways intimately linked to education. For instance, in Greece, in continuity with the Ottoman period, laws protected a number of women’s rights, including owning property. This situation contrasted with the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, where women had no legal personhood, as law codes (with a few exceptions for widows or wives with long-absent husbands) did not consider them full social, economic, or political agents. 65 Yet even in the Greek state, new structures and practices increasingly excluded women from public spaces. The centralization and professionalization of the administration and judiciary, for example, made it more difficult for women to lay claim to their property or engage in other legal procedures. Women now needed the literacy skills imparted by the nascent school system, or the services of a trained lawyer, to petition for redress or bring legal action. They also had to journey farther, on the infrastructure that the state had built (or promised to build) by deploying the technical, civil engineering expertise schools helped develop. This required women (and men) to spend more time and money if they opted to pursue legal action. Though these changes did not formally bar women’s participation in the judiciary, as Evdoxios Doxiadis has shown, they de facto locked them out of many of the modern administrative structures that took root. Women’s more limited access to education played a key role in this shift. 66
In sum, Danubian and Greek leaders’ drive to modernize created new structures, institutions, and practices that reinscribed gender roles. Often the designs of administrators and educators more closely reflected the societies that they imagined taking shape rather than southeast Europe as it really existed. Expanded access to education formed a crucial prong in their plans, imparting the basic skills that individuals increasingly needed to interact with the state and work in the industrialized economies that they projected would develop. The limited instructional opportunities available to women impeded their ability to engage with the administration and restricted their economic capacities. The introduction of distinct male and female curricula, in theory, if not always in practice, reinforced certain traditional ideas about women’s roles in society—as mothers, for example—and rendered others markers of underdevelopment or backwardness—laboring on the land with their male relatives, for instance. Modernization, education, and gender norms were tightly bound together.
Out of the Schoolhouse and into the Family Home
While reform-minded elites in southeastern Europe, like their counterparts across the continent, sought to remove some forms of instruction from the home, they simultaneously looked to inject new types of learning into the private sphere. Educational and administrative leaders in Greece and the Danubian Principalities recognized that a large percentage of the population could not realistically attend school. In Wallachia, a growing number of didactic periodicals, which started to appear in the early 1830s, transmitted key aspects of the curricula that pedagogues had crafted, teaching audiences about new technologies for agriculture, hygiene practices, and home economics. Over the course of the 1830s, and especially during the 1840s, these publications also began to disseminate ideas about a nascent Romanian national identity and ideology in addition to their emphasis on modernizing innovations and procedures. The men responsible for these journals, including Ion Heliade-Rădulescu, Simeon Marcovici, and Eufrosin Poteca in Wallachia, as well as Asachi in Moldavia, were likewise practicing professors and members of the various commissions and bureaucracies that constructed and enacted educational policies in the Principalities. Poteca, for example, theorized that if a handful of men in each village were literate, they might read articles in these magazines aloud to their families and neighbors. Literate individuals would ramp up the dissemination of knowledge that Danubian elites considered key to remaking their society. In Greece, periodicals similarly dispensed useful and didactic information from the official Greek Times to the French-language Greek Bee. Many of these publications initially benefited from the financial and material assistance of west European philhellenes. 67
Educators and administrators similarly sought to use the young boys who studied in monitorial classrooms as mechanisms for reaching those who could not attend school, notably women. As the French term méthode mutuelle (mutual method) and the Greek αλληλοδακτικά (which literally translates to learning together) highlight, boys enrolled in these establishments not only assimilated the materials but also developed the skills necessary to teach one another. Recall that the use of student monitors kept costs low in these schools and was central to their functioning. 68 This had potential applications outside of the classroom—boys returning home might instruct their relatives, including their mothers and sisters. Several articles in the SIE’s periodical, the Journal of Education, expounded on the value that these activities had in “bringing home” a moral and civic education, especially useful for mothers. 69
To encourage this practice, monitorial schools housed small lending libraries. Sarazin’s manual, for instance, meticulously outlined the type of texts that belonged in such collections—including the bible, books on morals, catechisms, and fables. 70 Teachers were to urge their students to take these volumes home and read them to their families; in doing so, they would further disseminate and entrench a system of values closely linked to both traditional Christian ethics and west European social norms. At the end of the Greek War of Independence, members of the SIE and other west European philhellenic philanthropists and associations organized and funded the translation of a handful of such texts into modern Greek. 71 In the Principalities, educators rendered materials from foreign languages, especially French and Greek, into the vernacular for didactic purposes. 72
Creangă’s novel offers a depiction of this insertion of the public world of the schoolhouse into the private sphere for the family home. Returning from class, Nică describes teaching his mother what he learned at school: “When I studied at school,” the narrator explains, “mama studied with me at home.” The passage continues, “[She] read the breviary, psalter, and Alexandria, better than I did,” adding, “She was so happy when she saw me pull out the book.” 73 Creangă’s account alone is not enough to generalize about the tens of thousands of boys educated in mutual-method schools in Greece and the Principalities (and beyond). It does suggest, however, that, at least occasionally, having taught one another at school, boys like Creangă instructed their relatives at home, allowing their mothers and other (female) family members to benefit second-hand from their education.
Thus, while states in the Balkans (and across Europe) often failed to create and fund establishments for girls, educators and administrators found innovative means of reaching women outside the classroom. Schemes such as the one described above may have even motivated working-class and peasant mothers, like Creangă’s, to send their children to school. It ensured someone could keep the family records and effectively deal with the growing bureaucracy. It also opened up the possibility that female members of the household might glean a rudimentary education through their sons and brothers.
Such practices shaped familial, gender, and state-society relations in three ways. First, they transformed young boys into intermediaries between their schools and the state, on one hand, and their parents and siblings, on the other hand. Employing male students in this manner allowed schools to indirectly provide an education for those beyond their walls, exceeding their institutional limits. At the same time, they gave male students a new type of authority over their female relatives, one derived from the instructional opportunities their mothers and sisters had more limited access to in the very best of circumstances. This likewise reinforced women’s increasing dependence on their (literate) male relatives to engage in the public sphere. Finally, the indirect curricula, which mutual-method establishments exemplified, fortified notions of male trustworthiness. Permitting boys to take home books—precious pedagogical materials—denoted a degree of confidence in them. More importantly, tasking boys with transmitting what they had learned in school identified them as reliable conduits of both practical and moral instruction. Attempts to supply women with a modicum of education in this way thus strengthened a male-dominated gender hierarchy.
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Greek and Danubian elites’ heightened interest in expanding access to elementary education during the early and mid-nineteenth century stemmed from their grander designs for economic, social, and political change. Primary instruction formed a cornerstone of their vision of the future that would furnish individuals with new skills and teach them novel habits. The educational policies that they supported, like their broader reform programs, angled to remake the region in the image of west European modernity. In pursuit of their goals, southeast European administrators and educators mobilized schools as tools, albeit often imperfect ones, to reconfigure people’s relationships with the state, society, and even their own families. Modernization demanded that men and women possess skills, such as literacy, to accomplish specific tasks. It required them to have formalized training to engage in certain professions. Access, or lack thereof, to education circumscribed the ability of individuals, notably women, to participate fully in public and economic life. Women had fewer instructional institutions and options open to them throughout the period, making it more difficult for them to freely engage with the state, especially in contexts that now obliged them to know how to read and write. Where schools and training programs for female students existed, they pushed girls toward occupations considered gender-appropriate, for example, in textiles, midwifery, or education. Instructional establishments permitted the Greek and Danubian states to relocate the transmission of knowledge necessary to exercise these professions within the public realm of the schoolhouse, removing it from the private world of the family home. They also allowed officials to better regulate and police these professions, more tightly controlling women’s (and men’s) productive capacity and earning potential.
Administrators and educators similarly deployed schools to reach inside people’s homes. Over the course of the period, they began to articulate a need to train girls as future mothers through formal education. In schoolhouses, female pupils would learn best practices for raising their children and running their own homes. This type of curriculum reinscribed women’s traditional gender roles, as mothers and caretakers, inside modern disciplining institutions. The mutual method, in particular, gave officials and pedagogues a means of inserting their teachings into the intimacy of the family home via the intermediary of male pupils. Investing young boys with the authority to instruct their mothers and sisters, and providing them, in some cases, with material supports to do so, reasserted a gendered social hierarchy dominated by men in both Greece and the Principalities.
Footnotes
Notes
A transnational historian of nineteenth-century Europe,