Debating was an important part of schoolgirls’ political education in late Victorian and Edwardian England that has been overlooked in the scholarship on female education and civics instruction. Debates offered middle- and working-class schoolgirls an embodied and interactive education for citizenship. Considering both the content of discussions and the process of debating, this article argues that school debates provided a unique opportunity for girls to discuss political ideas and develop political skills. Debates became intertwined with girls’ peer cultures, challenging contemporary and historiographical assumptions of girlhood apoliticism. Positioning girls as political subjects sheds new light on political change in modern Britain. Schoolgirl debates show how gendered political boundaries were shifting in this period. Within the unique space of the school debating chamber, girls were free to appropriate and subvert ‘masculine’ political subjects and ways of speaking. In mock parliaments, schoolgirls re-created the archetypal male political space of the House of Commons, demonstrating their familiarity with parliamentary politics. Schoolgirl debates therefore foreshadowed initiatives that promoted women's citizenship after partial suffrage was achieved in 1918, and they help to explain how the first women voters were assimilated easily into existing party and constitutional politics.
, the Girl's Realm, a sixpenny monthly girls' periodical launched the previous autumn, included a short story titled "Queen Mab" about a group of siblings who ran their own parliament. In their political play, the children mimic parliamentary procedures with considerable detail. Each sibling is elected as a Member of Parliament and debates are conducted with the correct "parliamentary language," all overseen by ten-year-old Patience, the organizer of the proceedings, and fourteen-year-old Albinia, who acts as Speaker. 1 The author of the story, Emma Marshall, was a prolific children's writer as well as a promoter of women's education and suffrage. Her story points to a wider phenomenon of girls' periodicals engaging with political themes. Both fiction and non-fiction articles in the Girl's Realm and the Girl's Own Paper at times explored the idea of juvenile, and specifically girlhood, citizenship; in doing so, they constructed the girl reader as an imperial and political subject. As Marshall's "Queen Mab" story exemplifies, understandings of girls' politics in the period were complex. Patience's appropriation of political language is in part attributed to the influence of her father, a member of the division of the county. This highlights the perceived importance of the family as a site for girls' political socialization and raises the question of how far girls' engagement with politics was understood to be adult-directed. Patience is represented as an exception rather than the norm. Her level of political interest is presented as unusual for a girl of her age, and she is mocked for being "too much like a 'grown-up.'" 2 Indeed, her younger brother and sister are often reluctant to comply with the parliament's rules, while her cousin Mabel rejects the institution entirely. In this way, the Girl's Realm engaged with a key debate in
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