The topic of girls’ education in Hungary in the late 1800s, based on the example of a School Magazine

In Hungary, scientific research on the world of children and the image of children has only started in the last few decades. This exploration can be organically linked to the research on the history of childhood by Béla Pukánszky, Éva Szabolcs and their colleagues, and to the work on women’s history by Katalin Kéri. The present research seeks to answer the question of how and in what ways the image of children and their world appears in the issues of the (Nép) Iskolai Szemle 1 , an educational gazette, published in Csurgó 2 between 1881 and 1896. The subject is interdisciplinary, it is part of education studies and pedagogy history, touching historiography. The historical approaches of the research are: local history, press history, school history, women’s history, childhood history. The focus of this study is on the education and upbringing of girls and women. The complete research on children will not be presented here, only the part of the research on girls. The research method is an analytical, processing, subject-specific content analysis with background research in press history. The Iskolai Szemle 3 on the education and upbringing of women and girls has published nearly two dozen articles on the subject in its 10 years of publication time. From the early 1890s, a veritable ‘battle’ was waged in the pages of the journal for and against the bourgeois girls’ schools. By the end of the decade, the debate was settled: education and ‘domesticity’ were not mutually exclusive concepts in the education of women. The results of the articles under study cannot be generalized in terms of national relevance, but an analysis of the implicit content of the texts reveals a broad outline of the principles of women’s education in a Hungarian journal of the dualism era.