This book examines the education of working-class and middle-class girls between 1800-1914. It argues that an influential middle-class ideology advocated that all women should confine their activities to the home, as housewives and mothers. It held that women from the lower classes should be given instruction only in knowledge that was domestically useful, and that middle-class women should be allowed to develop accomplishments that would allow them to attract socially desirable suitors.

The book argues that many women of both these classes struggled against these views that were so sedulously upheld by their husbands and fathers.