Hirsch, Pam 1947–

PERSONAL: Born October 19, 1947, in Birmingham, England; daughter of Clifford (a managing director of a technical plastics company) and Joyce (Brookes) Blakemore; married Desmond Hirsch (a chartered surveyor), July 3, 1981; children: Stephanie, Sophie. Ethnicity: "White Anglo-Saxon." Education: Charlotte Mason College of Education, certificate, 1972; Anglia Polytechnic University, B.A. (with honors), 1981; University of Essex, M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1992. Politics: "Oldish Labour." Religion: Humanitarian. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, theater.

ADDRESSES: Home—31 Grantchester St., Cambridge CB3 9HY, England. Office—Newnham College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Literature and history teacher in Cumbria state schools, 1972–78; teacher at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and Newnham Language Center, Cambridgeshire, England, 1981–83; nursery school principal, 1983–88; Homerton College, Cambridge, England, senior lecturer in English and research mentor, 1992–2001; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, lecturer in English literature, film theory, and history of education, and graduate tutor at Newnham College, 2001–.

MEMBER: Biographer's Club, New Cavendish Club, Women's Library.

WRITINGS:

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist, and Rebel, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1998.

(Editor, with Mary Hilton) Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, 1790–1930, Longman (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Mark McBeth) Teacher Training at Cambridge: The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes, Woburn Press (Portland, OR), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Women in the Victorian Art World, Manchester University Press, 1995; The Uses of Autobiography, Taylor & Francis, 1995; and Wollstonecraft's Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920, Manchester University Press, 1996. Contributor to periodicals, including Women's Philosophy Review, Brönte Society Transactions, and George Eliot Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research for a biography of writer and political activist Phyllis Bottome.

SIDELIGHTS: Pam Hirsch is an author of nonfiction specializing in feminist studies. Hirsch's favorite literary practice is to examine the lives of progressive women within their historical contexts. Hirsch has written several articles on historic feminist figures, including pieces on Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Brönte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Howitt, Margaret Morris, and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Her first full-length book is about Bodichon, a highly influential leader of the nineteenth-century Victorian women's movement.

In Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist, and Rebel, Hirsch gives the world what has been termed its most thorough and integrated introduction to Bodichon. Prior works had examined Bodichon's feminism and polemical writing, but neglected to include her contributions to feminism through her painting. As a Pre-Raphaelite artist, Bodichon founded the Society of Female Artists and campaigned for women's admission into the Royal Academy schools in England. As a pioneering journalist, Bodichon founded the English Woman's Journal, which helped fire the cause of women's rights. She was a close friend of author George Eliot, and her writing concentrated on the liberation of women from the strict conventions of the Victorian age. As a political activist, Bodichon was a supreme force, working for legal rights for married women, the right of middle-class women to work, the right of women to vote, and the right of women to have access to education. Bodichon also was the cofounder of Girton College in Cambridge, the first university college for women in England.

Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, 1790–1930 is a collection of essays about the varied range of contributions made by women to British education over nearly 150 years. The women responsible for these contributions were teachers, theorists, sisters in religion, university academics, and political figures. Some women devoted their entire lives to a single objective; others seized opportunities as they emerged. Several of the women earned lasting reputations, such as Maria Montessori; others rose to local prominence and were soon forgotten, notwithstanding the value of their groundbreaking labor. All are included here, in a collection that Janet Howarth described in the English Historical Review as a volume with "much to offer both specialists and the general reader."

Teacher Training at Cambridge: The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes focuses more acutely on the work of a single pair of educators in a single setting and time period between 1879 and 1909. Browning was the first principal of the Day Training College that was created in 1891 to train working-class men to become elementary schoolteachers. Hughes was the first principal of the Cambridge Training College for aspiring female secondary schoolteachers. "Both [individuals] shared a commitment to realizing students' individual potential and extending their cultural horizons," observed Joyce Senders Pedersen in her review for the History of Education Quarterly, and this commitment is the focus of Teacher Training at Cambridge. Pedersen did not believe that Hirsch and McBeth offer conclusive arguments to support the success of the endeavors undertaken by Browning and Hughes, particularly in regard to their efforts on behalf of institutional reforms in the area of teacher training or to the permanence of their contributions, but concluded her assessment by stating that "in drawing attention to these issues this study opens up vistas inviting further exploration."

Hirsch once told CA: "I am centrally interested in women who have taken risks, in their lives and in their work. It would be safe to say that I use gender as a category of analysis in all my work—whether it be on literature, history, education, philosophy, politics, or aesthetics."

Hirsch recently added: "I read omnivorously from a very early age, and went into teaching. The desire to write my first book was because I 'fell in love' with the character of Barbara Bodichon. I wanted to write a biography that would do justice to her multi-faceted character and achievements.

"The most surprising thing I have learned as a writer is that ninety five percent of the work is the researching and thinking. The writing itself seems not so hard, though it's not so much inspiration as perspiration! My favourite book is always the one I am currently writing.

"The effect I hope my books will have is to alert readers to the 'forgotten' women, women who were very significant in their day but whose contributions to literature, painting, film, politics have not been thoroughly researched and written up."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English Historical Review, February, 2001, Janet Howarth, review of Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, 1790–1930, p. 261.

History of Education Quarterly, winter, 2004, Joyce Senders Pedersen, review of Teacher Training at Cambridge: The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes, p. 608.

London Review of Books, October 1, 1998, review of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist, and Rebel, p. 26.

Reference and Research Book News, May, 2004, review of Teacher Training at Cambridge, p. 189.

Times Educational Supplement, April 30, 2004, Gerald Haigh, review of Teacher Training at Cambridge, p. 19.

Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1998, Lindsay Duguid, review of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, p. 36.

Women's History Review, fall, 2002, review by Stephanie Spencer, p. 555.