Tag Glossary

This attribute is on the element AWARD found within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It distinguishes between the different kinds of awards: scholarship, prize, and other. An entrance scholarship to Oxford or winning first prize in a Spelling Bee: distinguishing between awards will help understand the material conditions affecting women's education.

CHRONCOLUMN is a mandatory attribute on the element CHRONSTRUCT (available throughout the textbase), which designates a given event as belonging to a subject-specific “column” - that is, to appear in different faceted searches - in Orlando timelines. It has four values: PoliticalClimate, WomenWriters, WritingClimate, and SocialClimate. The same event can be assigned to more than one CHRONCOLUMN, and each may have a different RELEVANCE value. In searches where CHRONCOLUMN is not specified, the event will appear with the icon of the one assigned first. Interpretation of values SocialClimate and NationalInternational is fluid.

The attribute values carry the following connotations:

PoliticalClimate Events

• British-centric events with major implications in Europe, colonies, or world-wide;
• major foreign events which affected Britain either politically or socially (eg., Russian Revolution);
• establishment of major national and international organizations (e.g. League of Nations, Oxfam, International Labour Organization);
• change in status of countries' governing structure, especially colonies, former colonies, and close allies (e.g. independence, coups);
• British monarchs’ accession;
• British general elections; major British and other military engagements (e.g. in Europe, in India, Boer War, major campaigns of WWI and II)

Social Climate: the items in this column will frequently refer not to discrete events but to larger trends or practices affecting women; this means DATERANGES as well as DATES, often approximate.

The following are types of information appropriate to this column:

• advances, developments, or regressions in the areas of technology, science, medicine, law
• education
• conditions surrounding or affecting domestic conditions: housing, clothes, food and food supply, family well-being
• women's political office or involvement in political organisations e.g. the dates of a non-writing but historically significant woman's election to office. (Many events will be listed in the PoliticalClimate column as well--e.g. Lady Astor as first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons.)

Writing Climate

• texts and events associated with male writers
• texts and events associated with non-British women writers
• information about copyright, print technology, book trade, etc.

Women Writers

• texts and events associated with women writers individually or as a class
• material conditions affecting women's writing

This optional attribute is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION > SCHOOL. It records the significant differences between types of institutions. We are interested in the effect of institutional structures on women's lives and hope to capture, for example, how institutional differences between trade schools and boarding schools influenced women. Because of the complicated range of (especially British) educational institutions, this attribute has ten attribute values: boarding, grammar, private, state, dameSchool, daySchool, comprehensive, secondaryModern, tradeSchool, prep:

Boarding: a boarding school is a school at which the students sleep. Common in the fee-paying system, less common in the state or free system, though in some areas like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland boarding schools are (or maybe were) standard at secondary level because of the far-flung nature of terrain. Often weekly boarding (home for weekends) rather than for whole term.

Grammar: Grammar schools date back to the middle ages; grammar in title means education in Latin (occasionally Greek as well). They were for boys only, though some took a few girls almost without noticing. Grammar schools for girls began in the nineteenth century; academic education was thought of as a needing single-sex environment. Entrance from 1944 was by an exam called the "Eleven Plus" from age at which children sat it. Grammar schools creamed off the top 10% or so of the population. They gradually died out after Comprehensive Schools came in during the 1950s and 1960s. Currently making a come-back.

Private: The broad category private (or fee-paying) includes the subcategory of “public schools” which are a particular group of high-status, now private schools with a particular history.

State: Schools provided for out of the taxes for free education are called state schools.

DameSchool: A totally informal school run by a woman on her own initiative, usually at a primary level: teaching elementary alphabet, etc.

Day school: a day school applies in contexts where boarding schools are common. Attending a day school is different from being a day pupil at a boarding school.

Comprehensive: Brave new idea of putting whole ability range in same (therefore typically larger) school. In many communities the grammar school and the “secondary modern” were each converted into a comprehensive and the teachers had to spend a decade convincing the local residents that both were equally good.

Prep: a private school (historically single-sex male, and boarding) not secondary as in US terminology but primary (typically to the age of 13).

SecondaryModern: These replaced trade or vocational schools when another Education Act went through, as the schools for those who failed the 11+ exam. A well-meant system but children felt rejected. Harrowing tales of those who actually made it to university in the end despite having failed the 11+ and attended a Secondary Modern.

TradeSchool: A secondary or post secondary institution where students learn a trade.

This optional attribute is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION > SCHOOL. We are interested in how many women writers went to university, how many had access to primary (elementary) education but not secondary, and the different institutional levels of women's education across historical periods.

This optional attribute is attached to BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It records the Mode of learning and allows us to distinguish between a domestic or an institutional or an autodidactic education through its values: Domestic, Institutional, or Self-taught. The Domestic mode includes all home schooling, whether by a mother, brother, or goveness. Self-taught covers all forms of independent study. Education in any kind of school ranks as Institutional. This attribute allows us to trace the historical developments in women's access to education, for example, the informal domestic education of women writers in the early periods versus the founding of girls’ schools and eventually women's entrance to post-secondary education. The Self-taught value illuminates the place of self-help in women’s intellectual aspirations. A single educational career may make use of all three values in turn; Self-Taught and Institution apply to a good deal of learning in adulthood as well as childhood. 

This optional attribute attached to the element SCHOOL (within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION) records whether the school is single-sex or inclusive. This attribute (with values SINGLESEX and CO-ED) helps us to interpret the influence of single-sex education on women writers across historical periods.