Elsie Morres and the education of girls at the Hermitage, 1906-1933

© 1988 Elizabeth SummerfieldThe Church of England Girls' High School, Geelong, which became popularly known as 'The Hermitage', opened its doors in 1906 with a Melbourne University graduate, Miss Elsie Morres, as its first headmistress. For 27 years, until her retirement in 1933, Elsie Morres was the driving force in shaping the school's life, both its broad educational aims and its more mundane daily operations. Her work throws interesting light on the education of middle-class girls, and on the definitions of femininity with which they were confronted, in the first decades of twentieth century Victoria. Feminist historians have extensively documented the reform movement led by female educationalists in Britain in the mid nineteenth century, a period which witnessed vast changes in the type and status of girls' secondary and tertiary education in that country.(l) In the Australian colonies, the desire of the middle- and upper-class citizenry, in particular, to imitate the 'Motherland' facilitated the apparent ready accommodation of the English innovations to the Australian educational environment. (2) This appearance ignores not only the existence of significant Australian female educational reformers, but the continued vigilance necessary to sustain hard-won reforms well into the twentieth century. Australian historians of girls' education have noted the ready translation of English reforms to the Australian educational environment of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.(3) In Victoria, in particular, the establishment of the Presbyterian and Methodist Ladies' Colleges in 1875 and 1882 respectively, indicated the ease with which some sections of the upper and middle classes accepted the education of girls in institutions, and in subjects modelled on those of boys' 'public' schools. (4) Although the Anglican Church in Australia was tardier in its entry into the arena of girls' education, it too looked to England for guidance. (From Introduction