Judith Harford
Biographic Data
| ID | 5138394 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith Harford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith |
| FAMILY NAME | Harford |
| SIGNATURE | HARFORD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5511-1283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Women’s scholarly lives
This special issue illuminates the risky, contested and often hidden spaces in which the first generations of academic women negotiated and crafted a scholarly life. Taking a longue durée approach, it traces the complex contours of the scholarly trajectories of a range of academic women internationally whose lives straddled the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, providing key insights into the shifting dynamics of acceptance and resista…
‘Strangers within
This article explores the lives of Ireland’s first women professors, whose careers spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period marked by the international expansion of higher education for women, against the backdrop of wider social, economic and political change. Drawing on a range of sources, including university records, personal correspondence, and student testimonies, the article interrogates how these women navigated…
Marriage bars and motherhood
In Ireland, the rationale for, and long duration of, the marriage bar in employment stemmed from the widely held belief that women, once married, belonged in the home. The marriage bar, legislated for in the public sector but simultaneously practised in the private sector, affected thousands of women in Ireland. Drawing on twenty-one oral history interviews and supplemental narratives by email, this article demonstrates the deeply flawed assumpti…
“An Ireland of Brave, Manly Boys, an Ireland of Pure, Modest Girls 1 ”
This article examines how the Catholic Church, working hand in glove with the Irish State, used the education system in order to regulate Irish sexuality in the early decades of Irish independence. Through an analysis of a range of primary sources, interwoven with oral testimony, it argues that the dominance exercised by the Catholic Church in the organisational culture of schools, its control over the training of teachers and its suppression of …
Writing Ireland
History of education scholarship in the Republic of Ireland has witnessed a blossoming in recent years, a trajectory which diverges from broader international patterns. Expanding beyond its traditional focus on teacher education, recent scholarship has extended its theoretical, methodological and thematic foundations. This article traces the contours of the historiography of Irish education, highlighting dominant themes and intellectual trends. F…
“It’s not my place to speak”
In this article, we explore the concept of student voice as it comes to life in the high-stakes setting of the university lecture, and as it is specifically experienced through the perspective of student teachers from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on the philosophical work of Stanley Cavell, we examine how student voice can be lost, frozen, or otherwise crowded out in the lecture setting. Based on an analysis of data garnered t…
From foundations to frontiers
Perspectives on education policy-making in Ireland, 1990–2025
Degrees of Change
This article traces the contours of the history of women’s education in England and Ireland in the period 1850-2000, mapping dominant themes and key inflection points. Positing a framework for reading degrees of change over time, we propose four interrelated lenses: access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks. Drawing on key contributions to the field, we argue that women’s engagement with higher education has followed a complex and …
Teacher supply in Ireland
The last several years have seen an escalation in calls for an adequate response at governmental level to the reality of a teacher supply crisis in Ireland. This article traces the evolution of the crisis, providing important socio-historical context and analysis. It argues that while the issue of a steady supply of teachers has been a feature of the evolving complexion of the Irish educational landscape for decades, the problem has become more p…
Job prospects, useful knowledge, and the ‘rip-off’ University
This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting The Idea of the University (1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman's classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly under pressure to be 'useful:' on this understanding, 'useful' denotes an arguably limited and utilitarian sense wh…
The Deis programme as a policy aimed at combating educational disadvantage
Existing research in the area of educational disadvantage in the Irish context is located either within the historiography of policy in the area or in contemporary macro analysis of dominant trends. The existing canon of research tells us that prolonged periods of unemployment and poorer health outcomes are features of early school leavers, that the educational experience of young people are reflected in their future life trajectories, and that i…
Becoming women teachers
Drawing on archival material and oral testimony of former students, this paper examines the lives and experiences of women in Catholic primary teacher training colleges in Ireland in the period 1922–1974. It commences with a brief overview of the historical context in which these colleges emerged, situating their development within the socio-political and cultural context of the emerging Free State and the changing primary school curriculum. Resi…
Years of Inequality
2022 marks one hundred years since the foundation of the Irish State, and thus an appropriate time in which to reflect on how educational policy has shaped the nation over the course of a century. This article examines one hundred years of education policy through an equality lens, asking how the concept of educational equality has been understood, fostered and mediated. Framing policy implementation across three defined periods, 1922–1959, 1960–…
Promoting academic resilience in Deis schools
This article reports on baseline data gathered as part of an intervention project which aims to enhance academic performance, encourage retention and broaden the educational and career aspirations of senior cycle students in schools which serve socio-economically disadvantaged communities. The experiences and perceptions of 405 students attending 16 DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) schools who are participating in a voluntary …
Reflecting on 100 years of educational policy in Ireland
The year 2022, one hundred years since the foundation of the State, provides an opportunity to reflect on the development of policy in relation to educational equality over the course of the last century, including promises made and opportunities lost. This article looks back at one hundred years of education policy through an equality lens, asking whether or not the state has delivered on promises made and whether or not commitments to fostering…
Leading in the academy
The under-representation of women in senior echelons of the academy, particularly in disciplines which have been historically male-dominated and male-led, is well-documented internationally. The narrative, however, is not a linear one, and there have been intervals of alteration and narrow apertures of opportunity. This article focuses on one of those intervals, the period 1957–1962, which saw three women professors being appointed to the Science…
Life threads
Early advocates for the expansion of women’s higher education imagined a future that was deeply embedded in their aspirations for social, economic and political equality. In the vanguard of campaigns for wider access to higher education were women professors, they themselves outsiders within an academic hierarchy marked by male privilege. This article shines the spotlight on two women professors to understand the educational, social and cultural …
Piety and Privilege
During the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for secondary school education. The State also permitted the Church to pursue its major interest in education in secondary schools. Unhindered, the Church thus was able to promote within the schools sets of practices aimed at ‘the salvation of souls’ and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class along with priests, brot…
Mapping an agenda for gender equality in the academy
Higher educational organisations across the EU, and indeed globally, remain male-dominated. The fact that men occupy 86 per cent of all positions of Rector/ President/Vice Chancellor and 76 per cent of all full professorial positions, illustrates the way in which these organisations are designed by men for men. Their deeply embedded structural and cultural features reflect, reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal and more recently managerialist and …
The path to professorship
The under-representation of women in senior echelons of the academy is well-documented internationally. In the Irish context, the issue of gender equality has reached the active policy agenda relatively recently, largely triggered by a number of high profile lawsuits and the subsequent setting up of an expert review panel and a gender equality taskforce, both issuing landmark reports [HEA 2016. National Review of Gender Inequality in Irish Higher…
The gendering of diaspora
This article examines the way in which Irish American women teachers used education as a platform to extend the reach of their social and cultural capital, enabling them to subvert patriarchal and imperialist ideologies and, embracing subjectivity, assume key leadership roles in a range of associations fundamental to organised feminism. Drawing on a tapestry of primary sources, it interrogates how these gender transgressors successfully resisted …
Challenging the dominant Church hegemony in times of risk and promise
Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere. In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directly or indirectly the vast majority of education institutions in the country. This dominant hegemony was most powerful during the period post-Independence, achieved in 1922, and up until the 1960s. By the 1960s, however, Irish society had begun a process …
Investigating the potential of cultural-historical activity theory for studying specific transitions in the history of education
In recent years, and particularly with the emergence of cultural history, historians of education have begun to adopt a wide variety of theoretical approaches to their scholarship. Notwithstanding this, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) remains underutilised in the field of history of education, despite being employed widely in other domains of education research. This paper illustrates the way in which CHAT offers a valuable framework f…
I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’
This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered,…
Engaging student teachers in meaningful reflective practice
One man one job”
In 1932, the Irish government, facing an economic downturn, introduced a marriage ban which required that female primary school teachers were required to resign on marriage. This followed a series of restrictive legislative measures adopted by Irish governments throughout the 1920s which sought to limit women's participation in public life and the public sector. Such a requirement emerged in several countries in response to high unemployment and …
Continuity and change in the perspectives of women religious in Ireland on themselves both as religious and as teachers in the years immediately prior to, and following, the Second Vatican Council (19…
A general lack of scholarly works on various aspects of the history of the lives of female teaching religious has recently been highlighted by Hellinckx, Depaepe and Simon. This paper, which reports a preliminary study, is offered as one contribution to addressing the deficit identified. The hope is that it will provoke further scholarship in the field. It is based on an oral history project on the perspectives of female religious in Ireland on t…
Irish educational policy in the 1960s
A decade of transformation that emerged following a period of inertia and insularity in Irish education, the 1960s is widely regarded by scholars as representing a paradigm shift in education policy. Marked by a more interventionist, strategic policy approach, this period resulted in significant democratisation of education, particularly at post-primary level. Based on an analysis of key primary sources, many of which are here examined for the fi…
Induction needs of a group of teachers at different career stages in a school in the Republic of Ireland
The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland
The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland in the nineteenth century has traditionally been viewed as a Protestant initiative. Scholarship suggests that the Irish campaign developed along the same lines as the English movement, gaining from and growing out of the English advances. Leading Protestant schools for girls have been viewed as the driving force behind the concessions afforded Irish women. This paper challenges this assump…
Piety and Privilege
During the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for secondary school education. The State also permitted the Church to pursue its major interest in education in secondary schools. Unhindered, the Church thus was able to promote within the schools sets of practices aimed at ‘the salvation of souls’ and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class along with priests, brot…
Contesting the Limond thesis on British influence in Irish education since 1922
This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, “[An] historical culture ... rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored”? British influence on Irish education since 1922', which appeared in Comparative Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449–462. Limond's overall thesis is that ‘a post-colonial overhang affects Irish policy-makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices’. This paper contests three main aspe…
The emergence of a national policy on teacher education in Ireland
The development of the Irish system of education was, not unlike all critical aspects of Irish identity, fundamentally shaped by its relationship with its colonial neighbour. Prior to Independence in 1922, the system of education promoted was a fundamental part of a strategic effort to ensure cultural assimilation and political socialisation. Control over the education system facilitated the systematic erosion of the native language and culture a…
I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’
This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered,…
The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland
The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland in the nineteenth century has traditionally been viewed as a Protestant initiative. Scholarship suggests that the Irish campaign developed along the same lines as the English movement, gaining from and growing out of the English advances. Leading Protestant schools for girls have been viewed as the driving force behind the concessions afforded Irish women. This paper challenges this assump…
An Experiment in the Development of Social Networks for Women
This article examines the network of women’s colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to women’s exclusion from the realm of the university and their desire to participate in higher education. These colleges, run largely along denominational lines, were situated in the major cities with the majority located in Dublin. The pioneering colleges for Protestant women were the Ladies’ Collegiate School …
Nervous Energy and Administrative Ability’
At the turn of the twentieth century, middle‐class educated gentlewomen in Ireland had established positions of authority and leadership in the relatively new professions of education and nursing. Acting in the roles of lady principals and lady superintendents, respectively, in education and nursing, many of these women had themselves participated in the social reform movements that led to the establishment of their new professions in the late ni…
Engaging student teachers in meaningful reflective practice
The emergence of a national policy on teacher education in Ireland
The development of the Irish system of education was, not unlike all critical aspects of Irish identity, fundamentally shaped by its relationship with its colonial neighbour. Prior to Independence in 1922, the system of education promoted was a fundamental part of a strategic effort to ensure cultural assimilation and political socialisation. Control over the education system facilitated the systematic erosion of the native language and culture a…
Induction needs of a group of teachers at different career stages in a school in the Republic of Ireland
One man one job”
In 1932, the Irish government, facing an economic downturn, introduced a marriage ban which required that female primary school teachers were required to resign on marriage. This followed a series of restrictive legislative measures adopted by Irish governments throughout the 1920s which sought to limit women's participation in public life and the public sector. Such a requirement emerged in several countries in response to high unemployment and …
Mapping the terrain of female education in Ireland, 1830–1910
Education for Irish women and girls developed significantly in the period 1830–1910. During this time, formal state‐funded education systems were established in Ireland by the British government. Some of these systems included females from their inception and some attempted to exclude girls and women. This article charts the opening up of formal schooling and university to Irish girls and women, examining the points at which they were excluded, t…
Continuity and change in the perspectives of women religious in Ireland on themselves both as religious and as teachers in the years immediately prior to, and following, the Second Vatican Council (19…
A general lack of scholarly works on various aspects of the history of the lives of female teaching religious has recently been highlighted by Hellinckx, Depaepe and Simon. This paper, which reports a preliminary study, is offered as one contribution to addressing the deficit identified. The hope is that it will provoke further scholarship in the field. It is based on an oral history project on the perspectives of female religious in Ireland on t…
Contesting the Limond thesis on British influence in Irish education since 1922
This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, “[An] historical culture ... rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored”? British influence on Irish education since 1922', which appeared in Comparative Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449–462. Limond's overall thesis is that ‘a post-colonial overhang affects Irish policy-makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices’. This paper contests three main aspe…
Irish educational policy in the 1960s
A decade of transformation that emerged following a period of inertia and insularity in Irish education, the 1960s is widely regarded by scholars as representing a paradigm shift in education policy. Marked by a more interventionist, strategic policy approach, this period resulted in significant democratisation of education, particularly at post-primary level. Based on an analysis of key primary sources, many of which are here examined for the fi…
Secondary School Education in Ireland
Women’s education associations
Examining the historiography of women’s education, the issue which dominates is understandably that of access. Access, or lack thereof, is a transnational construct which forms an over-arching framework through which the issue of historical gender equality in higher education can be interpreted and interrogated. Each of the seminal texts which examines the historiography of women’s higher education uses access as a lens. While it is important to …
I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’
This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered,…
The historiography of the professoriate
Through the lens of nineteenth-century Irish society and through an interrogation of the diaries of one of the first women professors appointed to the National University of Ireland, this article traces the entry of women into the professoriate in Ireland. The aim of the paper is to extend the map of the international research agenda which speaks to a historiographical deficit in the area of women and the professoriate, interrogating the complex …
Mapping an agenda for gender equality in the academy
Higher educational organisations across the EU, and indeed globally, remain male-dominated. The fact that men occupy 86 per cent of all positions of Rector/ President/Vice Chancellor and 76 per cent of all full professorial positions, illustrates the way in which these organisations are designed by men for men. Their deeply embedded structural and cultural features reflect, reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal and more recently managerialist and …
The path to professorship
The under-representation of women in senior echelons of the academy is well-documented internationally. In the Irish context, the issue of gender equality has reached the active policy agenda relatively recently, largely triggered by a number of high profile lawsuits and the subsequent setting up of an expert review panel and a gender equality taskforce, both issuing landmark reports [HEA 2016. National Review of Gender Inequality in Irish Higher…
The gendering of diaspora
This article examines the way in which Irish American women teachers used education as a platform to extend the reach of their social and cultural capital, enabling them to subvert patriarchal and imperialist ideologies and, embracing subjectivity, assume key leadership roles in a range of associations fundamental to organised feminism. Drawing on a tapestry of primary sources, it interrogates how these gender transgressors successfully resisted …
Challenging the dominant Church hegemony in times of risk and promise
Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere. In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directly or indirectly the vast majority of education institutions in the country. This dominant hegemony was most powerful during the period post-Independence, achieved in 1922, and up until the 1960s. By the 1960s, however, Irish society had begun a process …
Investigating the potential of cultural-historical activity theory for studying specific transitions in the history of education
In recent years, and particularly with the emergence of cultural history, historians of education have begun to adopt a wide variety of theoretical approaches to their scholarship. Notwithstanding this, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) remains underutilised in the field of history of education, despite being employed widely in other domains of education research. This paper illustrates the way in which CHAT offers a valuable framework f…
Life threads
Early advocates for the expansion of women’s higher education imagined a future that was deeply embedded in their aspirations for social, economic and political equality. In the vanguard of campaigns for wider access to higher education were women professors, they themselves outsiders within an academic hierarchy marked by male privilege. This article shines the spotlight on two women professors to understand the educational, social and cultural …
Piety and Privilege
During the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for secondary school education. The State also permitted the Church to pursue its major interest in education in secondary schools. Unhindered, the Church thus was able to promote within the schools sets of practices aimed at ‘the salvation of souls’ and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class along with priests, brot…
Promoting academic resilience in Deis schools
This article reports on baseline data gathered as part of an intervention project which aims to enhance academic performance, encourage retention and broaden the educational and career aspirations of senior cycle students in schools which serve socio-economically disadvantaged communities. The experiences and perceptions of 405 students attending 16 DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) schools who are participating in a voluntary …
Reflecting on 100 years of educational policy in Ireland
The year 2022, one hundred years since the foundation of the State, provides an opportunity to reflect on the development of policy in relation to educational equality over the course of the last century, including promises made and opportunities lost. This article looks back at one hundred years of education policy through an equality lens, asking whether or not the state has delivered on promises made and whether or not commitments to fostering…
Leading in the academy
The under-representation of women in senior echelons of the academy, particularly in disciplines which have been historically male-dominated and male-led, is well-documented internationally. The narrative, however, is not a linear one, and there have been intervals of alteration and narrow apertures of opportunity. This article focuses on one of those intervals, the period 1957–1962, which saw three women professors being appointed to the Science…
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Irish and British Studies (20 works) · Irish (19 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Higher education (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Pedagogy (13 works)