‘Educator Extraordinaire': Anne Mullin Jellicoe

This is Anne Jellicoe (1823 - 1880), a woman about whom you've likely never heard. In Dublin City, Anne founded a college for the education of girls. Alexandra College played an integral role in the lives of many extraordinary Irish women, who in their turn had a profound impact on the history of Ireland. 

Born Anne William Mullin on 26 March 1823, her whole life long Anne had a keen interest in uplifting the lives of Irish women. Following her 1846 marriage to John Jellicoe, the two moved to County Offaly where Anne opened a school for girls, teaching them lacemaking, homemaking and other practical skills.

Controversially, Anne not only took the bold move of teaching the girls to think independently, she decided to add taught subjects normally reserved for boys. The local Catholic priest was so outraged, he pushed the authorities to bring the school to an end.

Not to be deterred, Anne and John moved to Dublin, where Anne worked for charity schools. She taught poor and indigent women secretarial skills and bookkeeping, such that these women might secure employment by which they could support their families.

In 1861 Anne founded the Queen’s Institute for the Training and Employment of Educated Women. There Anne and other teachers provided technical training classes for women. It was located in the building that is now Buswell’s Hotel. (At the corner of Kildare & Molesworth streets, just over the road from the National Library of Ireland.)

Anne realised she wanted to do more than provide technical training for women. She recognised that women needed a well-rounded education. Having enjoyed a proper education herself, Anne mourned the dearth of such schooling for middle-class Protestant young women, and wanted to offer something comparable to that given to young men.

These ideas ran entirely contrary to the long prevailing belief that middle-class women should be educated only in ‘the accomplishments’ that which would allow them to attract a husband and raise a family. For a Protestant middle-class girl, needlework, music and appropriate reading, together with basic arithmetic (to work out the grocer’s bill) and a language from the continent, most often French, but occasionally Italian or German, comprised her education. 

Little thought was given to those middle-class girls who would never marry or who would end up in very reduced circumstances, having been widowed or abandoned. Anne’s husband John died in 1862, and her own widowhood seemed to increase Anne’s desire to better educate women.

From my postcard collection, the back garden of the college, 
featuring the Jellico Building.

In 1866, with the help of Church of Ireland Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench, who supported her mandate, Anne founded Alexandra College in Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. The original plan was to educate governesses at the school, but Anne recognised the need to make the school into a university-style institution offering a firm grounding in taught subjects, including History, Physics, Chemistry, Euclidian Geometry, Algebra, English Literature, Languages and Art. These subjects would prepare young women to sit the same examinations as young men. 

Alexandra College on Earlsfort Terrace.
Lawrence Collection, National Library of Ireland

This was no easy task for Anne and others who held that educating young women was in and of itself intrinsically valuable. Catholic bishops in particular felt a world with educated women was an inherently bad thing, because to educate a woman was to bring her into an unnatural state away from her so-called natural roles of wife and mother.

Anne Jellicoe was among those who fiercely lobbied for the extension to girls of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878. The Act established the principle that girls and women had the right to sit for public competitive examinations and the right to earn university degrees.

By the time of Anne’s death on 18 October 1880, Alexandra College had become a recognised feeder school for young women entering university. Perhaps not surprisingly, her obituary named Anne as the ‘Lady Superintendent of Alexandra School’, but did not acknowledge the fact that she founded the college.

Today Alexandra College still exists. It now operates as an independent school, under the Church of Ireland ethos, and is recognised as one of the finest girls’ schools in Ireland.

Thankfully, in the 19th century, Catholic nuns (members of my own family among them) also got on board with the idea of educating girls for university entrance, but that is a story for another day.

©Éire_Historian

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Images: 

1] A portrait of Anne William Mullin Jellicoe by an unattributed artist.

2] From my postcard collection, the back garden and Jellicoe Hall at Alexandra College.

3] The buildings of Alexandra College fronting Earlsfort Terrace. Lawrence Collection, National Library of Ireland.

Endnote:

The Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act, 1878, Chapter LXVI, Section Six, Line 4, with respect to the education of girls, reads exactly as follows:

“The Board shall from time to time, with the approval of the Lord Lieutenant, make rules for the purposes of this Act with respect to the following matters. For applying, as far as conveniently may be, the benefits of this Act to the education of girls.”