Th e Education Act of 1870 (a.k.a the "Forster Act") marked a watershed in the history of the Victorian state. With its passage, England fi nally joined the other major European states in their adoption of public elementary schooling for all children. 1 Th e act divided the country into 2,500 school districts, each to have a governing school board elected by local ratepayers. At both the national and local levels, however, there was great concern over the government's expanded role in the home, over the fate of England's extensive parochial school system, and over whether elementary schooling should be paid for directly by parents or indirectly through taxes. Some measure of compelling attendance was also deemed necessary, particularly for the poorest of England's working classes, by those across the socioeconomic spectrum who supported universal primary education. 2 Th e newly elected school boards were therefore authorized to create their own bylaws regarding school fees and the mechanisms of compulsion in their districts.Because of a lack of consensus among policymakers on the education issue, school fees were not eliminated until 1891, and compulsory attendance did not become national policy until 1880. In a nation where Liberal I would like to thank Margot Finn and Anna Clark for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and Donald Critchlow and the anonymous readers at the Journal of Policy History for their comments on its fi nal iteration. sascha auerbach | 65 ideals and the right of individuals to be free from government interference were widely championed, compulsion was an especially problematic subject, and not one that the members of the fi rst School Board for London (LSB) approached lightly. 3 Most members of the board agreed that they should maintain as much continuity as possible between the established traditions of voluntary philanthropy in London's working-class districts and the new, state-sponsored educational reform. To that end, in 1871, the LSB committee tasked with laying a blueprint for enforcing the laws on compulsory education strongly recommended that the board should hire "women who have had experience in similar work" as London's first official School Attendance Officers (i.e., truant officers). 4 The justification for this recommendation was twofold. First, since these officers would be dealing with parents on issues involving childrearing, the work was "most fitly dealt with by women," and second, they argued that middle-class women with previous experience in domestic reform "will be the least likely to incite resistance" from working-class mothers. 5 At the launch of compulsory schooling, the LSB had clearly defined the enforcement of the new regulations as women's work.Th e initial reaction to the committee's suggestion was mixed. Among the fi rst cohort of School Attendance Offi cers (a.k.a. "School Board Visitors, " or simply "Visitors") in London, men and women were almost equally represented. In 1871, for example, the Lambeth Division of the LSB hired four women...
