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Women Pioneers of Public Education: How Culture Came to the Wild West, by Jurgen Herbst

Rabe-Kleberg, analyse Froebelian pedagogical discourses in the USA and Germany and the nexus of maternalism and professionalism in the person of the Kindergarten teacher, respectively. Whilst these themes may seem familiar to students of ECEC history (not least owing to previous works by Baader and Rabe-Kleberg themselves), they bear reconsideration as part of the volume’s focus on long-term trajectories and patterns of change. Although the history of education is most straightforwardly the focus of essays by Penn, Baader, Borchorst and Rabe-Kleberg, all of the essays in the volume are historically informed, as befits the overarching questions posed regarding policy trajectories and change over time. By and large the essays – even those purportedly about only a single country, such as Willekens’s on Belgium, serve the goal of comparison in a way seldom seen in other putatively comparative historiographical works. This makes the individual essays and the volume as a whole worth reading as a good example of social-science history, whether one is especially interested in family policy or not.