Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners by Alison Plowden

that:
    Our gentlewoman shall learn not only all manner of fine needlework ... but whatsoever belongeth to the distaff, spindle and weaving: which must not be thought unfit for the honour and estate wherein she was borne...And which is more, to the end that being become a mistress, she shall look into the duties and offices of domestical servants, and see how they sweep and make clean the chambers, hall and other places: make ready dinner, dressing up the cellar and buttery: and that she be not so proud that she should disdain ... but to be present at all household works.
    The pros and cons of higher education for women continued to be earnestly discussed, especially during the first half of the Tudor century, and despite the misgivings of the old-fashioned, there's no doubt that literacy among women in general was on the increase. The numbers of cookery books, books on household management, needlework and related feminine interest subjects, as well as books of advice and pious exhortation to wives which were now coming off the presses, indicated that there must have been a worthwhile market for them. The widening availability and comparative cheapness of the printed word naturally gave special impetus to would-be readers, but, at the same time, as life became slowly but steadily more urbanized and more complicated, the wives and daughters of shopkeepers, merchants, traders and small businessmen of every kind were finding it more and more necessary to be able to write a letter, con a legal document and cast up accounts.
    Girls continued to learn the traditional arts of baking and brewing, spinning and weaving, butter- and cheese-making and the concoction of herbal remedies from their mothers, just as they had always done, but the acquisition of more formal skills could present a problem. There's evidence that girls as well as boys attended the scattered chantry and parish schools offering elementary education to the local children, and some grammar schools, too, seem to have admitted girls, at any rate to part of their course, but there were as yet no schools for girls in any recognizable sense. In the early years of the century, of course, parents could still send their daughters to a nunnery to learn French, some Latin, needlework, music and Church history. Considerably later on, the Protestant refugees coming in from France and the Low Countries began to set up academies for young ladies, offering a syllabus of French, sometimes Italian, music, dancing, deportment and needlework. Such establishments, though, were only for the few, and in general an ambitious girl would have to rely on her own resources to get an education, learning from one or other of her parents, from an elder brother, the local parish priest or curate, or from a sympathetic and literate neighbour. Quite a number of wives persuaded their husbands to teach them to read. Higher up the social scale there was the family chaplain, or a young noblewoman might share the services of her brother's tutor.
    Another method of obtaining extra advantages for daughters which continued to be popular among upper- and middle-class parents was the practice of 'placing out' - that is of sending a girl away to be brought up and educated in a household better circumstanced than one's own. This habit applied to boys as well as girls - boys apprenticed to a craft lived with their masters' families - and had its origins in the feudal custom of sending a boy to serve as a page in his lord's household as the first step in his progress towards knighthood. But 'placing out' for a girl, even if she paid for her keep by performing some domestic duties or by acting as a 'waiting gentlewoman' to her hostess, meant the chance of acquiring accomplishments and social graces not obtainable at home, and consequently the chance of making a better marriage.
    Foreigners regarded this system (which was, of course, the forerunner of the boarding-school system) as yet another instance of English