| Summary: | The idea of establishing a denominational college for young women in the Anglican Deanery of Bedford was first submitted to the Montreal's Synod in 1873. Following a contest which was held between local municipalities, the overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant rural village of Dunham won the honors and six years later, the Dunham Ladies' College (the college would become St. Helen's School in 1913) opened its doors. This thesis examines the reactions and readjustments of the Anglican Church, and those of their followers, attributable to its disestablishment (in the 1840's and 1850's) and to the rise of liberalism and to the transformation of traditional social order that went on in the same age. The example that we have selected---the DLC/ SHS---will allow us to scrutinize de 1870 to 1930 period. It will demonstrate the importance of religion in the construction of women's social identities: education being a means borrowed by the local and diocesan Anglican elite (both lay and ecclesiastical ones) to promote the new spiritual mandate of the Church and a conservative vision of social organization. The elite's men wished for the DLC/SHS to be an oasis of peace and of purity, the ideal place for young ladies to become gentlewomen. Throughout our study of the methods employed for their education, we will demonstrate how this elite planned the education of these young ladies in a way that would insure their becoming conveyances of the values necessary for the implementation of a spiritual Anglican society.
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