It is interesting to note in this connection that the expansion of primary schooling was itself a contributing factor. As the corps of public schoolteachers expanded at an increasing rate in the nineteenth century, and the costs of salaries for them skyrocketed, a perceptible trend toward "refeminization" of the teaching profession began to occur. This reversed, of course, the opposite trend toward masculinization that had characterized the early decades of reform, and seems to have largely resulted from the search for less expensive labor pools from which to recruit teachers as educated men followed other options. The early female schoolteachers formed a corps from which professional women's organizations, and even proto-feminist groups, were recruited, groups which in turn became advocates for the improvement of women's education. Educational demands were a central feature of the bourgeois women's movements in Germany, France, England, Holland, and elsewhere in the last decades of the nineteenth century. All over Europe, feminist demands for equal access to the schools and universities ran up against ideas and institutions based on principles of inequality.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 98 - 99)