During most of the nineteenth century, many French women continued to be educated according to models long established by custom and religious tradition. One recent observer has termed the failure to institute real and lasting educational reform at the end of the eighteenth century a "missed opportunity"—for in spite of the egalitarian and secular aims of the French Revolution in 1789, a truly nondiscriminatory education system for both women and men would not be established in the country until the 1880s. However, legislators had put forth many proposals for educational reform in the years just after the revolution; two in particular attempted to institute educational systems for women that were, to a great extent, egalitarian.

The first of these proposals endeavored to replace the predominantly religious education that women originally received in convents and at home with reformed curricula. More importantly, the proposal insisted that, because education was a common good that should be offered to both sexes, instruction should be available to everyone. By the same token, teachers would be drawn from both sexes. Thus the proposal held it essential that schools for both men and women be established promptly throughout the country and that these schools be public, a tangible sign of the state's interest in all of its citizens. One limitation of this proposal, however, was that girls, unlike boys, were to leave school at age eight in order to be educated at home in the skills necessary for domestic life and for the raising of families. The second proposal took a more comprehensive approach. It advocated equal education for women and men on the grounds that women and men enjoy the same rights, and it was the only proposal of the time that called for coeducational schools, which were presented as a bulwark against the traditional gender roles enforced by religious tradition. In other respects, however, this proposal also continued to define women in terms of their roles in the domestic sphere and as mothers.

That neither proposal was able to envision a system of education that was fully equal for women, and that neither was adopted into law even as such, bespeaks the immensity of the cultural and political obstacles to egalitarian education for women at the time. Nevertheless, the vision of egalitarian educational reform was not entirely lost. Nearly a century later, in the early 1880s, French legislators recalled the earlier proposals in their justification of new laws that founded public secondary schools for women, abolished fees for education, and established compulsory attendance for all students. In order to pass these reforms, the government needed to demonstrate that its new standards were rooted in a long philosophical, political, and pedagogical tradition. Various of the resulting institutions also made claim to revolutionary origin, as doing so allowed them to appropriate the legitimacy conferred by tradition and historical continuity.