Central to feminine institutional education in the Spanish colonial Philippines was religious and moral formation: the forging and practice of virtue as defining a woman's worth. This type of education sought to prepare girls and women for their primary social function of spousemother-homemakerspouse-mother-homemaker or, to a lesser extent, for religious community life. In keeping with the feminine ideal prevalent in Hispanized societies of the period, women's education introduced new feminine values with emphasis on purity, modesty, and seclusion. Paradoxically, enclosure, and the virtues consonant with it, gained public transcendenceapproval, on the premise that the quality of public life depended on the ethical values of its participants whose personal lives had been shaped first in the home by women.