Mary Dendy has received attention from historians because she was the first paid commissioner under the Board of Control (the administrative body that regulated the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act), was at the forefront in disseminating views regarding the sexual proclivities of feeble-minded women and because she advocated permanent segregated care for the feeble-minded. This article takes a gendered approach to examine two dimensions of her work. First, it explores some of the ways in which the segregated education that developed at Sandlebridge in the context of permanent care was an encoding of Dendy's highly sexualized and eugenic view of "feeble-minded". Second, it explores the relationship between Dendy's notions of permanent care for the feeble-minded and her advocacy of aspects of progressive pedagogy. Progressivism included the notion of learning by doing, instruction based on experience and the education of the whole child, ideas that grew from the work of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Herbart. The last section of the article draws together aspects of the two dimensions of her work to analyse ways in which the physical, intellectual and moral education, promoted by Dendy and practised at the Sandlebridge Schools, constituted a control of the female body of the feeble-minded. (Contains 135 footnotes.)