Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

Jess was one of the twenty-four retired women teachers, ten of whom never married, whose life stories provided the focus for this study. Marriage, as Jess aptly commented, was ‘the end’ of a teaching career for women in the Education Department, yet nine of the participants married and later returned to teaching. Usually, this was during periods of acute teacher shortage, but sometimes they were re-employed due to financial need. In all cases, they were not reinstated to permanent positions. Rather, they had contractual arrangements that had to be annually renewed, thus providing no security of tenure.

The central argument of the book is as follows. In Australia, as in many other societies, compulsory education ushered in systems that were both bureaucratic and patriarchal. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, the Education Department’s policies on the employment of women teachers were overtly shaped by the nineteenth-century gender discourse of separate spheres. The public world, the world of work and politics, was a masculine world. On the one hand, a man’s subjectivity could be constructed through a number of potential discursive sites, such as occupation, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, or wealth. A woman’s subjectivity, on the other hand, was thought to be constructed primarily through domesticity and her marital status. Being a woman teacher was no exception; it was also a gendered experience.

At the same time, a detailed study of a group of women teachers who trained at Claremont Teachers’ College, Western Australia, in the early decades of the twentieth century, and subsequently taught in Western Australian state schools, revealed that they led ‘rich and varied lives’.² Thus, we need to be cautious about theorising the undeniable inequities women teachers experienced as being the result of a totally deterministic patriarchy. They were surrounded by competing discourses that may be described as both traditional and modern. Indeed, the ‘rich and varied’ was generated by the contradictions between these discourses as they opened up new possibilities for them. In particular, the induction into ‘the culture of critical discourse’ through schooling and training gave the women the intellectual tools to form a standpoint from which to review their options.