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

The selection of the historical period, 1914–1940, was made for a number of reasons, but primarily because there is evidence, both in Western Australia and in other societies, that this was a time of intense and significant ideological and social reformation. In particular, the period has been identified as one of crisis in the social formation of masculinities and femininities.²³ While it is acknowledged that the experiences of the Great War severely shook traditional patterns of authority and gender, producing challenges to patriarchy and to the ideology of the family and ‘separate spheres’, it should not be forgotten that this dismantling of gender order had, in fact, commenced in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In Western Australia, women had been enfranchised since 1899, and a number of women’s groups—some with an acknowledged feminist orientation—had played a significant role in this achievement. Damousi²⁴ maintained, however, that it was in the aftermath of the war that the myths and ideals that surround gender were seriously disrupted, as the drive of modernism and technical rationality was evidenced in a number of political, cultural, and ideological projects. In Australia, as in the United States and Britain, this was manifested in the growth of ‘normalising practices’²⁵ as the new experts developed the repertoire of ‘scientifically’ derived ‘regimes of truth’ for public and private life. Scientific management, psychology, sexology, and eugenics all impacted on the lives of women, men, and children as individuals, but especially so as families. As Reiger²⁶ has put it, ‘In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Australia and likewise in similar Western societies, we can see a relationship between a series of programmes to transform family and domestic life’.

The project to transform the family, to render it more ‘efficient and effective’, was developed and delivered by the public servants. These were the members of the new technical intelligentsia, essential to the process of state formation. Deacon²⁷ referred to this group as the ‘new middle class’, those workers who depended on the sale of educational, technical, and social skills or cultural capital. The new middle class included large numbers of women,²⁸ the largest category being that of the government schoolteacher. Her role in this modernist project was to transform the pupil (particularly a young one) into a rational being by using scientifically derived principles of pedagogy and curriculum.