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

It is part of what she and Middleton later referred to as ‘a continuation of a conversation’⁵ about histories of women in teaching generated by the publication of Prentice and Theobald’s Women Who Taught in 1991.⁶ This influential collection brought together a series of essays, written in the 1980s, from a number of English-speaking countries. The editors selected articles that were considered to flag ‘important new directions at the time of their publication’⁷ in that they moved beyond much previous historical writing, which was seen to perpetuate stereotypes of teaching and professionalism. These new directions not only troubled and deconstructed totalising notions of the ‘feminisation’ of teaching by writing about regional and historical variations, they also brought to the study of teachers’ work theories of labour and class, thus linking the analysis to a wider social context.⁸ A further significant development was the insistence on the inclusion of ‘stories from below’ gathered through the biographical and autobiographical writings of women who taught.⁹ The essays, thus, provided a ‘map’ showing both the past achievements of historical research about women teachers, as well as signalling what the editors saw as the agenda for further scholarship.

Prentice and Theobald argued that the central theoretical problem for the historiography of women teachers was ‘how to evoke the oppressive structures that maintained a patriarchal order while at the same time affirming that women were not the passive victims of that oppression’.¹⁰ They concluded that if future studies were to yield more understandings about the complexities of women teachers’ lives and work, they had to include close attention to ethnic, class, and regional differences, as well as to instances where women teachers exercised autonomy and resistance. Weiler and Middleton’s Telling Women’s Lives,¹¹ published eight years later, is an edited collection of essays that took up that agenda and, in addition, foregrounded poststructuralist concerns raised within historical scholarship about the creation of historical texts, narrative, and the nature of subjectivity. This ‘narrative turn’, as it is sometimes referred to, questions modernist metanarratives of history as ‘progress’, emphasises the discursive production of the decentred subject, and also cautions historians to be reflexive about the creation of ‘truths’ in their works. In addition, Davies claimed that the ‘author is not the final arbiter of meanings’, but one who uses and develops ‘the ideas as a set of creative possibilities’, which the readers ‘bring to life’.¹²