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

Poststructural musings have also problematised the unitary category ‘woman’, arguing that such a totalising conceptualisation obscures the significance of class, race, sexuality, and age, all of which are interpolated in discourses of femininity.¹³ Thus, it is argued, gender is socially produced by multiple and historically changing discourses with consequent differences in subjectivity. The implication is that histories of women teachers need to be particularised by, for example, taking into account the ways in which social origins influence schooling, the choice of teaching as a career, the qualifications achieved, the kinds of schools in which women worked, and the administrative positions they occupied.

There is much dissent and debate about what this means for feminist historical scholarship,¹⁴ but St. Pierre and Pillow have maintained that this is as it should be, for feminist poststructural writing, they explained, should not produce new metanarratives of ‘clear and consensual’ explanation. Rather, the outcome should be ‘lusty, rigorous, enabling confusion’.¹⁵ However, the valorising of the culture, language, and representation has raised concerns that the material will be rendered irrelevant. In this regard, Stanley and Maynard have cautioned scholars that material structures and relationships should not be ignored and that we need to create ‘detailed empirical expositions of particular times, contexts, persons, debates and issue’,¹⁶ as well as eclectic theoretical approaches.

So what does this mean for those of us who are trying to create histories about and for women teachers, and who are part of the collective exploration of which Weiler wrote? More specifically, what are the implications for a project such as that reported on in this book, which sought to understand the gendered processes involved in becoming a woman teacher in early twentieth century Western Australia? The methodological matters are detailed in the next chapter, but in terms of how my study may be placed within these developments in the historical exploration of the lives of women teachers, I suggest four strands of continuity.