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

This much more troubling notion of the gendered processes involved in becoming a woman teacher in early twentieth-century Australia, both from a participant perspective and a theory-informed perspective, is revealed through an examination of the women teachers’ family lives, their schooling, the monitoring experience, and their training at Claremont Teachers’ College.

Regarding women teachers’ family lives, these were shaped by Victorian constructions of gender and the separation of public and private spheres. Thus, the families nurtured in their daughters a femininity that was traditional. At the same time, these families were, almost without exception, recent arrivals in Western Australia and struggling to make a ‘better life’. They educated their daughters and welcomed their choice of teaching as a career.

The schooling experiences of the women also reflected contradictory expectations. On the one hand, they were subjected to gender regimes similar to those that had been part of their family lives. On the other hand, the future teachers were exposed to the ‘culture of critical discourse’,³ a set of linguistic rules by which assertions must be justified by appeal to reason—particularly scientific—and not to traditional authority, such as that based on patriarchy or class.

The initial phase of teacher training in Western Australia at the time involved an ‘apprenticeship’ period known as monitoring. Once again, this period of the women teachers’ lives was framed by policies and practices that emphasised traditional constructions of daughterly femininity. However, their testimonies show that, as monitors, many took on responsibilities and exercised a degree of autonomy that they had not experienced up to then.

Finally, those who were in residence while training at Claremont Teachers’ College from the first decades of the 1900s to the late 1920s were immersed in an institutional culture that was strongly infused with notions derived from Victorian family life. Women students were expected to be ‘dutiful daughters’. But Claremont was not a cultural island. The Great War had seriously disrupted the traditional myths and ideals surrounding gender, and these changing gender discourses challenged the paternalistic college regime. By the late 1920s, the students were beginning to experience a more relaxed environment.