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

This study goes some way towards addressing the deficit. It explores and illuminates themes surrounding gender and their links to the construction of teacher identity by examining contemporary policy documents, popular culture and media, institutional practices, and organisational procedures. These sources provide the historical context—the discursive frame for the period. However, they are insufficient to gain a personal understanding of what it meant to be a girl becoming a teacher in Western Australia. We need to deal with the individual subject as well as social organisations ‘and to articulate the nature of their interrelationships, for both are crucial to understanding how gender works, how change occurs’.³⁰ Consequently, in aiming to understand what it was like ‘growing up teacherly’ and being a woman teacher, the study explores the lives of individuals by drawing on an investigation of biographies, memoirs, correspondence, and interviews with women who trained at Claremont Teachers’ College during the interwar years and then taught in Western Australian state schools. The major focus is on the early years of the participants’ lives up to the point of graduation, for, as I have suggested, a detailed analysis of their subsequent lives is a project in its own right.

Claremont Teachers’ College (Claremont College) was the only teacher-training college in Western Australia at this time and was the only site for the preparation of teachers until the establishment of the University of Western Australia in 1913. It therefore constitutes an excellent site for conducting a case study bounded by period and institutional location. In addition, since Claremont College was part of the state Education Department, it can be argued that it was a site of ‘discursive concentration’, with rich traces of the cultural practices and organisation patterns that infused teaching with gender, both in preservice training and in work in state schools.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women teachers were surrounded by a number of sharply competing discourses about femininity, social progress, teachers’ work, and the management of education. 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.³¹ Most significantly, the opportunity to receive higher education and to enter teaching gave women access to the culture of critical discourse.³²