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

Prologue

The establishment of compulsory education in Australia, as in other countries, led to bureaucratic and patriarchal systems of schooling, as well as gendered practices of teacher training and employment. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, the Education Department of Western Australia’s policies on the employment of women teachers were overtly shaped by the nineteenth-century gender discourse of separate spheres that constructed their work in schools through a prism of domesticity and maternalism. In addition, women teachers were seen as unsuitable for positions of administrative authority and were, almost without exception, subjected to regulation by male administrators. However, theorising the undeniable inequities women teachers experienced as being the result of a totally deterministic patriarchy perpetuates stereotypes of teaching and professionalism. To move beyond this deterministic understanding, recent scholarship has called for the need to investigate the subjective experiences of becoming and being a woman teacher.