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

This was rationalised on the grounds that some of the harsh ‘outback’ appointments were too difficult for young women, but there is also a clear indication that the ideology of ‘separate spheres’—the discourse of the apparently natural, sex-determined aptitudes—and its twin, the ideology of the family, were at play here.⁵⁷ Thus, a strong British heritage, a heavily bureaucratised structure serving a widely dispersed and sparse population, and a pronounced gender regime were some of the key organisational and ideological factors that shaped the context for Western Australian teachers at the turn of the century. The Great War and the Depression generated sea changes that, curiously, reinforced some aspects of these, while weakening others.

Becoming a Teacher: The Questions

As already stated, this book is an exposition of the account I constructed of the family lives, schooling, monitoring experiences, and training at Claremont Teachers’ College of a group of women teachers. In the construction, I sought to contribute to the task of understanding the gendered processes involved in becoming a woman teacher both from a participant perspective and a theory-informed perspective. This involved tracing the complex pattern of continuity and change in the lives of my participants, thus linking the historical context with the subjective experience. It is a partial response to the overarching question of what was it like becoming and being a woman teacher in early twentieth-century Western Australia, and a contribution to what Weiler has termed the ‘collective exploration’ of the history of women teachers.

The early life experiences of the participants and the construction of their subjectivity were explored through a series of guiding questions. These were not specific research questions such as would shape a study conducted within a positivist framework. Rather, they were intended to act as heuristic aids to ‘developing interpretations or analytic themes rather than causal explanations’.⁵⁸ In other words, I recognised their provisionality and that others would be likely to emerge as the study unfolded. The most intelligent questions deemed to be worthy of pursuing with the participants, which suggested themselves from the outset, were as follows: