| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The 1920s were also, in many ways, years during which there was a blurring of the public-private dualism. Mackinnon29 pointed out that increasing numbers of university-educated women opted to combine career and marriage at this time. Writing of teachers in Australia, she claims, ‘In the early decades of this century that disapproval [of working married women] was gradually relaxed or overlooked as numbers in secondary schools rose and qualified teachers were in high demand’. This situation was to change as the Depression impacted on the various state governments, with resultant budget cuts and a severe pruning of all government services.
The available descriptive and rather general accounts of women teachers of the period point to increased state intervention in the lives of individuals and to the importance of teachers’ work in furthering this. It is also apparent that educated women were making choices about their futures as employment prospects opened and they entertained the possibility of combining marriage and career. However, we are told little about the ways in which individual teachers responded to these trends. What seems to be evident is that this period of gender crisis held the potential for change in gender relations and for women’s participation in the professions, but there is little scholarly investigation of the subjective experience of becoming and being a woman teacher at this time. So, while it would appear that, during these decades, women teachers were surrounded by a number of sharply competing ideologies about femininity, social progress, teachers’ work, and the management of education, we are not informed about how these related to the formation of their professional identities and the direction of their lives. Nor do we have details of the life experiences of young girls growing up to become teachers and of the ways in which these competing discourses circulated in their families, schools, and, eventually, their teacher training.