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

Framing the Study

To search for the ‘rich and varied’ in the lives of Western Australian women teachers would be to open up a substantial research programme beyond the scope of the study reported here. Such a project would contain a number of foci and, in its totality, would investigate life histories from cradle to grave. My intention was to take a ‘slice’ of this massive agenda in order to create a fine-grained historical narrative that takes account of personal lives, as well as the particular cultural and material contexts in which they were lived. I sought to understand how the life experiences, from childhood to graduation, of twenty-four retired women teachers afforded them opportunities not only to become teachers, but also to create more rich and varied feminine subjectivities than those suggested by traditional gender discourse. A further project, similarly detailed and encompassing their postgraduation lives, is clearly required in order to give a more complete picture of women’s teaching lives in the state.

Oral testimonies from twenty-four women teachers who graduated from Claremont Teachers’ College in the early twentieth century provided the personal perspective, while secondary sources, policy texts, and institutional records were used to re-create the historical context. My aim was to identify the gendered discourses circulating in the ‘spaces’ in which my participants grew up to teach, as well as to explore subjective accounts their experiences. More specifically, I sought to understand how becoming a teacher and participating in higher education gave my participants opportunities to exercise a degree of autonomy in their lives that they might not have otherwise had. While recognising from the outset that, as the investigation progressed, further questions might emerge, I constructed the following questions as preliminary guides to the task: