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

In addition, I draw upon my combing of the discursive constructions deployed in the narratives in order to identify how my participants were ‘telling themselves’ within a particular framework of meaning. Once again, I detail instances where traditional constructions of femininity were both replicated and challenged within the memories of monitoring, while also pointing to textual clues to the development of teacherly identity.

The residential life at Claremont Teachers’ College is the focus of both chapters 8 and 9. I outline the gender regimes prevailing during the eras of two college principals, William Rooney and Robert Cameron, from two perspectives. Chapter 8 tells the tale from the official perspective and is concerned with the policies and practices that produced very different institutional cultures under these two men. I give an account of how, under Rooney, and during the years 1903 to 1927, the rules and daily life produced a familial culture. Rooney was a patriarchal principal, and the subject positions afforded to women students were ‘daughterly’. Cameron, however, created a very different regime emphasising independence and collegiality, thus reworking the sites from which women could construct a sense of teacherly femininity.

Chapter 9 tells the tale from ‘below’ by focusing on student voices. I re-create college life from the testimonies of the storytellers and the student journal, The W.A. Trainee. The latter is a rich source of information about humour, institutional myth, and the prevailing gender regimes. Together, the sources upon which I drew allowed me to generate a picture of how the participants experienced the prevailing gender regimes and how they both accepted and resisted them in the construction of teacherly femininity.

Chapters 10 and 11 are based on analyses of ‘the making of the teacher’ during the Rooney and Cameron eras. In developing these analyses, on the one hand, I reasoned that the microtechnologies of the gender regimes at Claremont were not merely forms of control or suppression; they were also productive in the sense that they worked to fashion what I term the ‘womanly teacher’. On the other hand, the other set of microtechnologies that operated at the college, namely, those that formed the training programme, worked to fashion the ‘teacherly woman’.