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

In chapter 10, the syllabus, the teaching practices, and the allocation of students to particular courses are examined from the official perspective. I use annual reports and college calendars, as well as secondary sources, to describe the nature of the training programme and the embedded assumptions about teacher professionalism. I identify the manner in which the discourse surrounding teacher training was reworked during the period the participants were at college, as well as continuity and change in the gendering of that training.

Chapter 11 is an exploration of student responses to these experiences. Again, it is based on the participants’ testimonies. These sources allowed me to identify what they recalled about the courses they took and the lecturers who taught them. They also allowed me to trace changing perceptions about the work of teaching, which reflected the shifts in the official discourses. Furthermore, they indicated a subtext in that they yielded some clues about what the students saw as central to their construction as teacherly women.

Chapter 12 is an ‘epilogue’ in which I explore critical incidents in the postcollege lives of the women. Though this is in no way a detailed analysis of the totality of those lives, it is a significant chapter. In particular, it ‘troubles’ what Munro⁶⁰ has described as ‘the seamless narrative of “women’s true profession” ’, in which ‘women’s motivation to teach is grounded solely in their supposed natural “maternal nurturance” ’. It also troubles the notion that once women left teaching, their identities were focused on the familial and the domestic. I heeded Theobald and Prentice’s important caution that in seeking to understand the histories of women teachers, we have to simultaneously ‘evoke oppressive structures that maintained a patriarchal order while at the same time affirming that women were not the passive victims of that oppression’.⁶¹ The traces of counterdiscourses in the testimonies and my analysis of these suggest that direct experience of the hardships and individual injustices some women experienced, working within these oppressive structures, were significant in generating resistance to them.