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This book is a contribution to such an investigation. It based on a detailed study of twenty-four women teachers who trained at Claremont Teachers’ College, Western Australia, in the early decades of the twentieth century, and subsequently taught in Western Australian state schools. The focus is on the process of becoming a woman teacher and the narrative details of the lives of these women as they grew up, were schooled, served as monitors, and then attended college.
What is revealed is that such a process was not an unproblematic reproduction of traditional gender roles. As they grew up, the women were surrounded by competing gender discourses that may be described as both traditional and modern. The contradictions between these discourses opened up new possibilities for them to create a sense of self that was not defined solely in terms of domesticity and marital status but also by expertise and professionalism. In particular, the induction into ‘the culture of critical discourse’ through schooling and training gave the women the intellectual tools that gave them a standpoint from which to review their options. This is much more complex notion of the gendered processes involved in becoming a woman teacher in early twentieth-century Australia and high-lights the richness and variety of the lives of the twenty-four who so generously shared their life stories.
This argument, however, should not be seen as promoting a Whiggish celebration of women’s access to education and the teaching profession. Instead, it should be seen as one contribution to the major research agenda that needs to be conducted internationally in order to respond to the call for a greater set of bounded studies that pay close attention to ethnic, class, and regional differences, as well as instances where women teachers exercised autonomy and resistance.