Until the latter decades of the twentieth century historical works
on Australian education tended, almost without exception, to not
foreground gender. The revitalisation of feminism in both the
social and academic worlds in the 1970s nurtured scholarship whose
primary purpose was to place gender at the centre of policy and
research. One strand of this project was to map the careers and
structural positioning of women teachers. However, while this
important advance brought an analytical lens to bear on what had
been a significant lacuna in the history of education the emphasis
on the overt structural and cultural exclusions faced by women who
taught tended to perpetuate stereotypes of teaching and
professionalism. Thus, women teachers were understood as victims of
patriarchal bureaucratic systems. The possibility that women
teachers had more complex and agentic lives was largely unexplored.
More recent scholarship has called for the need to investigate the
subjective experiences of becoming and being a woman teacher thus
creating a greater set of bounded studies which pay close attention
to ethnic, class and regional differences as well as instances
where women teachers exercised autonomy and resistance. A further
significant development has been the insistence on the inclusion of
'stories from below' gathered through the biographical and
autobiographical writings of women teachers as well as oral history
testaments. This book is part of that ongoing historical
exploration of women teachers' lives and makes a unique
contribution. This is partly due to the location, Western
Australia, and also in the focus on the process of becoming a woman
teacher. Oral testimonies from twenty-four womenteachers who
graduated from the only Western Australian teachers' college in the
early twentieth century provide the personal perspective, while
secondary sources, policy texts and institutional records are used
to create the historical context. This book challenges the
assumption that families and schools unproblematically reproduced
prevailing gender regimes. By becoming teachers, these women had
been exposed to traditional expectations that they would accept
masculine authority and eventually leave teaching to become wives
and mothers. On the other hand they were also educated, encouraged
to enter the teaching profession, and rewarded for their
achievements. They learned to invest themselves in developing their
rational and critical capacities. If they stayed in the profession
they would have to remain spinsters, an apparently unacceptable
social position. It might have seemed like an impossible choice but
in the final chapter of the book Janina Trotman details the nature
of these choices and the rich and varied lives of the women who
made them. Girls Becoming Teachers will appeal to a wide range of
groups. Scholars engaged in researching gender, education and
professionalism would find much of interest, as will those who
investigate the construction of subjectivities. Since much of the
book is based on oral testimonies it would be an important addition
to an Oral History Collection. Finally, since stories are a source
of pleasure and fascination, many teachers, both retired and in
service would find the book a pleasure to read.
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