Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural
California counties from 1850 to 1950, "Country Schoolwomen"
explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what
teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it
shaped their categories of experience.
The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and
two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression
years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about
by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author
examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable
impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town
life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from
the time of the earliest European settlement.
This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and
work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the
work of women in schools has always been controlled by men--that
education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space
in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold
positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. "Country
Schoolwomen" introduces us to a network of women educators who
occupied positions of power at the state level, who supported one
another, and who defined an alternative, far more positive image of
the woman teacher. The work of these women put forth a vision of
classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. And for
many of the women in this study, teaching clearly did provide
material resources and intellectual satisfaction.
The historical record thus suggests that rather than signaling
their subjugation, teaching has afforded women a potential source
of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial
independence. But women have had to struggle--not always
successfully--to claim this potential, which male educators have
often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university
experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom
teaching as "women's work" and have consequently been slow to
acknowledge competing perspectives on the profession. This study
ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense
ideological landscape, one in which representations of "the woman
teacher" were often caught among contradictory and contested
visions.
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