Democracy’s Angels: The Work of Women Teachers by Kristina Llewellyn (review)

I’m assuming that I’ve come by this review of this remarkable study at least somewhat honestly. In addition to my own long standing scholarly interests in state schooling and teachers’ work, I began my teaching career in Ontario schools in the latter part of the 1945–1970 era covered in this study. Memories of themes and activities during that time (albeit through the eyes of a white heterosexual male) certainly congrue with much of what Llewellyn describes and analyzes. Not only that, but it turns out that one of her respondents was a long-favoured aunt of mine (even though pseudonyms were used, the mini-bios provided clearly gave her away), and my own memories of her stories — especially those told to me “in real time” during the latter part of her teaching career — added much to my take-up of this book.

In addition to lengthy interviews with 20 women from Ontario and British Columbia who taught in secondary schools during the immediate post-war era, Llewellyn accesses an enormous range and volume of primary sources relating to schooling and teaching — Ministry and school board records and reports, teacher federation documents, newspaper accounts, as well as drawing contemporary schooling studies and commentaries. In addition, her wide review in the introductory chapter of relevant post-structural, feminist, Marxist and neo-Marxist works clearly speaks to the wide theoretical lens she employs in her analysis of her data. While some might prefer a more singular application of a specific theoretical dictum, or even be bothered by her somewhat “on this hand…” approach to explicating her findings, I for one appreciated this wide-set view, drawing from across a range of approaches to help tease out possible meanings and understandings.

Llewellyn chooses to explore the “relationship of gender, education and democracy” by examining three broad aspects of schooling — curriculum, character education and school administration — in order to “provide a primarily gendered examination of how each major trend in education shaped a limiting role for women teachers within secondary schools” (p. 19). She begins this, in the first chapter, by unpacking the “purpose of educational democracy” and the ways in which politicians and the schooling elite attempted to develop a “nationalist platform of democracy” which “reaffirm a conservative ideal of citizenship” — patriarchal, white, English, middle class and heterosexual. Given the post-war pressures arising from demographic, economic, increased immigrant, and feminist and cultural upsurges, this certainly posed a challenging problem for those in power, and Llewellyn does an admirable job of documenting these challenges — through the words and actions of the elites, as well as in her respondents’ reflections on these changes. A number of themes are explored in the ensuing chapters — school structuring/streaming, the increasing numbers of immigrant and working-class students entering secondary schools, changing women’s roles in the post-war era, centralized vs. local control of curriculum, modes of teacher supervision, student vs. teacher-centred pedagogy, etc. In addition, the renewed post-war call for anti-totalitarian modes of governance provided further tension and conflict for both teachers and schooling officials — contesting the meanings of “citizenship” and the seeming contradictory role of schools in meeting both individual and national “needs.”

While Llewellyn certainly seems to maintain a critical approach to much of what her respondents told her, and clearly draws on the critical oral history methods literature noted in her introductory chapter, I must say that I found myself still questioning what it really means for someone to “remember” and relate an event, in interview contexts like these. What does it tell us about that person — who she might have been then, and who she is now? What is the relation between the purported event, the memory of it, and the present context in which this memory is being evoked? What are the limitations of this methodological approach, and in what ways can they, if at all, be addressed?

I was reminded once again of these questions when...