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

In the aftermath of World War II, educational policy makers and administrators placed great emphasis on preparing students to become equal, autonomous participants in the democratic order. They were reacting initially against the horrors of the Holocaust and totalitarianism, but as the Cold War intensified attention shifted to combatting “godless” communism more specifically. As Kristina Llewellyn demonstrates, secondary schools, “with their role in forming apprentice adults into citizens” (23), played an especially important role in this project, and female secondary school teachers, whose number grew in the 1950s, played a key role in citizenship education within secondary schools. The practice of educational democracy was, however, replete with contradictions. On the one hand, democratic citizenship training promoted equality and tolerance, while on the other it left unchallenged a social hierarchy based on gender, race, and religion. Espousing equality of access to education, policy makers and administrators streamed students into academic and vocational training, the former clearly seen as superior to the latter. Educators, including women teachers, also continued to assume that minority children generally lacked the capacity to benefit from academic education.

Such contradictions created special difficulties for female teachers. Actively recruited because of a shortage of secondary school teachers, women who were asked to prepare their students for participatory citizenship were themselves denied equality within their profession and the polity because of prevailing gender assumptions. School officials and many male teachers subscribed to “masculinist” definitions of professionalism and intellectual ability. They deemed male teachers intellectually and professionally more competent than female teachers, whom they saw as caring and communicative, but irrational. Men’s supposed intellectualism and greater commitment to their careers, as well as obligations to support their families, were deemed to give them greater claim to responsible, well-paid positions. Consequently, few women attained positions as department chairs, principals, inspectors, or superintendents. While officials promoted ideas of decentralization and participatory democracy, women teachers were thus denied the opportunity to participate in this system as equals. Female secondary school teachers found themselves in a paradoxical situation: asked to cultivate active citizenship among their students while being denied full access to it themselves.

Llewellyn’s analysis of the attitudes of school officials and the characteristics of the system they attempted to create is exceptionally well grounded in the theoretical literature on gender, citizenship, and educational labour. This discussion provides the necessary context for the core of the book: an analysis of the motivations, feelings, and reactions of female secondary school teachers in this patriarchal educational system. She relies on interviews with 20 women teachers: ten each from Toronto and Vancouver. (13) All but one of the teachers – a second-generation Chinese Canadian – are white, middleclass, and Christian. Llewellyn believes that the interviews allow her to uncover the informal ways whereby women teachers exercised a modicum of power within the patriarchal educational system. They did so, above all, by supplementing official curricula with materials they deemed important.

While Democracy’s Angels enhances our understanding of citizenship education in postwar Canada, its narrowly circumscribed theoretical and research parameters exclude important empirical evidence. Although it is significant, as Llewellyn points out, that the 20 women teachers she interviewed deflected her attempts to discuss resistance to or protests about their unequal situation within the educational system, print sources suggest that such protest not only occurred in the 1940s, but also attracted public attention, some of it sympathetic to the quest for equality by female high school teachers. In 1944/45, for example, male high school teachers appealed to the Toronto Board of Education for higher pay than their female counterparts, invoking the family wage arguments. While many women teachers seemed to agree with this demand, others organized to fight against unequal pay based on gender. One of their spokespersons was the female vice-president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, Toronto District. The protesters received support from women school trustees, a number of women’s groups, the Toronto District Labour Council, and...