Teaching: "A Great Adventure"

Teaching: "A Great Adventure" Sari Knopp Biklen. School Work: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching . New York, N.Y: Teachers College Press, 1995. χ + 207 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8077-3407-1 (pb); 0-8077-3408-X (cl). Dina M. Copelman. London's Women Teachers: Gender, Class, and Feminism, 1870-1930. London: Routledge, 1996. xix + 286 pp.; ill., tables. ISBN 0-415-01312-7 (cl). Alison Oram. Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900-1939. Manchester , England: Manchester University Press, 1996. viii + 258 pp; tables. ISBN 0-7190-2959-4 (cl). Marjorie Theobald. Knowing Women: Origins of Women's Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ix + 294 pp.; ill., tables. ISBN 0-521-42004-0 (cl). Joan N. Burstyn For nearly two centuries, many women have made their career in teaching . Yet until recently, scholars, including feminists, ignored the ways women teachers perceived their work and negotiated the dissonance between gender expectations of their time and their experience as teachers. Here are four books, dealing with English, Australian, and American societies , that throw new light on the aspirations of women teachers and how, since the nineteenth century, they have constructed their lives. Together, these books provide a fascinating comparison of the social structure of the United States, England, and Australia—albeit in overlapping but somewhat different periods. Each book is based upon extensive research. Three authors—Dina M. Copelman, AUson Oram, and MarjorieTheobald—use official records, such as parliamentary papers of Britain, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Victoria; records of the School Board for London and individual schools; log books of particular teacher centers; and, in Britain, the records of the National Union of Teachers, the National Union of Women Teachers, the Association of Assistant Mistresses, and the National Association of Schoolmasters. Copelman and Oram also interviewed retired teachers whose recollections they cite in conjunction with those of other teachers interviewed for the Edwardian Oral History Archive; and they quote from memoirs, teacher magazines, and journals. Sari Knopp Biklen's research methodology differs markedly from that used by the other three authors. Grounding her work in sociology and feminist theory, Biklen © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 2 (Summer) 208 Journal of Women's History Summer draws upon diaries by teachers and literature about teachers from the nineteenth century to AlumÃ-nate materials she obtained in the early 1980s by observing and interviewing teachers at one elementary school in the northeast United States. She uses her qualitative research as a springboard to explore the meaning that women elementary school teachers assigned to their teacriing. Both Biklen and Theobald also use fiction to illustrate the gender ideology influencing teachers, parents, and politicians of the day. Each of the authors refers to a wide range of secondary literature and feminist scholarship to substantiate her arguments. In examining the lives of women elementary school teachers in London in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, Dina M. Copelman analyzes the influence of class within the social structure of British society. Women teachers, she shows, were drawn from various socioeconomic classes, and their occupation had different significance for the women in each class. Middle-class women were more likely to teach in secondary schools (attended by girls of the same class as they) than in elementary schools which were established for the more needy classes. Many secondary school teachers remained single throughout their lives, or left teaching once married. Despite urging from nineteenth-century feminist reformers, who saw in elementary school teaching an opportunity to expand jobs for middleclass women while spreading middle-class values, only a few women of the upper-middle class became elementary school teachers. It was women of the artisan and the lower-middle class who entered elementary school teaching in large numbers. For them, Copelman says, teaching had a different significance than for upper-middle-class women. These elementary school teachers came from families accustomed to women taking a role in the commercial life of the city, whether as shop assistant, seamstress, telegrapher , or laundress; parents expected their daughters to work consistently over many years. These teachers, often with prodding from their parents...