‘I always had to be a teacher’: Gladys Ward and State elementary school teaching as a career for women in twentieth century South Australia

Abstract

Case study builds upon Kay Whitehead’s detailed empirical work with respect to South Australia. Equally pertinent is Whitehead’s and Thorpe’s analysis of historical discourses of ‘vocation, career and character’ as constituting a ?matrix of subjectivity’ against which individuals construct their teacher‐selves. My methodological and conceptual approach is also informed by those historically‐situated ‘narrative inquiries’ collected in Weiler and Middleton’s book, Telling Women’s Lives, and Cunningham and Gardner’s ‘life histories’ of UK teachers in the years 1907‐1950.The authors use personal accounts (oral and written) as a major source for examining the ways in which twentieth‐century teachers constructed their own subjectivities within the context of dominant practices, institutions and discourses. Such studies give voice to women in education whose lives historians in the past have deemed insignificant ‐ none more so than the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ female classroom teachers with whom this article is centrally concerned. Thus I similarly use the privately‐printed teaching memoirs of Gladys E. Ward (Present, Miss: the story of a teacher’s life in the outback and in the city), reading the representations of herself as a ‘career teacher’ in the Primary Branch of the South Australian Education Department against the contemporary local discourses of women in teaching which framed her narrative.

Citation

Trethewey, L. (2005), "‘I always had to be a teacher’: Gladys Ward and State elementary school teaching as a career for women in twentieth century South Australia", History of Education Review, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 13-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/08198691200500007