Kay Whitehead
Biographic Data
| ID | 3840858 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kay Whitehead |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kay |
| FAMILY NAME | Whitehead |
| SIGNATURE | WHITEHEAD K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Flinders University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2139-151X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 33 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Recruiting Indigenous School Teachers around the British Empire, Plus the Australian Variation
‘The story of our influence is not so easily told’
When former teacher
Ageing in the history of education
Australian women teachers, ageing and activism in and beyond the educational state, 1920s–1970s
From assimilation towards reconciliation with Amy Levai, nee O’Donoghue (1930–2013), South Australia’s first qualified Aboriginal infant teacher
Australian women educators’ internal exile and banishment in a centralised patriarchal state school system
This article explores Australian women teachers’ struggles for equality with men from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. While Australia purported to be a progressive democratic nation, centralised patriarchal state school systems relied on women teachers to fulfil the requirements of free, compulsory and secular schooling. This study focuses on the state of South Australia where women were enfranchised in 1894, far ahead of Europe…
The teacher educator and the suffragist
Focusing on the transnational circulation of ideas about suffrage and education, this article explores the work of suffragist Muriel Matters (1877–1969), and teacher educator Lillian de Lissa (1885–1967). It begins with Matters’ and de Lissa’s childhoods and education in post-suffrage Australia, and their initial work as an actress and kindergarten teacher respectively. The second section focuses on the development of their politics when Matters …
Single women teachers as missionaries and Women Education Officers in mid-twentieth century British Africa
This article focuses on British women missionaries and Women Education Officers (WEOs) in British Africa when girls’ education was prioritised in preparations for independence. The marriage bar was removed in Britain in 1944 but remained for WEOs and missionaries. The article explores how they negotiated singleness in their lives and work in the mid-twentieth century. It examines their leadership and teaching in mission and government schools and…
Marjorie Caw’s transitions from city teacher to leading citizen in interwar rural Western Australia
This article explores Marjorie Caw’s (née Hubbe) transition from her professional work and active citizenship as a young, single, kindergarten teacher in Adelaide to her multi-faceted married life on a farm near Kojonup, Western Australia during the interwar period. Besides engaging fully in domestic work, Caw taught her children at home and maintained her commitments to nation building by leading the Kojonup Country Women’s Association. Issues o…
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern: A History of School Nature Study in Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 49(2), pp. 275–276
British Women Education Officers and progressive education for an independent Nigeria
This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three WEOs endeavoured to reconcile their British cultural values, progressive education, English language ins…
They call me headmaster’
This article explores commonalities in the lives and work of women head teachers in Malawian secondary schools and women principals in Australian Lutheran schools. In both Australia and Malawi women are under-represented in school leadership and often appointed to complex schools and communities. We commence with a brief discussion of Malawi and Australia’s political and educational histories which have much in common, before outlining current se…
Women's leadership of ‘much needed national work’ in wartime education
While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa, longstanding principal of Gipsy Hill Training College (where Walker trained) and national advocate fo…
Exchange teachers as "another link in binding the [British] Empire" in the interwar years
This article focuses on “exchange teachers” from Great Britain plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, these countries constituting the white settler dominions of the British Empire. Participants in the League of Empire’s exchange scheme were mostly white middle class women elementary teachers. Reports of their work in newspapers and magazines show that they used whiteness as a strategy to differentiate the lands and peoples they en…
Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement
In this article I argue that women educators' personal and professional networks underpinned the growth of nursery school education into a transnational movement in the interwar years. Edna Noble White, Lillian de Lissa, Mary Gutteridge and Gwendolyn Watkins' interlocking networks facilitated and connected the nursery school movements in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Although these women educators were at the centre of …
Transnational connections in early twentieth-century women teachers’ work
Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC’s progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to “think internationally”. She was especially proud that a handful of students from countries such as China, Turkey and C…
Marking a Marginal Past
In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and economically. However, women’s and Aboriginal histories are marginalised in the district’s social memory.…
A decided disadvantage for the kindergarten students to mix with the state teachers”
In early twentieth‐century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women’s hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with Lillian de Lissa as its principal. This article focuses on a proposed amalgamation with the state training…
Three Accounts of a Working Life in Newfoundland
British‐born Violet Cherrington spent most of her working life (1922–52) as Principal of Bishop Spencer College, a Church of England school for girls in St John’s, Newfoundland. This article focuses on her as a woman, educator and national subject in Canadian history, and it is written as three accounts rather than a single narrative. The first account is based on texts that were mostly written by Cherrington in the 1920s and 1930s when Newfoundl…
A ‘break with tradition’ in interwar teacher education
British teacher education in the interwar years was a contested field, dominated numerically by women but regulated by the Board of Education. The traditional perception of women’s residential training colleges was that they were autocratic and socially isolated. By focusing on Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC), the first specialist training college for nursery school teachers, and its foundation principal, Lillian de Lissa, I challenge this per…
Making a manly teacher’s career in Australia
This paper highlights ways in which understandings about masculinity intersected with concepts of vocation, career and character in the life and work of an Australian teacher, Victor Pavia. Firstly, it outlines his vertical career path from teacher to headmaster and then inspector, made possible in a bureaucratised state school system that institutionalised the patriarchal dividend. Secondly, it shows how his manly character was forged in social …
Aging and activism in the context of the British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union, 1914–1922
Careers Advice for Women and the Shaping of Identities
This article focuses on representations of women's work in two sets of articles, both entitled 'Careers for Women' that appeared in the Woman's Record in 1921-22 and the Australian Women's Weekly in 1933. Each provided advice about careers to potential women workers in traditional fields such as teaching and nursing as well as some relatively new occupations in the world of commerce. Although a range of discourses can be applied to women's work, …
Concerning images of women in government offices in the early twentieth century
This paper focuses on images of women who worked in government offices and explores the ways in which age, along with gender and class, became institutionalised as a marker of difference among them in the early twentieth century. It argues that the girl typist was etched sharply in the public imagination and, although there were anxieties about her youth and femininity, by the 1930s the more ambiguous image of the middle‐aged single ‘lady officer…
Transnational Innovations, Local Conditions, and Disruptive Teachers and Students in Interwar Education
This paper examines the grammar of schooling and educational innovations that were being promulgated transnationally in the 1920s and 1930s. First, the paper explores how some elements of the grammar of schooling such as age grading, year‐long courses of study and annual employment contracts for teachers were mediated by local circumstances in Newfoundland. Then it identifies progressive ideas that were being promoted by the Department of Educati…
Postwar headteachers' perspectives of 'good' teachers
Dans cet article, l'auteur examine les changements intervenus dans la periode de l'apres-guerre dans les profils des enseignants en notant la croissance du nombre de femmes mariees durant cette periode contrastant avec la majorite de celibataires dans la premiere partie du siecle. La recherche de l'auteur souligne egalement les negociations entreprises par le Ministere de l'Education en Australie du Sud dans le recrutement d'enseignants en proven…
The Function of Age and the History of Women's Work
In this paper, we consider what it might mean to hold age as an analytic lens in historical research on women workers, in particular women teachers. Our study serves as a springboard for further discussion about what these new narratives might look like, and what they might reveal, or, moreover, what work they might do. In constructing an account of a woman physical educationist whose work traversed the first half of the twentieth century, we sho…
The City as a Site of Women Teachers' Post-Suffrage Political Activism
This paper focuses on the political activism of three women teachers, Lizzie Hales, Phebe Watson and Adelaide Miethke, in the city of Adelaide, South Australia, during the post-suffrage era. With the exception of Adelaide Miethke, none of these women are known to historians who are interested in post-suffrage feminism, and in the history of education the focus has been mostly on their involvement in the teachers' union. However, our research has …
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern: A History of School Nature Study in Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 49(2), pp. 275–276
Women's leadership of ‘much needed national work’ in wartime education
While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa, longstanding principal of Gipsy Hill Training College (where Walker trained) and national advocate fo…
A decided disadvantage for the kindergarten students to mix with the state teachers”
In early twentieth‐century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women’s hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with Lillian de Lissa as its principal. This article focuses on a proposed amalgamation with the state training…
Making a manly teacher’s career in Australia
This paper highlights ways in which understandings about masculinity intersected with concepts of vocation, career and character in the life and work of an Australian teacher, Victor Pavia. Firstly, it outlines his vertical career path from teacher to headmaster and then inspector, made possible in a bureaucratised state school system that institutionalised the patriarchal dividend. Secondly, it shows how his manly character was forged in social …
Post-Suffrage Factory Inspectors in New South Wales
Colonial Rural Teachers
Colonial Rural Teachers
Lavinia seabrooke, gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia
This article relates the campaigns of Lavinia Seabrooke, the first headmistress of the girls' department of Grote Street Model Schools in South Australia, and her women colleagues, to a broader discussion of the impact of gender on state formation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that men's interests were constructed as hegemonic and that Women's voices were eliminated from the written records as the norms of state a…
German Schools and Teachers in Nineteenth‐Century South Australia
This article uses the biographies of three German teachers to explore nineteenth century German immigrants' efforts to provide education which upheld their ethnic traditions and prepared their children to take their place in the British colony of South Australia. Lutheran schools, German state schools and private schools initially performed these functions in both rural and urban areas. Once compulsory schooling was introduced in 1875, however, G…
Post-Suffrage Factory Inspectors in New South Wales
The City as a Site of Women Teachers' Post-Suffrage Political Activism
This paper focuses on the political activism of three women teachers, Lizzie Hales, Phebe Watson and Adelaide Miethke, in the city of Adelaide, South Australia, during the post-suffrage era. With the exception of Adelaide Miethke, none of these women are known to historians who are interested in post-suffrage feminism, and in the history of education the focus has been mostly on their involvement in the teachers' union. However, our research has …
Postwar headteachers' perspectives of 'good' teachers
Dans cet article, l'auteur examine les changements intervenus dans la periode de l'apres-guerre dans les profils des enseignants en notant la croissance du nombre de femmes mariees durant cette periode contrastant avec la majorite de celibataires dans la premiere partie du siecle. La recherche de l'auteur souligne egalement les negociations entreprises par le Ministere de l'Education en Australie du Sud dans le recrutement d'enseignants en proven…
The problematic place of a woman physical education instructor
In this article the author's problematize the position of women in state school physical education, focusing in particular on the ‘instructors’ who were appointed to work with women teachers and senior girls, and prepare trainees at the Teachers College in South Australia. In exploring this little researched area, the article explores shifting representations of the woman ‘instructor’ from the 1920s to the late 1940s, highlighting the interplay o…
The Function of Age and the History of Women's Work
In this paper, we consider what it might mean to hold age as an analytic lens in historical research on women workers, in particular women teachers. Our study serves as a springboard for further discussion about what these new narratives might look like, and what they might reveal, or, moreover, what work they might do. In constructing an account of a woman physical educationist whose work traversed the first half of the twentieth century, we sho…
Concerning images of women in government offices in the early twentieth century
This paper focuses on images of women who worked in government offices and explores the ways in which age, along with gender and class, became institutionalised as a marker of difference among them in the early twentieth century. It argues that the girl typist was etched sharply in the public imagination and, although there were anxieties about her youth and femininity, by the 1930s the more ambiguous image of the middle‐aged single ‘lady officer…
Transnational Innovations, Local Conditions, and Disruptive Teachers and Students in Interwar Education
This paper examines the grammar of schooling and educational innovations that were being promulgated transnationally in the 1920s and 1930s. First, the paper explores how some elements of the grammar of schooling such as age grading, year‐long courses of study and annual employment contracts for teachers were mediated by local circumstances in Newfoundland. Then it identifies progressive ideas that were being promoted by the Department of Educati…
Careers Advice for Women and the Shaping of Identities
This article focuses on representations of women's work in two sets of articles, both entitled 'Careers for Women' that appeared in the Woman's Record in 1921-22 and the Australian Women's Weekly in 1933. Each provided advice about careers to potential women workers in traditional fields such as teaching and nursing as well as some relatively new occupations in the world of commerce. Although a range of discourses can be applied to women's work, …
Aging and activism in the context of the British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union, 1914–1922
A ‘break with tradition’ in interwar teacher education
British teacher education in the interwar years was a contested field, dominated numerically by women but regulated by the Board of Education. The traditional perception of women’s residential training colleges was that they were autocratic and socially isolated. By focusing on Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC), the first specialist training college for nursery school teachers, and its foundation principal, Lillian de Lissa, I challenge this per…
Making a manly teacher’s career in Australia
This paper highlights ways in which understandings about masculinity intersected with concepts of vocation, career and character in the life and work of an Australian teacher, Victor Pavia. Firstly, it outlines his vertical career path from teacher to headmaster and then inspector, made possible in a bureaucratised state school system that institutionalised the patriarchal dividend. Secondly, it shows how his manly character was forged in social …
A decided disadvantage for the kindergarten students to mix with the state teachers”
In early twentieth‐century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women’s hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with Lillian de Lissa as its principal. This article focuses on a proposed amalgamation with the state training…
Three Accounts of a Working Life in Newfoundland
British‐born Violet Cherrington spent most of her working life (1922–52) as Principal of Bishop Spencer College, a Church of England school for girls in St John’s, Newfoundland. This article focuses on her as a woman, educator and national subject in Canadian history, and it is written as three accounts rather than a single narrative. The first account is based on texts that were mostly written by Cherrington in the 1920s and 1930s when Newfoundl…
Marking a Marginal Past
In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and economically. However, women’s and Aboriginal histories are marginalised in the district’s social memory.…
Transnational connections in early twentieth-century women teachers’ work
Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC’s progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to “think internationally”. She was especially proud that a handful of students from countries such as China, Turkey and C…
Exchange teachers as "another link in binding the [British] Empire" in the interwar years
This article focuses on “exchange teachers” from Great Britain plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, these countries constituting the white settler dominions of the British Empire. Participants in the League of Empire’s exchange scheme were mostly white middle class women elementary teachers. Reports of their work in newspapers and magazines show that they used whiteness as a strategy to differentiate the lands and peoples they en…
Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement
In this article I argue that women educators' personal and professional networks underpinned the growth of nursery school education into a transnational movement in the interwar years. Edna Noble White, Lillian de Lissa, Mary Gutteridge and Gwendolyn Watkins' interlocking networks facilitated and connected the nursery school movements in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Although these women educators were at the centre of …
They call me headmaster’
This article explores commonalities in the lives and work of women head teachers in Malawian secondary schools and women principals in Australian Lutheran schools. In both Australia and Malawi women are under-represented in school leadership and often appointed to complex schools and communities. We commence with a brief discussion of Malawi and Australia’s political and educational histories which have much in common, before outlining current se…
Women's leadership of ‘much needed national work’ in wartime education
While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa, longstanding principal of Gipsy Hill Training College (where Walker trained) and national advocate fo…
Marjorie Caw’s transitions from city teacher to leading citizen in interwar rural Western Australia
This article explores Marjorie Caw’s (née Hubbe) transition from her professional work and active citizenship as a young, single, kindergarten teacher in Adelaide to her multi-faceted married life on a farm near Kojonup, Western Australia during the interwar period. Besides engaging fully in domestic work, Caw taught her children at home and maintained her commitments to nation building by leading the Kojonup Country Women’s Association. Issues o…
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern
Educational Reform and Environmental Concern: A History of School Nature Study in Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 49(2), pp. 275–276
British Women Education Officers and progressive education for an independent Nigeria
This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three WEOs endeavoured to reconcile their British cultural values, progressive education, English language ins…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (25 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Historical Education Studies Worldwide (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Australian History and Society (12 works)