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 relationships with men and women. Thirdly, there was his vocational commitment to associational activity where he consolidated his position among men. However, Pavia’s ascendance to the top of his profession was by no means assured for there were many tensions along with expanded opportunities at each stage of his career. Keywords: masculinityteachersvocationcareercharacter Notes 1Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 13. 2Ibid., chap. 1; R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 119–21. 3E. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 3. 4A. Nolan, ‘Making Modern Men: The Scopes Trial, Masculinity and Progress in the 1920s United States’, Gender and History 19, no. 1 (2007): 122–42; Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001), 107–18. 5Robert Gidney and Winnifred Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton and Co., 1976); Barry Bergan, ‘Only a Schoolmaster: Gender, Class and the Effort to Professionalise Elementary Teaching in England 1870–1910’, History of Education Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1982): 1–21. 6Dina Copelman, London’s Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1996); Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Lynne Trethewey, ‘"Either You Have Misunderstood the Directions, or You are Not Playing the Game”. South Australian Women in Educational Administration 1900–1960’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 38, no. 1 (2006): 1–18; Kay Whitehead, The New Women Teachers Come Along: Transforming Teaching in the Nineteenth Century, ANZHES Monograph Series, 2 (Sydney: Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society, 2003). 7Jackie Blount, Fit to Teach: Same‐sex Desire, Gender and Schoolwork in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 26. 8Kate Rousmaniere, ‘Go to the Principal’s Office: Toward a Social History of the School Principal in North America’, History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2007): 3. 9My thanks to Stephen Thorpe with whom I first worked to explore these concepts. See Stephen Thorpe and Kay Whitehead, ‘Calling, Career and Character: Historically Shifting Conceptions of Women Teachers’ Work’ (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April 2004). 10David Hansen, ‘Teaching and the Sense of Vocation’, Educational Theory 44 (1994): 259–75; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), 80–5; Max Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 77–128. 11Robert Connell, Masculinities (St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 186. 12Jude Hilkey, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 101; Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation’, 115, 117; Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 174. 13Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 171. 14Ibid., 111. 15Toby Ditz, ‘The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History’, Gender and History 16, no. 1 (2004): 2–3. 16Hilkey, Character is Capital, 4; W. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 273. 17Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 112. 18Quoted in Margaret Crocco, Petra Munro, and Kathleen Weiler, Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880–1960 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 6. 19 Advertiser, August 16, 1934, 17. 20John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005), 177. 21Incomes of School Teachers, 1875–76, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1878, no. 42 (hereafter SAPP), 1–15; Teachers of Public Schools, SAPP 1881, no. 90, 1–10; Whitehead, New Women Teachers, 46–8. 22Rotundo, American Manhood, 168. 23Progress Report of the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Education, 1881, SAPP 1881, no. 122, 34. For Victor and Annie’s teaching records see Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, State Records Office of South Australia (hereafter SRSA). 24Progress Report of the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Education, 1881, SAPP 1881, No. 122, 30; see Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 26Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 66. 25P. Pavia, President, SA Public School Teachers’ Union, ‘Third Progress Report, Royal Commission on Education’, SAPP 1912, no. 27, 53 (hereafter Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’). 27Progress Report of the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Education, 1881, SAPP 1881, no. 122, 32. 28Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 6. 29Progress Report of the Commission on the Working of the Education Acts, 1882, SAPP 1882, no. 27, 106. 30A. Cobiac, ed., South Australia Marriages – Index of Registrations 1842–1916, vol. 4, N–S (Adelaide: South Australian Genealogy and Heraldry Society, 2001), 1458. 31Pavla Miller, Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986), 70. 32Whitehead, New Women Teachers, 46–51. 33Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, SRSA; J. Thomas, ed., South Australian Births – Index of Registrations 1842–1906, vol. 7, N–P (Adelaide: South Australian Genealogy and Heraldry Society, 1997), 2296; A. Cobiac, ed., South Australian Deaths – Index of Registrations 1842–1915, vol. 4, N–S (Adelaide: South Australian Genealogy and Heraldry Society, 2000), 1104. 34Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 34. 35Blount, Fit to Teach, 15; Ditz, ‘New Men’s History’, 12–14; Nolan, ‘Making Modern Men’, 127–8. 36V. Pavia to Inspector‐General Hartley, 10 January 1880, GRG 18/3/1880/137, SRSA. 37Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 56. 38Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 36. 39Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 75. 41Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 94. 40 Education Gazette 1, no. 8 (1885): 55; Education Gazette 2, no. 17 (1886): 75. 42Ditz, ‘New Men’s History’, 2–3. 43Connell, Masculinities, 164. 45Brian Condon, ed., The Confidential Letterbook of the Inspector‐General of Schools, 1880–1914 (Magill: Murray Park Sources in the History of South Australian Education, Murray Park College of Advanced Education, 1976), Letter 54. 44Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, SRSA; Education Regulations 1879, SAPP 1879, no. 37, 5. 47Ibid., Letter 68. 46Ibid., Letter 66. 48Rousmaniere, ‘Go to the Principal’s Office’, 7. 49 SA Teacher’s Journal 13, no. 1 (1928): 9. 50Nolan, ‘Making Modern Men’, 134. 51Condon, Confidential Letterbook, Letter 141. 52Nolan, ‘Making Modern Men’, 136. 53Hilkey, Character is Capital, 67; Susman, Culture as History, 280. 54Inspector Stanton to Inspector‐General Hartley, 3 April 1888, GRG 18/3/1888/808, SRSA. 55Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, SRSA; Thomas, South Australian Births, vol. 7, 2296; Cobiac, South Australian Deaths, vol. 4, 1104. 56 Education Gazette 23, no. 243 (1907): 6; Education Gazette 26, no. 279 (1908): 9. 57Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 64. 58Ibid., 61, 70; Hansen, ‘Teaching and the Sense of Vocation’, 270–1. 59Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 34. 60 Education Gazette 21, no. 223 (1905): 83. 61 Education Gazette 24, no. 258 (1908): 85. 62 Education Gazette 18, no. 192 (1902): 138. 63Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 54. 65David Collison and Jeff Hearn, ‘"Men” at “Work”: Multiple Masculinities/Multiple Workplaces’, in Understanding Masculinities, ed. Martin Mac An Ghail (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1996), 65. 64 Education Gazette 19, no. 201 (1903): 94. 66 Education Gazette 28, no. 309 (1912): 166. 67Adrian Vicary, In the Interests of Education: A History of Education Unionism in South Australia (St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1997), 30–4. 68 Education Gazette 28, no. 310 (1912): 177. 69Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 224–5. 70Ibid., 53. 71Linzi Murrie, ‘The Australian Legend: Writing Australian Masculinity/Writing “Australian” Masculine’, Journal of Australian Studies 50 (1998): 74. 72Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 55. 73For Adelaide Miethke’s teaching record see Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets 1882–1960, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 76Ibid., 83. 74Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 55–6. 75Ibid., 91. 77Ibid., 58. 78Ibid., 82. 79Ibid., 65. 80 Education Gazette 28, no. 310 (1912): 182. 81 Education Gazette 29, no. 321 (1913): 294–5. 84Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 56. 82Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 55–6. 83Inspector Pavia’s report 1915, SAPP 1916, no. 44, 28–30. 85Inspector Pavia’s report 1913, SAPP 1914, no. 44, 29; SAPP 1915, no. 44, 28; SAPP 1921, no. 44, 49. 86Pavia, ‘Third Progress Report’, 78. 87 Register, April 28, 1915, 6. 88Appointment of an additional inspector of schools, 14 March 1924, GRG 18/2/1924/667, SRSA; Director of Education’s report 1924, SAPP 1925, no. 44, 16. 89Appointment of an additional inspector of schools, 14 March 1924, GRG 18/2/1924/667, SRSA. 90Ibid. 92 Education Gazette 44, no. 499 (1928): 79. 91Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 113. 93Berman, All That is Solid, 143. 94 SA Teacher’s Journal 13, no. 1 (1928): 9. 95Berman, All That is Solid, 15. 96 News, August 15, 1934, 16; Advertiser, August 16, 1934, 17

Career path · Character (mathematics · Management · Masculinity · Pedagogy · Sociology · State (computer science · Vocational education · Australian History and Society · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Education Studies Worldwide

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