Useful and Expendable

The development of the teaching profession in Australia in the late 19th century and early 20th century meant an important broadening of employment opportunities for women.1 Teaching, like nursing, became an area of work in tune with concepts of women's role as nurturers. It could be regarded as an extension of women's place in the home, as a corollary of a mother's duty in educating her children, as natural. It does not necessarily follow that the degree of participation of women in the teaching profession was seen as inevitable or appropriate. Indeed, the position of women teachers in Western Australia in the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to conflict between the social conventions demanding women's role in the workplace be subordinate, both in status and degree of acceptable participation and the demands of an economy under stress. During this period, the policies adopted by the State edu cation bureaucracy and the State arbitral authority established that women played a subsidiary role in the teaching profession. The exigencies of the Great Depression altered the balance somewhat and women teachers were in the vanguard of labour in the service of the economic ends of the State. In this sense they were useful, even neces sary, to the functioning of the system but there was no change in atti tude. The mores remained undisturbed. When economic conditions changed, women teachers were expendable

Bureaucracy · Duty · Mores · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Vanguard · Australian History and Society · Education Systems and Policy · Gender Studies · Historical Education Studies Worldwide · History · Law

• Women Teachers in Western Australian “Bush” Schools, 1900-1939

  Open Access•Janina Trotman•History of Education Quarterly•2006

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