Elizabeth M. Smyth and Paula Bourne (eds.), Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives.

Trethewey, Lynne

Elizabeth M. Smyth and Paula Bourne (eds.), Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives, Toronto, Inanna Publications & Education Inc., 2006. 236pp., ISBN 0-9736709-3-2, pbk.

Elizabeth Smyth and Paula Bourne are to be congratulated for conceiving the idea to honour Canadian feminist historian Alison Prentice by collecting essays produced by an array of historians whose explorations of women's formal and informal education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been influenced by Prentice's scholarship. Whether emergent or established historical researchers, the authors of these ten leading-edge studies either draw upon Prentice's analytical frameworks to examine the complexities of women teachers' professional and personal lives; or build upon her pioneering work, using public and private sources to reconstruct women's educational experiences, the ways in which women have historically exercised leadership in institutionalized and other settings, and how women individually and collectively have reacted to the structures, ideologies and power relations which shaped their access to education and professional careers at different times and in different places.

The contributors to this volume exhibit the same qualities that have rendered Alison Prentice a legend in her own lifetime among social historians and historians of education throughout the Western world. For they, too, push theoretical boundaries, challenge existing assumptions, and 'raise further questions concerning women's historical experience while identifying the need for new initiatives and linkages between historical and contemporary events' (p.18). Following Prentice's example, they employ a variety of methodologies drawn from current feminist scholarship, meticulously gleaning evidence from a wide catalogue of sources to illustrate their arguments. They similarly conceptualise education broadly to include traditional institution-based settings, home and community, and the informal learning networks that arose from travel and involvement in social activism. Lastly, in line with Prentice's style, they write accessibly, 'making history real, personal and relevant' (p.12).

In the introductory chapter, the editors identify significant publications by Prentice, and the local, national and international scholarly as well as teaching and learning networks through which her work became widely known and subsequently informed the scholarship of other researchers interested in reconstructing women's lives, situating their educational experiences in historical context, and contributing to a more inclusive, nuanced history of education which takes account of gender, class, race/ethnicity, religion and power relations in schools and other sites of learning. The essays are presented in three thematically-linked sections: the lives of women teachers; regulating women in the emerging professional fields of social work, teaching and medicine; and the interplay of gender, individual and societal norms in women's public and private lives as nineteenth-century travelers, Australian and American graduates of the 1950s, and as twentieth-century 'small town' Ontario residents.

Rebecca Coulter's study of Donalda J. Dickie (1883-1972), a progressive educator whose 'power of practice' shaped the learning experiences of children and teachers in schools across Canada, adds considerably to our understanding of the historical nature of women's leadership in state education systems. Inspired by Prentice's studies of Mary Electa Adams and Mossie May Kirkwood, Hallman and Lathrop's essay elucidates the occupational trajectories of two other Canadian female academics who worked at opposite ends of the twentieth century to inspire in their students 'scholarly passion infused with feminist fire'--whether scholarly life was lived within the separatist model of higher education for women or within a state university. ANZHES 2000 Conference delegates will recognize Marjorie Theobald's chapter on the making of teaching as a woman's profession in Australia: it was first written and delivered in her self-consciously personal, yet theoretically and empirically well-informed style, as the Fink Memorial Lecture at the University of Melbourne. Next, Inga Elqvist-Salzman's biography of nineteenth-century Swedish teacher educator Cecilia Fryxell uses Fryxell's writings on discipline, pedagogy and the character of the effective teacher to explore perennial issues in teacher education.

The subject of Cathy James' biographical essay is university-trained Edith Elwood McLaren whose activism in the Canadian settlement house movement helped to lay the foundations of social work as a profession and the administrative structure of the modern Canadian welfare state. Harry Smaller follows with 'State formation and schooling reform in 1880s Toronto', in which he examines the social-economic-political circumstances that facilitated a significant restructuring of state schooling along particular class and gendered lines, how these reforms impacted on teachers' work, and how women teachers especially reacted to the changes imposed by School Board officials. Wendy Mitchinson's essay shifts our gaze to the medical context for women's education in Canada during the early twentieth century--notably the perceptions of women's bodies in medical literature which influenced arguments for gender specific education of girls/young women.

In the final section, fascinating glimpses into women's life histories are afforded by Susan Mann's superbly crafted essay on the travel lessons learned by middle-class Canadian schoolgirls and women of all ages whilst abroad, which she argues confirmed their own domesticity. Also by Alison MacKinnon's expose of 1950s women graduates' struggle to become intellectual beings and feminine selves simultaneously in a period when 'contradictory forces pulled educated women into the workplace yet urged them to find fulfillment in domestic life' (p.208). Lastly, Cecilia Reynolds uses data from her intergenerational interview study to describe the changing ideology of domesticity, framing three generations of Ontario women's experiences of school and work.

Each of these ten essays makes compelling reading. The book is indeed a fitting tribute to the pioneering work of Alison Prentice, whose photographic image as an international scholar in Paris (p.203) says it all in my opinion--living, learning, leading, then as now.

LYNNE TRETHEWEY

University of South Australia