Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural California counties from 1850 to 1950, Country Schoolwomen explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their categories of experience.
The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from the time of the earliest European settlement.
This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the work of women in schools has always been con
Trade Review
"A fascinating history of rural women teachers in California. Her major achievement is to successfully integrate genres that are too often separated: critical and feminist theory, life histories, the political economy of schooling, quantitative demography, and institutional history." -- David Tyack * Stanford University *
Country Schoolwomen is feminist scholarship at its best..." * Pacific Historical Review *
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. Womens's history and the history of women teachers; 2. Gender and the growth of the educational state: California, 1850-1940; 3. Culture, schools, and community: Tulare and Kings counties; 4. Subjugated knowledge: lives of women teachers, 1860-1920; 5. Memory and identity: lives of women teachers, 1920-1940; 6. The work of teaching in rural schools, 1920-1940; 7. Men take control, 1940-1950; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
