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Using Case Studies in the History of Education to Teach U.S. Women's and Gender History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Karen Leroux
Karen Leroux*
Affiliation:
Drake University, where she teaches courses on women's and gender history and other topics in US and modern world history
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Texts introducing students to women's and gender history typically emphasize how gender refers to the social meanings attached to sexual difference, which vary over time and across societies and cultures. As one of these texts explains, “Definitions of what is masculine and feminine are learned as each society instructs its members from infancy through adulthood as to what behavior and personality attributes are appropriate for males and females of that generation.” Given wide agreement that gender is learned, it is surprising how seldom the places and people who institutionalize learning appear in the texts used to teach U.S. women's and gender history. Teachers are remarkably scarce in the literature, even though vast numbers of U.S. women have taught since the mid-nineteenth century. The reasons for this absence are not clear. Perhaps teachers' social location, at the murky boundaries of the working and middle classes, has contributed to their omission from sharply defined studies of class and gender consciousness. Or perhaps the conventional association of women and teaching has deterred gender historians, following the theory that studying the margins of women's experiences better reveals the mainstream. Yet, the perceived ordinariness of the woman teacher may be especially helpful to illuminate periods of significant change in the meaning of gender.

Type
Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 149 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

1 Kerber, Linda K., Jane Sherron De Hart, and Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, eds., Women's America: Refocusing the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9–10.Google Scholar

2 A review of the secondary sources reprinted in popular anthologies supports this observation. See Norton, Mary Beth and Alexander, Ruth M., eds., Major Problems in American Women's History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), esp. 322–26; Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Dublin, Thomas, eds., Women and Power in American History: A Reader (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009); and Women's America, 103–16, 214–23, and 368–78. In Major Problems in American Women's History, one essay includes a few pages on black women teachers in early twentieth-century Worth Carolina. Women and Power has no essays concerning women and schooling. Women's America, the most extensive of these anthologies at more than eight hundred pages, includes an excerpted essay on black educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown and two that involve Catholic nuns. Teachers and schools figure more prominently in the literature of women's and gender history of other nations, including Canada.Google Scholar

3 Given my review of recent anthologies, even antebellum pioneers such as Catharine Beecher and Emma Willard seem to be disappearing from the texts published for college classrooms.Google Scholar

4 This essay focuses on the second of a two-course, upper-division sequence: Women and Gender in Early America and Women and Gender in Modern America.Google Scholar

5 Anderson, Karen Tucker, “Persistent Discrimination Against Black Women During World War II,” in Norton and Alexander, Major Problems in American Women's History, (3rd ed., 2003) 366–73; and Meyer, Leisa D., “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women's Army Corps during World War II,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), 581–601.Google Scholar

6 Students are assigned Blount, Jackie M., “Manly Men and Womanly Women: Deviance, Gender Role Polarization and the Shift in Women's School Employment, 1900–1976,” Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 318–39; and Cahn, Susan K., “‘Mannishness,’ Lesbianism and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sports,” in Kerber, Linda K. and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds., Women's America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 508–17. Blount has published a monograph, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), but the “Manly Men” article introduces undergraduates to the topic very effectively. Together with the excerpted Cahn essay, it also reflects the amount of reading I can expect students to complete for a single class period.Google Scholar

7 Coontz, Stephanie argues that the “‘traditional’ family of the 1950s was a qualitatively new phenomenon.” I attempt to help students reach a similar conclusion about the postwar gender system. See Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 25.Google Scholar

8 This creates an opportunity to discuss using contemporary films as secondary sources in need of corroborating evidence and to remind students about sourcing their evidence.Google Scholar

9 Blount does not analyze the impact of race and sexual orientation in Fit to Teach. Google Scholar