“Gendered Expectations of Youth and the Feminization of Teaching”

 

In his article “Women Teachers in Canada, 1881-1901 Revisiting the ‘Feminization’ of an Occupation”, Eric W. Sager picks up the story of the sisters written by Jean Barman to tell us about the conditions in which large numbers of women sought work as teachers in NS. He says, “They were part of the ‘feminization’ of teaching, a gradual, uneven, and often contested process that gathered pace in the last half of the nineteenth century”. He uses Alison Prentice’s work to show us his emphasis on the complexity of a process involving the educational state. He compares various data to determine the number women and men with teaching occupation picking up the several bases like ethnicity, religion, place and he focuses on ‘teachers per children’ data too. His analysis of various data shows that at the end of the nineteenth century the status of women teacher was ambiguous and unstable. He says that the idea of ‘professional women’ was a contradiction. His arguments clearly show the historical causes of the feminization of teaching relate gendered expectations for girls and boys in education.

I really liked the way author claims his arguments in this article, especially the data he uses from different sources, and the subjects he picks from different writers’ works.

 

The article was written by J. Donald Wilson, “‘I Am Here to Help If You Need Me’: British Columbia’s Rural Teachers’ Welfare Officer, 1928-1934” focuses on women with jobs producing significant structural changes affecting a lot of rural teachers. He tells us about a suicide case of Mabel Jones to shed light on the difficult circumstances of young female teachers in rural BC in the 1920s. The author admits that his study is biased towards women and women in some difficulty. To discuss the living conditions and other pertinent information, the author uses the recorded information of Lottie Bowron as she took down information like their names and schools where they taught, all of which varied greatly from teacher to teacher. “I am here to help if you need me”, this line comes from the actual event when Bowron said to one troubled teacher to reassure her. Her support for women became legendary. The author says “Teachers’ letters still on file sing her praises, and in many ways, she seems to have acted as a surrogate mother, especially to the younger female teachers. There seems in fact to be clear evidence of the merits of same-sex support system, for these teachers often turned to Bowron for help rather than to the all-male inspectorate.” This shows the existence of female networks between the teachers and the women in the community.

Although this article satisfies the title, a lot of content in this article was not necessary to include.

 

In his article “Boys Will Be Men, Girls Will Be Mothers: The Legal Regulation of Childhood in Toronto and Vancouver”, Dorothy E. Chunn discusses about similarities and differences between the provinces with respect to two major issues: first, the enactment of criminal and quasi-criminal legislation, ostensibly universal in application but directed primarily at poor children and the adults responsible for them, to force compliance with middle-class standards of morality and family life; and, second, the administration of many such statutes through the Toronto and Vancouver Juvenile Courts. He argues about legal coercion of those who flouted bourgeois norms of childhood and sexuality did effectively reproduce the desired social class and gender relations among a certain ratio of the recalcitrant. Covering the major areas like Methodological Notes, Childhood, Sexuality and the Law, Childhood, Sexuality and Socialized Courts, author intelligently uses the various newspaper articles, and the works of several writers to conclude that the juvenile and family courts played an important role in ‘rehabilitating’ deviant children and/or parents.