Australian women teachers, ageing and activism in and beyond the educational state, 1920s–1970s
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines South Australian women teachers’ work in a centralised, patriarchal bureaucratic educational state. Focusing on women teachers in the capital city of Adelaide, the essay features two senior teachers, Phebe Watson (1876–1964) and Adelaide Miethke (1881–1962), and draws on the experiences of two additional long-serving teachers, May Mills (1890–1984) and Ruth Gibson (1901–1972). Given a strict marriage bar to women teachers’ employment in the South Australian state school system, they were single women. Additionally, chronological age and the ageing process, gender and marital status were intertwined and foundational to many regulations and processes that governed teachers work, including a statutory retirement age of sixty for women. Deploying an intersectional analysis, the paper demonstrates that the four women negotiated pejorative discourses of gender, ageing and marital status while ascending a “service ladder” to senior positions of responsibility, thereby enabling their activism and leadership in teachers unions and women’s organisations that were based in the capital city. Liberated from employment at age sixty, they applied their professional expertise and organisational skills in new fields of socio-political activism. In so doing, these senior single women continued to forge productive lives and challenge the inequalities of age and gender during their retirement.
Source: Paedagogica Historica
Author: Kay Whitehead
Institution: University of South Australia
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409978967