Telling women's lives - Kathleen Weiler

This collection brings together the work of scholars exploring the history of women in education in a number of different national settings. The contributors include both established scholars who have completed major studies and younger scholars exploring new directions. All of these writers share an engagement in reflection on the process of history writing and consider the impact of recent theoretical debates on their own scholarship. Their work reflects the influence of feminist theory and poststructuralism, but also of postcolonial theory and theories of the educational state. In these essays, writers address such key issues as the nature of historical evidence, the continuing need to uncover the 'hidden histories' of women as teachers, the ways life history narratives can illuminate women's own conceptions of themselves as women and teachers, the material conditions of teaching as work for women, and the way conceptions of gender have shaped women's experiences in relation to the educational state, the family, class, sexuality and race. These feminist writers also explore the ways they are implicated in the very subject of their research - the educated woman who is also an educator.