Women Teachers in Canada: Gender, Power, and the Profession

Introduction and Research Questions

The early development of the teaching profession in Canada favored the subordination of female teachers and the advancement of male teachers to positions of administrative authority. The objective of this paper is to examine this issue and to answer two specific research questions: (1) What factors contributed to this pattern? (2) To what extent has the pattern changed, and what factors have contributed to that change — or to the lack thereof?

The methodology employed in this study is qualitative in nature and is conducted through a review of the literature found in peer-reviewed academic articles and journals, books, and other relevant publications.

The Feminization of Teaching and Gender Stereotyping

The work "The Under Representation of Women in a 'Feminized' Profession: Gender Stereotyping, Management Politics, and the Dissemination of Information," published in the Dalhousie Journal of Information and Management, addresses gender role stereotyping and professions considered feminized — such as teaching, nursing, and, in the specific case discussed by Bird, librarianship:

"Gender role stereotyping and feminized professions are directly connected, as each stereotype is integral to the perpetuation of the other. Librarianship is not the only feminized profession; women are also predominantly associated with teaching and nursing, and all three professions share similar characteristics. Generally, these professions require women to be caregivers, to educate, to chaperone children, to exhibit unyielding patience, and to be subservient. This is similar to the roles that women played as housewives prior to the majority of women vacating the sole roles of wife and mother and entering the workforce." (Bird, 2007)

According to Bird (2007), the move of women from the home to positions of employment such as librarians and teachers was viewed "as a genteel calling and an extension of women's traditional role because it involved service, transmittal of societal values and culture, focus on the individual and attention to detail" (p. 1).

Bird (2007) further argues that the roles of working women have been vastly "undervalued, as have the stereotypical values associated with femininity: patience, acquiescence, horizontal consensus (as opposed to vertical hierarchies, which are associated with men), and the need for validation. This devaluation of women and of the roles of women in the workforce is not due to socially constructed biological inadequacies in 'femininity'; the devaluation of women is due to patriarchal ideologies." Research cited by Bird also demonstrates "different leadership and management styles between men and women," with comparable findings across studies.

Bird notes an additional dimension of gender stereotyping: men themselves regularly stereotype the sexual orientation of male members of feminized professions. As Bird explains, "Male librarians…seem to believe that there is a greater proportion of gay men in the profession than in society at large" (Carmichael, 1994, p. 227). Bird attributes this stereotype to the broader perception that librarianship — and by extension other feminized professions — is inherently feminine, implying that men who enter such fields must exhibit traits deemed atypical in men. Bird further states that variations in management styles between men and women "are attributed primarily to socially constructed, patriarchal ideologies that elevate men into positions of power over women" (2007).

The history of education in Canada has often overlooked the contributions of women teachers. Prentice and Theobald (1991), in Women Who Taught: Perspectives on Women, History and Teaching, note that the phrase "woman teacher" still carries evocative power, yet, like other feminist scholars, they discovered that "women who taught in the past had suffered the same fate as most women in history. The schoolmistress was largely absent from mainstream historical work on education. To the extent that traditional histories of schooling considered teachers at all, they tended to focus on the quest for professionalism in the occupation, and their concern was chiefly the male educator" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). Historical writing was itself found to perpetuate teacher stereotyping.

The Historical Invisibility of Women Teachers

Prentice and Theobald further found that "leading promoters of school reform accepted the doctrines idealizing the schoolmistress very reluctantly, and only when the numerical dominance of women teachers in state elementary schools was already a reality." A second complexity was the tendency to equate rhetoric with experience — women teachers were too often accepting of the idea portraying them as natural teachers of children, while another view blamed teachers for "watered-down, anti-intellectual schooling believed to be characteristic of the twentieth century on the image and reality of the nurturing 'motherteacher'" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991).

From a feminist perspective, women teachers were negatively viewed for their "passive acceptance of the hidden curriculum: the reproduction of patriarchy" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). So embedded were women in the hierarchical and gendered educational system that they were regarded as both "its victims and unwitting perpetrators." Those described as "least visible in the historiography of education" were women who taught in domestic settings and women who owned their own schools — overlooked even by the first wave of revisionist historians, who "sought the origins of worthwhile education for women in the nineteenth-century reform movement known then and now as the 'movement for the higher education of women'" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991).

When the state began recruiting women as teachers, this "signaled a shift of location, a transformation in their teaching labor, a loss of autonomy, but not a radical new departure in the history of women's work" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). In Quebec — a predominantly French Catholic province — more than fifty percent of government-hired school teachers were women "as early as 1851." A study conducted between 1851 and 1991 revealed that factors such as the lengthening of the school year or increasing pupil numbers could not explain the early predominance of female teachers in rural Quebec or in several eastern Ontario counties; the reasons were more likely "poverty and the presence of a resource frontier which offered important alternative employment to young men" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). Quebec also had a strong tradition of female teaching supported by women's religious communities devoted to education.

Montreal, the largest metropolitan center in Quebec, did not develop "a monolithic public school system governed by a few men at the top and staffed by large numbers of women in the lower ranks" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). Instead, two parallel systems emerged: French Catholic and English Protestant. The French Catholic system was "divided along gender lines, favoring boys' schools and male teachers," meaning that state-supported French Catholic schools remained predominantly male until the end of the nineteenth century.

Women who taught school during this period were almost invariably those acting out of economic necessity — a widow supporting children, a wife whose husband had failed in the gold fields, or a young woman supporting herself or her family. As women moved into state-financed school teaching, "the character of teachers' work in elementary schools underwent subtle but important changes" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991).

As college education became a requirement for desirable public school posts, "the teacher's own academic achievements increasingly became a matter of public record" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991). Drawing on the work of Joyce Senders Pedersen, Prentice and Theobald distinguish between private and public school headmistresses. The private schoolmistress aspired to a leisured, quasi-domestic role, whereas public school heads sought professional recognition and distinction in the public sphere. Private schoolmistresses aimed to groom pupils for leisured private lives; public school heads "considered themselves professional people and placed more emphasis on academic achievement." Despite these differences, both types aspired to elite status, "desiring to dissociate themselves from the mass of middle classes" (Prentice and Theobald, 1991).