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

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.