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‘Either You Have Misunderstood the Directions, or You are Not Playing the Game’. South Australian Women in Educational Administration 1900–1960

This article examines continuity and change in the management of gender with specific reference to infant mistresses, whose quest for autonomous control of their own departments in the largest South Australian primary schools threatened the maintenance of patriarchal authority in and through the administration of state schooling. The complex location of these women is discussed in relation to the broader history of infant education in South Australia and the sexual division of labour in teaching. In taking account of their active resistance to the imposition of male hegemony in a sphere of education which was traditionally ‘woman’s work’, the article describes infant mistresses’ networks, the strategies of power and rhetoric they deployed, and how they built professional boundaries to protect their distinctive interests. It also examines the means adopted by headmasters and the Education Department to manage the troubling spectre of the independent female principal so that men’s self‐esteem, social and professional status, ‘natural’ authority over women, and employment opportunities in the ‘manly’ realm of school administration might be preserved.