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Conservative woman or woman Conservative? Complicating accounts of women’s educational leadership

This article uses events in May 1985 surrounding the de‐selection of the Conservative chair of the Wiltshire Education Committee and her role in the campaign for comprehensive education in Salisbury, England, to pose questions about the representation of women who championed causes deemed to be progressive and to raise issues about how gender analysis is dealt with in such accounts. The article develops a frame of analysis that moves beyond the “heroic fairytale” in ascribing agency to women, while also revealing the operation of power structures in which they manoeuvred. A frame of analysis is outlined, based on Bourdieu’s thinking tools of fields, habitus and capital. These are linked with the notion of gender scripts to demonstrate the complexities and contradictions of the story of Joan Main, chair of Wiltshire education committee, and her simultaneous location inside/outside the Conservative political field and the field of local government. Bourdieu’s thinking tools and the notion of gender scripts are also used to demonstrate ways in which gender was an unspoken power relation in the events surrounding Main’s de‐selection and in her ability to gain re‐election as an independent candidate.