Women ‘learning to labour’ in the ‘male emporium’: exploring gendered work in teacher education

Abstract

This article reflects an interest in exposing links between women's academic work and the gender codes which organize and shape working life in the university context, both now and in the recent past, as a contribution to the sociology of women's work. Our specific focus is the gendered division of labour in teacher education in universities in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu and McNay, and through an analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 19 women who worked in faculties of education between the 1960s and 1990s, we examine how the gendered division of labour has influenced the careers and working lives of women university teacher educators during those decades. Our data are organized under three themes: public and private lives; women's work/place; and talking back. We identify continuities and changes as well as qualifiers, ironies and paradoxes.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the other members of the ‘Traditions and Transitions’ team— Dianne Hallman, Thérèse Hamel, Nicole Sanderson, Elizabeth Smyth and Michelle Webber—the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding, and the participants who contributed their time and thoughts to our project.

Notes

1. The research culture is defined here as a workplace culture that stresses and prioritizes research and publishing.

2. The concept of ‘social work disciplines’ gives us a way of exploring the working lives of those who have been seen as cultivators of the ‘public good’. See also Blackmore (1999).

3. To understand how symbolic domination works, one need only turn to the organization of female labour in primary schools where it is still commonly thought that only women should be the teachers of young children. Despite numerical increases in women's representation in other professions, this Victorian ideal still persists today and is premised upon the historical conflation of women's work with the private sphere.

4. The Faculty of Education opened under that name in 1907. From 1920–1977 it was called the Ontario College of Education, and largely controlled by the Ontario Ministry of Education, although still on the University of Toronto campus. In 1966 it was renamed the College of Education of the University of Toronto, to symbolize the closer connections with the university. The name was changed again in 1972 to the Faculty of Education of the University of Toronto. In 1996, FEUT was merged with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education to become the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). (See Booth & Stiegelbauer, 1996; Acker, 2003; Smyth, 2003.)

5. Transcripts examined included all of the interviews with women who worked at the University of Toronto Faculty of Education between the early 1960s and the mid 1990s (the case study). We also included all of the women who were interviewed in the first phase of the project about the history of teacher education in their institutions across the province of Ontario. In the cross‐provincial phase, some participants were men and some were women, and the questions did not so clearly target individual experiences. Nevertheless, in some of the interviews, individual experiences in the institutional contexts were discussed and were relevant to our overall theme.

6. All names of individuals are pseudonyms.

7. The term ‘tenure track’ refers to positions which carry with them the potential for permanent status after several years and an extensive evaluation of the individual's work.

8. In the Canadian context, ‘administrator’ can mean either an academic manager or a staff member who is not an academic. In the quotations in this section, the term generally refers to an academic manager such as a chair [head] of a department or a dean.