Feminism and the Development of Early Childhood Education in Australia

Abstract

Feminism has multiple definitions and even more manifestations, but many women working in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century for the development of early childhood education in Australia were undeniably feminists, part of what has been called the “first wave of feminism” (Krolokke and Sorenson 2006). This chapter looks at the views and activities of some of these women who were prominent in the establishment of kindergartens in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. Whilst active in the women’s suffrage movements, they also advocated innovative views of education which were only just being explored in Britain and the USA. Examining their views on education give an insight into the kind of feminism they represented. Debates on women’s suffrage were relatively straightforward and indeed women’s suffrage was established remarkably early in Australia. Debates in the field of early childhood at the time, though cutting edge in terms of educational theory, were more complex in practice. The debates were often about philosophies of education, control of educational institutions, and the necessity or otherwise for training early childhood teachers and the kind of character appropriate to such teachers. One writer has argued that these debates “exemplified the issues that fractured the field of early childhood education for most of the twentieth century” (Whitehead 2010, p. 87). The fractures manifest themselves in the “second wave of feminism” in the 1970s where childcare provision was a major concern. Bitter disputes on the value of childcare between different sections of the early childhood field meant that during this second wave of feminism there was no strong united voice for feminism from the early childhood field.