‘Hewing out my Future in Defiance to my Friends’: The Life and Times of a Gentlewoman School Mistress

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Eglantyne had entered teacher training college hoping that she might fulfil her ‘obligations to [her] fellowman by a little work’.1 During her final weeks at Stockwell Teacher Training College, she wondered ‘how many thousand years one will have to go on preparing…to do work, which perhaps one will never do’.2 She had remained stoically determined to achieve something at Stockwell and did manage to earn her teacher’s certificate. According to her examination results, the subject she knew best was how to cut out and sew a boy’s shirt.3 Thus, in spite of her previous work in history at Oxford University, she was “‘conscientiously recommended” as a teacher of the art!!!’4 By the early twentieth century, the decades-long battle for women’s rights had resulted in the opening of some previously forbidden public spheres and social spaces. Together with wider access to higher education and training colleges came opportunities for more middle-class women to pursue careers, notably in the fields of health care, teaching and social work, which were seen as respectable extensions of women’s unpaid work in prisons, workhouses and the cottages of the poor. ‘Paid or unpaid’, Helen Jones argues that teaching, nursing and social work ‘reflect[ed] the supposedly caring and sharing side of women’s characters’.5 This chapter examines Eglantyne’s brief experience teaching grammar school and suggests that it is only when we look closely at the experiences of individual women that we fully appreciate the historical and biographical intersection of contemporary ideas surrounding professional responsibilities and her generation’s sense of duty to their families, to public work and to themselves.KeywordsVoluntary ActionGrammar SchoolTeacher Training CollegeContemporary IdeaWoman TeacherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.