Abstract
Women have always played influential leadership roles in education but cultural notions have frequently limited their roles to behind-the-scenes contributions. The result is that their voices and wisdom have not been fully appreciated by subsequent generations. We propose to tell the stories of two women ˗ one Greek, the other American ˗ who lived in the 19th century as a way to more fully understand who women educators are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We selected these two women ˗ Aikaterini Laskaridou and Lydia Moss Bradley ˗ because their legacies continue to have a powerful influence on education even today, over a century after their deaths. The authors seek in the paper (1) to provide deeper understandings of their lives and accomplishments, and (2) to relate the understandings gained from their stories to current understandings of how women educators have influenced contemporary societies. The relevance of our endeavor is summed up by Elias Xirotiris (1961) who recently wrote about one of our subjects “since Laskaridou’s death, there [has been] no one to take the baton and to continue her work with the same enthusiasm and dedication.” We hope that our paper will contribute to a better appreciation of the considerable legacies left by the subjects of our investigation.
Highlights
Don’t let anyone tell you there weren’t notable and effective women throughout history
We sought to provide deeper understandings of Aikaterini Laskaridou and Lydia Moss Bradley’s lives and accomplishments, and relate the understandings gained from their stories to current understandings of how women educators influence contemporary societies
The research questions we sought to answer involved how do the lives of two women who lived over a century ago on two continents continue to exert leadership in education today and how do their life stories, which have been relatively unacknowledged in leadership literature provide models for women leaders today” (Lambert and Gardner, 2009)
Summary
Don’t let anyone tell you there weren’t notable and effective women throughout history. The result is that the female voice and wisdom have not been fully appreciated by subsequent generations Writing about another unrecognized woman school leader, Hauser (2006) states, The importance of using a feminist lens to understand Caroline Pratt (American educator, 1867–1954, who made significant contributions to progressive and early childhood education) lies in the argument that without women’s history and a feminist consciousness, the achievements of women in public and professional life can be erased. We sought to provide deeper understandings of Aikaterini Laskaridou and Lydia Moss Bradley’s lives and accomplishments, and relate the understandings gained from their stories to current understandings of how women educators influence contemporary societies. The chapter is organized into the Introduction, Methods section, an Authors’ reflection that reveals our reasoning as we constructed the means by which to study these two women, and our reactions to the process, the stories of Aikaterini and Lydia, a Comparative Analysis employing Lambert and Gardner’s Framework for the Development of Women Leaders, Summary, and final Authors’ Reflection
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