Women Teachers in Western Australian “Bush” Schools, 1900-1939: Passive Victims of Oppressive Structures?

Abstract

Demography, distance, and die expansion of settlements created problems for the State Department of Education in Western Australia and other Australian states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Educational administration in Canada and parts of the United States faced similar issues with regard to the provision of schools. A common response was the establishment of one-teacher rural schools, frequently run by young, and sometimes unclassified, female teachers. In the United States locally elected school boards were the primary source of regulation, but in late nineteenth-century Western Australia such local boards had been stripped of their powers and were answerable to the newly established, highly centralized Education Department. Formal regulated teachers. The masculinized system of the Department and its inspectorate. All the same, however, the local community still exerted informal controls over the lives of teachers working and living in small settlements.