Framing Lives: Women educators 1890-1960

Project Team: Professor Tanya Fitzgerald (La Trobe University) and Associate Professor Josephine May (University of Newcastle)

Project Description: Framing Lives is book length study for Information Age Publishing (Georgia, USA) that traces the history and agency of women educators in the early twentieth century to highlight their bifurcated attempts to establish their own professional identity while simultaneously pushing back the gendered boundaries of their lives. Accordingly, this book takes a broad approach to thinking about the ‘woman educator’ to produce a collective biography of women in this period. In taking this approach, the work not only explores the intersection of the public and private aspects in the lives of these women, it also explores the creative tensions and opportunities generated within their public lives in their professional roles as educators. Drawing its subjects from Australia and New Zealand, this book adopts an innovative textual approach as we draw on representations of women teachers, headmistresses and professors in photographs, school magazines, newspapers and cartoons to explore alternate ways of thinking about women’s intertwined lives and work in the early twentieth century.