The married woman, the teaching profession and the state in Victoria, 1872-1956

© 2002 Dr. Donna DwyerThis thesis is a study of married women's teaching labour in the Victorian Education Department. It looks at the rise to power of married women teachers, the teaching matriarchs, in the 1850s and 1860s in early colonial Victoria when married women teachers were valued for the moral propriety their presence brought to the teaching of female pupils. In 1872 the newly created Victorian Education Department would herald a new regime and the findings of the Rogers Templeton Commission spell doom for married women teachers. The thesis traces their expulsion from the service under the 1889 Public Service Act implementing the marriage bar. The labyrinthine legislation that followed the passing of the Public Service Act 1889 defies adequate explanation but the outcome was clear. For the next sixty-seven years the bar would remain in place, condemning the 'needy' married woman teacher to life as an itinerant temporary teacher at the mercy of the Department. The irony was that this sometimes took place under' liberal' administrators renowned for their reformist policies. When married women teachers returned in considerable numbers during the Second World War, they were supported in their claim for reinstatement by women unionists in the Victorian Teachers' Union (VTU). In the 1950s married women temporary teachers, members of the VTU, took up the fight, forming the Temporary Teachers' Club (TTC) to press home their claims. The TTC's 'cooperative campaign' would eventually force the Department to pass the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act, repealing the marriage bar in 1956. The thesis takes gender as a central category of analysis and draws on recent perspectives in feminist history on women teachers' lives. Through case studies and interviews it explores the educational bureaucracy's reshaping of the teaching service in the Victorian Education Department