(I)
Recently, deconstructions around the notion of femininity have been revealing in determining the diversity of educational spaces. These spaces range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. For the historian, each of these avenues opens up considerable scope for new academic research. This new research could explore some of the associated historical contexts to examine the deeper question of the variable and shifting interplay of feminine identity and its challenges within different socio-cultural settings: particularly those occupied by educators and their students. Driven by systematic archival research, this approach can give rich and vivid insights about femininity. The approach can also provide the reader with interesting accounts of how these historical contexts shaped the agency of females and their identity. In doing this, new directions in feminist and gender history emerge that interrogate the dynamic nature of femininity. This is âfemininityâ as both a conceptual tool and as part of the personal projects of actors immersed in their respective historical contexts.
New research suggests âfemininityâ should not be seen as an analytical category by itself, but rather being mostly determined within the academic spaces created by the paradigms of race, feminism, gender and class. Much academic travel about femininity is authorised by this phenomenon. And, tantalisingly, the entanglement of feminine identity formation within these broader paradigmatic categories creates a fluidity that reveals different educational outcomes for those females who shared their respective learning spaces. Furthermore, there is also some perversity to notice as authors seek to engage with this shifting frame to better understand how the ideal of femininity was referenced by the practicalities of female agency. One such circumstance was when women negotiated rather than disregarded the constraints of their historical context by paradoxically continuing to enshrine a time-specific ideal of femininity, even when their later circumstances demanded that they move away from it.
Additionally, there are new academic horizons to consider. Historians of gender and feminism, in particular, are seeking alternatives to linear analysis and they are resisting disciplinary boundaries around their research. For example, Kathryn Gleadle, in her influential The Imagined Communities of Womenâs History, is responsive to the seeming slowing in progress of womenâs history in the last 15 years or so. She disagrees with this view. Instead she sees an active field, still, but one that now cuts across many traditional binaries of inquiry and occupies, rhizome-like, imaginative intellectual alliances with other disciplinary fields. These create unexpected theoretical juxtapositions and complicated chronologies, while maintaining womenâs historyâs edge in broader feminist politics.1 In another direction, Mia Liinason and Claire Meijer argue that the mythology of homogeneous societies obscures the marginalisation of women of colour, as well as migrants and other ethnic minorities of women, where the historicity of their femininity reveals deep roots of gender-based oppression.2 It is within these shifting intellectual frames, and others like them, that new research locates its analysis around femininity using a diverse range of historical contexts through which interesting individual and collective personal stories are told.
(II)
The book is also sensitive to the important relational aspects of key areas of research that distinctively associate broader academic traditions with the dominant paradigms of feminism, gender, race and class. This sensitivity is important because these traditions have a direct impact on academic constructions of femininity within educational settings and contextualise femininity in quite different ways.
For example, in the colonial world, feminism was generally internal to the colonial project, as shown by Antoinette Burton. She asserts that feminist writers, in fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, created images of needy women in the non-white empire mostly only to project their part in an imperial mission to their audiences âat homeâ in England.3 There is also a cross over between gender and feminism, peculiar to empire. For example, Claire Midgely argues, women involved in the anti-slavery movement not only located feminism within prevailing imperial ideologies but also gendered these ideologies.4 While Raewyn Connell, (largely taking the discussion outside the feminist discourse) sees colonial masculinity and femininity in highly relational sociological terms.5 Central to understanding the construction of femininity is the significance of its relation to the construction of masculinity and the consequent recognition of how power is dispersed, and gendered ideas disseminated, in formal and informal education settings within any society.6 How then do European hegemonic mentalities around femininity in the non-white colonial world play out, notwithstanding the more visible clash of cultures that is usually the dominant topic of postcolonial scrutiny?
On the other hand, in mostly white European contexts, the overarching category of feminism is dominant in the analysis in another way, where other national and cultural determinants are in play. For example, Rebecca Rodgers, drawing on the work of Jo Burr Margadant as well as that of Isabelle Ernot, makes the case for strongly contrasting academic traditions in the English-speaking world compared to those to be found in France. In the former domain, feminist biographies have flourished and been given new robustness by postmodern scholarship, while in France there has been less of a commitment to creating a âpantheon of foremothersâ.7 These variable legacies in feminist scholarship, then, naturally create a different set of academic lenses, within which âfemininityâ can be scrutinised.
In the USA the interplay of race and gender has a different historicity. Angel David Nievesâ work examines African American women educators in the nineteenth century who helped to memorialise the struggle of Black Americans. Using biography, Nieves examines how these educators contributed by combining social and political ideology as these related to racial uplift and gendered agency.8 Yet, mostly male-constructed paradigms of racial separateness and female respectability could also intervene to create newly marginalised and shifting spaces of feminine educational interaction.
Transnational enquiry is also significant in the pursuit of new research on this theme. This is where the likes of Joan Scottâs well-established framework of gender as a useful category of historical analysis is extended to embrace new theorisations that encapsulate the global transferral of some feminine mentalities.9 More deeply, opportunities arise where transnational perspectives bring to history of education, research that highlights analysis of connecting spatial and temporal educational frameworks.10 And as interest in transnational frameworks has also grown to include cultural and social histories, so the history of womenâs education has enriched the discussion and extended it to include changing conceptions of femininity. In this way Kay Whitehead has tracked the flow of ideas and individuals as women educators crossed and re-crossed borders between what was once seen as merely one-way travel between a putative centre and its peripheries.11 Furthermore, women, and their performance of femininity, becomes central to what Chris Bayly has identified as the production of nation as a result of transnational flows.12 At this macro history level, womenâs experience has frequently been seen as a marginal enterprise, and to counter this predilection, work such as that of Pierre Yves Saunier has identified the need to ârecover individuals, groups, concepts ⌠that have often been invisible or at best peripheral to historians because [these historians] have thrived in between, across and through polities and societiesâ.13 More sophisticated research into the changing nature of femininity within transnational flows of both formal and informal educational ideas is now possible.
(III)
There are more intimate spaces of inquiry that take the discussion into the personal domain of historical actors where their femininity is discernible by objects, visual representations and their surroundings: research that invites a different kind of abstraction and theorisation. For example, there are studies to consider around sensory perceptions in the classroom that define feminine sensibilities and form. Additionally, visual representations of school settings that assume feminine identity, engage scholarship that focusses upon who controls forums of image making and why such studies need to relate strongly to cultural history.14 Again, gendered spaces are in play here and the work of Ian Grosvenor and Catherine Burke feature prominently.15 This f...