The Short Tenure of a Woman Superintendent: A Clash of Gender and Politics

Abstract

This article reports the two-year tenure of a woman superintendent in a small southern city. Placed against the background of local community politics and school district politics it shows that women in the superintendency still face issues of gender stereotyping that influence the way they are perceived as leaders of school systems. A feminist poststructuralist framework is used to understand how the various subject positions available to women collide with the discourse of the superintendency. It is recommended that women leaders resist the images that have been traditionally reserved for them and begin to reinvent the superintendency on their own terms.