Gender and Teachers: A Call for More Men and Its Historical Impact on Women Teachers

Abstract

This chapter focuses on gender and teachers – a topic whose historiography is complex and highly relevant to the theory and practice of education today. Specifically, historians of gender and education provide a necessary challenge to ahistorical calls for more men in teaching today. This chapter looks to how historians of education offer a challenge to contemporary masculinist discourses of teachers that are often rooted in the “failing boys” crisis. These discourses relate to historical debates about the causes and implications of the feminization of teaching both in religious and secular systems. In addition, historians of education, albeit to a more limited extent, trouble the concept of gender as binary and monolithic in shaping women teachers’ identities, by addressing the lives of racialized, Indigenous, and non-conforming individuals. This chapter provides a historiographical overview of gender and teachers by refocusing on the work of women as educators. We conclude that we need more literature on the history of the teaching profession that challenges the call for more men and diversifies the white, cis woman teacher.