Nobody’s sweetheart: the story of a mid century rural New Brunswick woman teacher
Date
2011-04-06T21:22:39Z
Authors
MacDonald, Gracie Ina
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Abstract
Rural women teachers have been cast in the popular and academic press as either passive victims or heroines struggling against adversity meted out by cruel trustees, indifferent parents, stern inspectors and primitive living conditions. More recent tropes generalize about women's oppression and teacher's role in maintaining the status quo. Such narratives reinforce dominant ideologies about women's work and place in society. Women's experiences, as told in their oral histories, are in fact much more complex and nuanced than such stereotypes. Using oral history and primary documents, this is the story of rural woman teacher who started her career in a one-room school in rural New Brunswick in the late 1950s and retired as an administrator in Montreal. Here is revealed a woman whose destiny was formed by her own strengths and weaknesses as much as by circumstance, a teacher who turned ‘women's work’ into an emancipatory career.
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Rural Women Teachers, Oral history