Only Natural: A Feminist Perspective of the State's Attempts to Control Teachers and Their Resistance

• In Event: 60.021 - Doing Less With Less? Learning and Austerity

Abstract

It has been long observed that women teach and men administrate. Men’s dominance over women is so complete as to be hegemonic. Men assert their power over their children, and the women who bear, raise and teach them. The feminization of teaching was accepted by defining it as a natural extension of motherhood into the public sphere. This study uses a feminist lens to connect these “givens” to current events, specifically that the increasing control over teachers through the standardized curriculum and high stakes testing is part of the current “war on women”, a backlash led by religious and political conservatives. Next, it examines the feminized forms of resistance women teachers incorporate to maintain their agency within this masculinized hegemony.

Author

• H. Scottie Johnson, The University of Texas - Austin