Disappearing Tricks: The Loss of 19th-Century Women Theorists in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Educational Studies Research 30 Years After Jane Roland Martin’s “Excluding Women From the Educational Realm”

Abstract

We were pioneers, hewing our way through forests of established customs; climbing over mountain ranges of indifference . . . led on always by the vision of schools yet-to-be.
Elizabeth Harrison -1919


In her groundbreaking 1982 article "Excluding Women from the Educational Realm" Jane Roland Martin interrogated the absences and devaluation of works by and about women and traced the epistemological inequalities embedded within the field that have distorted our understanding of theory and practice in education. Drawing on the autobiographies and philosophical essays of 19th century women theorists in the early childhood education movement (Harrison, Hill, Peabody, Wheelock, Wiggin), this paper explores the consequences of their “disappearance” from mainstream educational discourse, even after the advent of “the new scholarship on women” that Martin’s article heralded for educational theorists. The paper assesses gendered epistemological inequalities that positioned 19th century women theorists on the borders of scholarly debate during their own era, consigning their work to the contemporary “dust” (Steedman, 2009) of neglected archives within our own. Recovering their arguments “for schools yet-to-be,” the author describes how their contributions might inform current debates on a culturally sensitive pedagogy.

Sources Cited

Arnot, Madelaine. (2008) Educating the Gendered Citizen, London: Routledge.
Beatty, Barbara. (1995.) Preschool in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cowen, Robert (2002) Moments of time: a comparative note, History of Education 31 (5), 413-424.
Harrison, Elizabeth. (1930) Sketches Alone Life’s Roads, Boston: Stratford.
Hill, Patty Smith, ed. 1915. Experimental Studies in Kindergarten Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Howe, Florence. (2002) The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony From Thirty Founding Mothers, New York: Feminist Press.
Martin, Jane Roland. (1992) The Schoolhome. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Martin, Jane Roland. (2002) Cultural Miseducation: In Search of a Democratic Solution, New York: Teachers College Press.
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer and Mary Tyler Mann. (1863) Guide to the Kindergarten and Moral Culture of Infancy. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham.
Polkinghorne, Donald E. (1987) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. NewYork: Dutton.
Shapiro, Michael Steven. (1983) Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey. London: Pennsylvanian State University Press.
Steedman, Carolyn Kaye. (2009) Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Encounters.
Weber, Evelyn. 1969. The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wheelock, Lucy and Elizabeth Colsom. (1920) Talks to Mothers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company.
Wiggin, Kate Douglas. (1892) Children’s Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company.

Author

• Susan Douglas Franzosa, Fairfield University