Stephanie Spencer

A Uniform Identity: Schoolgirl Snapshots and the Spoken Visual

This article discusses the possibility for expanding our understanding of the visual to include the ‘spoken visual’ within oral history analysis. It suggests that adding a further reading, that of the visualized body, to the voice‐centred relational method we can consider the meaning of the uniformed body for the individual. It uses as a case‐study reflections on a photograph taken of a group of girls on a school outing and their adult interpretation of the meaning of the modifications to their school uniform. Extracts from oral history interviews with girls who left school in South London in the late 1950s are also used to demonstrate the frequency with which respondents refer to how they looked in order to express in more detail how they felt.

Reflections on the ‘site of struggle’: girls' experience of secondary education in the late 1950s

Brian Simon used the phrase ‘site of struggle’ to describe the class-based inequalities that were played out in the provisions for English compulsory education. In the nineteenth century, the growth of the state system for the working class alongside the predominantly middle-class independent sector simply confirmed existing class hierarchies with social mobility through secondary education only available to a select few. The 1944 Education Act abolished fees in all state-aided secondary schools in twentieth-century England and Wales but this did not mean that all pupils now received what had previously been described as secondary education. Indeed, for working-class girls and boys growing up in the 1950s, the experience of secondary education seems to have been aeons away from the ideals generated by the rhetoric of building a better future after the problems of wartime. Writing of education in Britain in the postwar period, Ken Jones has identified a longstanding conflict between the elitism endemic in British political and social life and any attempt to provide undifferentiated education spaces. ‘For most students, and most teachers, schooling was about the basics of literacy, numeracy and socialisation. It was endured without enthusiasm; it was a place riddled with teacher–student antagonisms; it was something if not ... to be run away from, then at least to be left quickly behind’. More than 40 years on, the 1988 Education Act heralded league tables, Standard Assessment Tests and a National Curriculum designed to offer equality of opportunity to all children yet Simon also noted that the changes were as much about political differences as increasing the quality of educational provision. Conservative plans within the 1988 Act, he argued, were intended to ‘develop a competitive hierarchic structure of schooling through establishment of a market system in education, and to strengthen the privatisation of the system’ Yet the experience of those who are most directly affected by changing policy is difficult to access. There is no place for children’s voices to be heard and adults’ memories of school days are often relegated to the first few introductory pages of biographical narratives. Those leaving school in the 1950s were the first cohort to do so after the passing of the 1944 Education Act under the influence of wartime radicalism. This article considers what we might learn from the memories of a small self-selected sample of women who left school in London between 1956 and 1960. I discuss how oral history is part of a methodology particularly suitable for research in the history of education. While the interviews can in no way claim to be representative of all school leavers at this time, I use them as an

Educational administration, history and ‘gender as a useful category of historical analysis’

Nearly 25 years ago Joan Scott reviewed the progress of historical analysis that foregrounded gender as an analytical category. Her article in The American Historical Review has become one of the landmark expressions of the state of the field. While historical approaches utilising gender frameworks have become quite commonplace, this issue of Journal of Educational Administration and History demonstrates that the gender debate is by no means over. Indeed in specialised areas of historical research the precise challenge that Scott laid down for historians to identify the power structures embedded within narratives of the past becomes all the more pressing. The papers in this issue highlight the vibrant nature of an approach which allows us to cross disciplinary boundaries as we enhance our appreciation of the impact of education in its broadest sense.

No “fear of flying”? Worrals of the WAAF, fiction, and girls’ informal wartime education

Abstract This article focuses on the series of 11 books about a young female pilot, Worrals of the WAAF, by W.E. Johns, creator of Biggles. The Worrals books were published from 1941 when recruitment for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was falling. Johns chose to ignore that the WAAF supported pilots through their work on the ground and did not themselves fly. The article discusses how historians of education can draw on fiction in order to identify aspects of informal education, especially during wartime, when so many children’s formal schooling was disrupted or non-existent. Drawing on Erica Jong’s 1970s metaphor of “flying” as representative of female freedom, it is possible to read Worrals’ character as a role model for teenage girls. The conundrum of why Johns chose to put Worrals in the WAAF, rather than in Air Transport with the likes of Amy Johnson, is further explored in the light of evidence that a number of WAAF were seconded to the SOE. It concludes that fiction read alongside a range of other evidence offers a rich source for the historian engaged in a search for the gendered nature of education beyond the classroom.

Girls at risk. Early school‐leaving and early marriage in the 1950s

Britain in the 1950s offered increased opportunities for secondary education leading to better career prospects at a time of full employment. A government report into early leaving in 1954 noted that it was girls of all social classes who were most ‘at risk’ of not staying the course. The following article discusses first the nature of risk and suggests that for girls perhaps, staying at school and delaying marriage, at a time when unequal pay and opportunities were the norm, was perceived as more of a risk than the safety of marriage and dependent domesticity. It then considers the concerns of the Early Leaving Report in more detail. Despite the attempts by policy makers to encourage girls into education, there were rival discourses which persuaded girls into domesticity and the article concludes by indicating the varied and pervasive nature of some of this rhetoric.

Revisioning the History of Girls and Women in Britain in the Long 1950s

This Special Issue of Women’s History Review challenges popular assumptions about girls and women in the 1950s, and about the 1950s as the quiet patch when women returned to the home and domestic duty before the ‘problem that had no name’ emerged and led to the excitement of the 1960s. But the volume goes further than this. The articles offer fresh approaches that reshuffle conventional categories and lead to the revisioning of both the lived experience of girls and women in this period, and the way that their story has been told, extending and enriching the terrain of women’s history. Tackling boundaries is key to this revisioning. Contributors expose, challenge, work across and explore the boundaries and divisions/binaries that characterise post-war histories that overlook, or underestimate, women’s changing relationship to both home and employment. Periodisation is the most obvious example, as decade boundaries are dismissed in favour of a longer-term perspective. Addressing ‘the long 1950s’, the articles bring into focus the immediate post-war period as a time when new trends were developed and/or established and they engage with questions about the short-term impact of the war and about what comes next. The reach of this collection also defies simple boundary lines. While the volume is principally about Britain, we recognise the fluidity of national borders and the importance of transnational mobilities and encounters for understanding women’s lives. Interrogating interfaces, transitions, liminal spaces and border crossings, this Special Issue offers fresh perspectives on the history of girls and women. A review of developments in theorising women’s history has been a regular feature of this journal. In 2006 Sue Morgan highlighted the changes that had occurred over the previous thirty years, noting the ‘shifts and turning points’ that had characterised our research. She reminded readers that ‘feminist history must continue to attend to its own need for reinvention and transformation and retain its fundamentally subversive stance through the perpetual interrogation of dominant historical concepts and categories’. In the seminar series that generated this Special Issue we took up that challenge and the articles here represent a range of content and methodology that confirms that feminist history is alive and well. Only two years ago Kathryn Gleadle explored the possibilities of the rhizomatic approach to conceptualising the different directions that are available to women’s historians today. The articles in this collection can also be read through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic lens and, as Gleadle suggested, present ‘multiple opportunities

Cosmopolitan Sociability in the British and International Federations of University Women, 1945–1960

ABSTRACT The article highlights the significance of sociability in the activities of the British and International Federations of University Women in the long 1950s. Much of the activity centred on Crosby Hall, the ‘International Clubhouse’ in London for overseas and British graduate women. Ideas of cosmopolitanism and sociability can be traced back to the Enlightenment. The article draws on Glick Schiller et al.s discussion of cosmopolitan sociability in a transnational age, and suggests that a gendered and historical perspective highlights the significance of events which might appear somewhat marginal compared with more formal political activities. Both Noah Sobe and Thomas Popkewitz have recently highlighted the exclusionary, as well as the inclusive, possibilities of cosmopolitanism. The nature, preparation and importance placed on social events in local, national and international networks demonstrates the centrality of the social in promoting the successful outcome of the more formal activities of the Federations on the public stage.

Imagining a future, living in the present and remembering the past

ABSTRACT The remit for this short piece was to identify themes emerging from the articles in this edition by Julie McLeod, Duncan Waite and Eugenie Samier, to consider how these themes reflect on the current field, and to identify their ongoing relevance. Additionally, I was asked to consider the current challenges that the field is facing and what this means for research and journals such as this one. My short response is that our research has to matter. It has to matter to us as individuals so that what we do is worthwhile; it has to matter that we can provide rigorous research that is reliable so that it can inform policy makers and administrators; and it has to provide teachers and students with a greater understanding of why they are doing what they are being asked to do.

Women's University Fiction, 1880–1945ANNA BOGEN

Regional branches or groups were diverse in voluntary organisations and frequently at odds with their leadership, who found them remarkably hard to keep in line; this is an area worthy of further research. Within the Women’s Institutes, for example, some ordinary members were more radical than their leadership, others less so. Ordinary members were often more focused on the social value of such organisations or on local politics, which had a more immediate influence on making their everyday lives more bearable. This important book will, I hope, further stimulate the growing field of research on twentieth-century women’s organisations. One area worthy of attention is, for example, the interactions, overlaps, contradictions and tensions between these five organisations and those parts of the women’s movement which have been categorised as more radical, such as the suffrage campaigns, the trade union movement or the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Such research will hopefully further enliven debates about whether there really was a meaningful differentiation between the women’s movement and feminism in the twentieth century.

Rulers, rebels and reformers: transnational, religious and gendered perspectives in the history of education

The 2012 History of Education Society Conference was held at the Winchester Hotel, Winchester between 30 November and 2 December. It was organised by a team from the Centre for the History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester. The theme of the conference was Rulers, Rebels and Reformers, each in their own way central to understanding drivers for change in formal and informal education. Over the three days some 100 delegates were in attendance. They came not only from the United Kingdom and several other European countries but also from Australia, Brazil, India, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, Taiwan and the United States of America. A keynote address was a central feature each day and over the course of the conference a further 65 papers were delivered. The now familiar postgraduate session saw a further eight presentations from postgraduate student delegates. For the first time, a poster session was included on the Saturday during a pre-dinner drinks reception: eight posters were displayed with the designers on hand to answer questions. To give a flavour of the conference, six papers, selected from a large number submitted for consideration, are included in this special issue. Most appropriately the issue opens with the plenary lecture by Dame Janet (Jinty) Nelson: appropriate not only because it was the opening plenary but also because it takes as its subject King Alfred of Wessex, whose association with Winchester as his capital is well known. His name lived on for many years in the former name of the city’s university. The last paper in the issue is the closing plenary by Sian Roberts. Within these six papers three themes, the transnational, religion and gender, emerge that highlight some of the exciting developments in scholarship over the tenure of editorship that finishes with this edition of the journal. Each of these themes also intersects with shifting views of the role of citizenship education. The diversity of topics and the span of years covered by the papers illustrate how overarching theoretical frameworks highlight the role that education plays in bringing about change. In the following discussion we offer some brief reflection on the articles selected for this issue and their contribution to current debates within the history of education. The editorial in 2009, for the joint edition with the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society, identified the significance of transnational flows