School work Book

Definitely worth reading as a partial view of the whole. This book identifies patterns in relating in one school between teachers (mostly the teachers were women and this was a study only of female teachers) it also grounds it in diaries of earlier women teachers and fiction about women teachers. To keep it manageable with that many different sources the author has kept to a small sample size with each type of source and has looked at each in much detail.

This means she has found lots of interesting material and she has sort of connected it together in themes such as professionalism, resistance and also various different ways of negotiating the career vs family unsolvable question. There's a lot of nuance and complexity (for example travelling signifies freedom for many women, but for some freedom would mean not having to leave home) and an acknowledgement of inevitable gaps.

I found the connections between different types of materials investigated to be a bit under-developed...or maybe it is just that I am a bit dense at the moment and needed more connections between them and also more of each. That said I don't want to give a book few stars just because for once someone was brief and didn't go on and on and on!

I liked it, I am glad I read it and I think it was research worth doing.