Corr, Helen

Helen Corr is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Strathclyde . She holds a Ph.D. in Economic and Social History from the University of Edinburgh.

Changes in Educational Policies in Britain, 1800-1920: How Gender Inequalities Reshaped the Teaching Profession

2009 0-7734-4913-2
Historically, education in Scotland lies at the heart of national pride and has been widely acclaimed as a more democratic and meritocratic system in terms of wider access to schools and universities when compared with England. One of the main paradoxes which this book unpacks is the that under the Scottish public co-education structure, schoolmasters did overall benefit more favorably within this distinctive tradition whereas the treatment of women teachers as an occupational group in relative terms was more ideologically undemocratic and patriarchal in relation to their female counterparts under the English system. This book sets out on a historical journey and embarks on the reconstruction of policy formation on gender and occupational segregation in the elementary (now called primary) school teaching and it shows that there was nothing ‘natural’ about that process.