ABSTRACT
In the inter-war period, more students were going to (and staying in) school and parents were turning over a good deal of the mentally and morally formative years of their offspring to teachers. As the Depression wore on and another world war loomed, the promise and future of the youth seemed especially important. As a result, the physical and psychological fitness of teachers as role models for their students became a source of scrutiny and panic. My chapter looks at how the concern about teachers’ suitability, which was a near national obsession, played itself out in plays. Christa Winsloe’s Girls in Uniform (1932), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1935) and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), among several others, reflected anxieties about the potential moral corruption posed by lesbian, gay and/or sexually voracious teachers. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2006), which variously inverts, teases and re-inscribes the historical depiction of unfit teachers more than half a century after the unfit-teacher panics.
