ABSTRACT

Sara Burstall was a pioneering headmistress, who ran a large girls’ school in Manchester for many years. In these few lines she sets out the basic tenets of the nineteenth-century feminist position on women and teaching: that it was a worthy and important job that deserved to be seen as a career and to be rewarded accordingly. In this chapter we outline the history of women’s entry to teaching in formal, well-organized schools, and provide a feminist analysis of the historical scholarship on women teachers. Our overall aim here is to consider the feminist legacy to teaching, by considering feminist pioneers and early feminist campaigns.