‘Their Market Value Must be Greater for the Experience they Had Gained'

In November 1914 Annie Watt Whitelaw, Headmistress of Wycombe Abbey School, chaired a meeting in London of the Overseas Committee of the Association of Head Mistresses (AHM). She was one of five headmistresses assembled that day who had worked abroad. Also present to meet with members of the committee was Miss Irving, head of Lauriston Girls School, Melbourne. ¹ The gathering of women illustrated the geographical mobility that had begun to characterise the careers of a growing number of highly educated women teachers by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.