Drawing on historical data, Jackie Blount argues in this article that explanations for shifts in employment patterns of women educators for most of the twentieth century have overlooked the impact of homophobia and gender role stereotypes. As Blount notes, although women teachers, more than half of whom were single, outnumbered men by more than two to one in the early 1900's, this trend shifted radically in the fifteen years following World War II, when the percentage of single women in the teaching profession fell to half its pre-war levels. Similarly, the number of women superintendents also declined rapidly. Blount analyzes school policies and practices, events, and publications from the turn of the century to the 1970s to uncover the practice of sexually stigmatizing women who defied narrowly defined gender roles. She describes events and theories that led to increasing gender role polarization after World War II that pressured women into assuming gender-specific roles, attitudes, and appearances, and that led to increasing gender role polarization after World War II that led to campaigns to identify and dismiss those in schools who were thought to be homosexual. Blount cautions that homophobia continues to hold sex discrimination practices in place, particularly those connected with women seeking power in schools. She concludes with the thought that until gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender educators are valued in public education, the powerful forces that maintain gender role barriers are unlikely to be erased.
From the beginning, sexuality has been an important defining consideration in school administration. This article explores the history of the three ways in which sexuality has been a central force in shaping school administration. First, administrative work, in conjunction with teaching, paralleled the roles of men and women respectively in traditional married households. Second, over much of the past century, school administrators have been required to demonstrate notably masculine qualities, including married status, as their existence in a profession of women repeatedly has been questioned. Finally, over the past half century, school administrators also have been pressed to cleanse from the ranks of school workers those persons with nonmainstream sexualities and/or unconventional gender characteristics, which have been regarded as evidence of homosexuality.
Over the past two centuries, school employment in the United States generally has been divided into gender-identified roles. In spite of this stark division, however, many men and women have transgressed their acceptable gendered places in schoolwork. At times, these gender transgressors-including male teachers of young children, women superintendents, spinsters, and more recently, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender educators-have faced severe sanctions as individuals, institutions, and the broader society have labored to maintain strict gender boundaries around them. This article offers an historical analysis of how fear of homosexuality emerged among educators and the public, and further how homophobia has perpetuated rigid gender-identified roles in school employment.
This article examines 20th-century longitudinal data on the American superintendency's composition by sex. The authors analyze and discuss those data in the light of occupational sex segregation theory to illuminate complexities associated with women's inroads into historically male work. The authors' overarching purpose is to deepen understanding of the contemporary superintendency by building on historical and feminist scholarship, situating findings in their social contexts, and considering possibilities for the future.
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