Fit to teach: same‐sex desire, gender, and school work in the twentieth century, by Jackie M. Blount

Abstract

Gender and Education549 are likely to be crucial factors affecting the different routes that men and women take in care work including the rewards they seek and the compensation they receive. They insist that pathways into management need to become less gendered through the increased provision of professional training leading to positions that are appropriately financially rewarded and open to women at all stages in their life-course.The book offers an important critique of popular notions about 'work-life balance', a concept that implies that acquiring some balance between work and family life is manageable and that the responsibility and power to do so is vested in the individual worker. Driving home the point that work and family are rarely mutually exclusive domains, particularly for women, the findings offered here suggest that the conditions of work are likely the most important factors affecting the ways that people manage the work-family interface. Although the study finds some evidence of family-friendly provisions, interviews with managers highlight how multiple constraints and pressures often block their efforts to implement policies to support the family lives of front-line workers. A worrisome picture emerges as workers describe the particularly demanding and stressful nature of childcare work along with their futile attempts at leaving responsibilities and feelings behind at the end of a working day. Indeed for some, especially foster carers, the work day never ends. The authors conclude that the nature of childcare work demands more from policies and practices than merely the rhetoric of work-life balance. They call for greater recognition of this reality along with investments in necessary supports for workers.The overriding message to be taken from Coming to Care is that the child care workforce is largely made up of people who are strongly committed to working with vulnerable children and to helping improve their lives. Accounts of workers reveal high levels of enjoyment and satisfaction from the nature of the work, but also, more often than not, a level of dissatisfaction with at least some of the conditions under which the work is carried out. The results of the study outlined in this book underline how workforce reform in children's services must encompass expanded gender-sensitive training and supports along with appropriate financial rewards and improved working conditions in order to ensure a more stable workforce in the future. Fit to teach: same-sex desire, gender, and school work in the twentieth century, by Jackie M. Blount, New York, State University of New York Press, 2005, ix +229 pp., $22.95 (hardback), ISBN 0-7914-6267-6This book landed on my desk at a time when results from a large Swedish research project called Beneath the Surface were about to fade away from the public mind. At the same time new study material, directed to help homosexual, bisexual and transsexual pupils and teachers, distributed from the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education, was presented and discussed...

Seeing the Visibly Invisible: An Intersectional Analysis of the Employee Experiences of Black Female Rural Educators

“…When it comes to career progression, administration has historically and continues to remain a higher paying, male-dominated profession (Blount, 2005). Even with more experience on average, women are less likely to be promoted to the principalship (especially in higher paying grade levels), and if promoted, endure a longer wait in assistant principalship than their male peers (Bailes & Guthery, 2020).…”

De-storying Community Narratives: Unimagined Community in Queer Educators’ Small Stories

“…As Alexander and Rhodes (2012) advance, the queer imagination has been "impoverished" by dominant social narratives. For example, heteronormativity (Warner, 1993), or the normalized assumption that all people are heterosexual, invites unimagining of queer community and our stories from contexts of teaching and learning-this, of course, in addition to the physical removal of queer educators from classrooms, districts, and the profession (Blount, 2005;Graves, 2009). When queer community narratives do appear in educational context, they are often shaped by another dominant narrative, queer fatalism.…”

Lessons for a Rural Female Superintendent: Gender, Leadership, and Politics

“…After manumission and the last of the Great Plains Indian wars, there were yet more youth, freed slave and Native American children, in need of education primarily for assimilation or, sadly, extinction. It is a tragedy that respected gainful employment for some Euro-American, African American, and a few Native American women came at the expense of their silenced sisters and brothers (Adams, 1995;Blount, 1998;Peterson & Vaughn-Roberson, 1986;Vaughn-Roberson, 1993/2004. In any case, by 1920 only 15 % of the nation"s public school teachers were men (Vaughn & Liles, 1992).…”

“…This opened the door for Blanton, but her campaign was a bitter contest. Opponents accused her of atheism, and Blanton countered by exposing her male opponent"s close association with an impeached former governor (Vaughn-Roberson, 1993/2004. Following Young"s lead on the national educational front, Blanton was also elected vice-president of the NEA on three separate occasions.…”

“…After her second term, Blanton ran unsuccessfully for the United States Congress from Denton County. Leaving politics behind, the former school administrator earned a doctorate from Cornell University and then a professorial appointment at the University of Texas in 1927 (Vaughn-Roberson, 1993/2004.…”