Jobs for the Girls: Family Ideology and the Employment of Women in Education

While it is apparent that teaching is, and has been since the development of mass schooling, a feminized occupation, it has never been a profession in which women have had equal representation or dominance at administrative level. The argument developed in this paper is that women's positions in the teaching profession are intimately related to their familial roles as articulated by the ideology of the family. This has a series of implications, but the paramount which is focused on here is that of control. First, the maintenance of capitalist social relations through the socialization, control, and categorization of the young in schools is a legitimate extension of the ideological perceptions for women's familial role. Second, teaching is a marginal occupation, in that it is located in the middle sectors of capitalist formations (White, 1983a p. 45). The presence of large numbers of women and the accompanying ideology of the family segment the occupation and reduce its potential for collective mobilization. The growth of teaching as an occupation may therefore be seen as an example of the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy.