Women and Education: Major Themes ( co-edited with Jane Martin) is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions. Issues affecting women and education cannot be analysed in territorial isolation; while it is possible in many parts of the Western world to cite evidence of widening opportunities, choices, and potential in women’s lives, the gendered nature of educational provision, practice, and thought is often more starkly apparent in regions across the world. Consequently, the collection adopts an explicitly international approach to explore fully the complexities of the educational experience, its gendered history, and its particular implications and interpretations in specific societies and locations and across a broad temporal span. Women and Education also includes autobiographical works to capture the experience of education as a broad societal process, and not simply as formal schooling.
Volume one Space, Place, and Time is a theoretical and historical framework for the collection. Taken together, the materials gathered here constitute a toolbox of ideas for theory-building and research for researchers and students of feminist theory and research methods, and for users across the social sciences concerned with issues of gender. Volume two Pupils, Students, and Learning brings together key studies in gender and education. In particular, this volume explores past experiences through autobiography and life history, and investigates gender dynamics within schools. Volume three Teachers and Teaching, focuses on the culture and politics of work. It presents findings into processes and pedagogy and gathers critical research on women teachers’ expectations, their struggles to achieve equality, and attempts to change practice. The last volume in the collection Politics and Policies contains a selection of materials that discuss the history and gendered nature of education policies. Presenting a range of views, the work gathered in Volume IV illuminates women’s place in the development of educational traditions, reforms, and theories, and examines their role as educational policy-makers.
As a reference work, Women and Education has a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context.
Martin, Jane, and Joyce Goodman, eds. Women and Education: Major Themes (4 Volumes). London: Routledge, 2011.
