Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives. Elizabeth M. Smyth and Paula Bourne, editors. Toronto: Inanna, 2006; illustrations; 236pp; ISBN 0-9736709-3-2; $24.95 (paper).
Despite the subtitle "Historical Perspectives," W omen Teaching, W omen Learning's historical focus is lim ited alm ost exclusively to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. The two exceptions are Marjorie Theobald's examination of the legal contexts for early twentieth-century Australian teachers and Inga Elgqvist-Salzm an's article on a nineteenth-century Swedish teacher. Even Susan Mann's article on nineteenth-century Canadian women who travelled to Europe focuses on how those women "harnessed travel to a domestic agenda" (179). Eventually, I developed an appreciation for the volume's tight historical focus, but still wish that the subtitle were more precise.
The volume's strength lies in the subtle persuasions of feminist social history m ethodologies. W hat often begins as the biography of one or two women builds, in essay after essay, to consider wider social and political implications of wom en's educational and employment opportunities in shifting ideological contexts, with a strong recurring argument for women's active roles in shaping those ideologies rather than simply working within them. This is particularly true of Rebecca Coulter's fine analysis of Donalda Dickie's role in curriculum developm ent.
I can't help but feel I have been charm ed, at least in part, by Alison Prentice, the educator and historian to whom this volume is dedicated and whose influence is evident throughout. Diane Hallman and Anna Lathrop take up Prentice's work most explicitly. They write, "Prentice held that the close examination of individual scholarly wom en shed light on com m onalities and

controversies in the relatively brief history of wom en in higher education and the professoriate" (45). Hallman and Lathrop turn Prentice's attention to women of "scholarly passion" to two more women, Irene Poelzer and Mary Hamilton, who took her educational projects outdoors. They conclude that the academy is but one site of scholarly engagement for women, and one that is always inform ed by institutional practices and contexts that may not be in the best interests of wom en. Alison Mackinnon's essay on the attitudes and opportunities of women who attended elite, wom en's colleges in the 1950s explores the historical and intellectual milieu that nurtured Prentice herself. Despite the decade's hackneyed reputation for conservatism, Mackinnon argues that the 1950s were also "the tim e when significant numbers of women first fully engaged in the changing and confusing struggle to be both intellectual beings and fem inine selves" (209).
There are a couple of issues that could have been pushed further. Coulter's fleeting analysis of Dickie's positive although "somewhat sentimental and anglicized" representation of Aboriginal peoples in her textbooks is likely worthy of a separate discussion (32). Moreover, some contributions are m arred by an unfortunate tendency to take wom en's words at face value. Mann, for example, insists that travelling women's diaries were "free of the exigencies of editor, publisher or even reader" (179). Diaries have not always been strictly "private" documents, nor have the boundaries between public and private been either im perm eable or ideologically neutral. Despite her rejection of post-modern and post-colonial "invasions" into women's travel writing, Mann's own analyses of travelling wom en who "m oved about quite com fortably within an empire, a class, a gender...[and] showed little inclination to explore, m uch less step beyond those confines... [because] they did not see them as confines" evinces Simon Gikandi's "complicity/resistance dialectic" articulated in Maps of Englishness.
Overall the volume's focus on larger ideological contexts, at work either at the

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individual and/or institutional level, makes this a valuable collection. In this regard, W endy Mitchinson's analysis of the impact of early twentieth-century medical views on women's educational possibilities and Harry Sm aller's analysis of women teachers' resistance to increasing state control stand out.
Rachel W arburton Lakehead University