History Is Hers: Women Educators in Twentieth Century Ontario

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

What a tragic waste. Coulter and Harper report on a multi-year research
project involving seven researchers and numerous assistants, which
yielded 200 oral history transcripts of interviews with former teachers.
Yet we see very little of this material. Instead of a wealth of
authentic interviews, we’re given a very thin sprinkle of a few short
excerpts, awash in some of the most contorted analytical prose to ever
achieve the status of print.

The teachers interviewed are all retired; their teaching experiences
were in Ontario, in the period of approximately 1935 to 1980. The
researchers looked at them in the subcategories of single, married,
Aboriginal, francophone, and visible minorities, plus those involved in
school board administration or in teachers’ associations.

The work professes to “get to the ‘real story’ of [female]
teachers’ lives.” For the most part, the positives of the teaching
experience are bypassed, presumably as part of the authors’
“determination to avoid the trap of sentimentality.” The focus is on
the prejudices, lack of advancement, wage discrimination, and charges of
homosexuality and mental instability faced by female teachers of the
era.

The book needs professional editing to clean up the grammar and
punctuation and to work on the clarity of the content. Proofreading
would also help.