Conference Program

This contribution is dedicated to one of the most problematic issues in the long and arduous journey towards gender equality: the difficult relationship between women and education. In particular, it analyses female education and the teaching profession between the 19th and 20th centuries. For a long time, girls’ entry into education was a complex and ambiguous process. Although legislation provided for equality between girls and boys, compulsory education was often evaded, penalising girls more, who were useful in the domestic economy and perceived as future housewives. The teaching profession was an almost unattainable goal for young women aspiring to become teachers, who were considered more suited to lower-level female education and, even with the same qualifications, location and teaching class, received a lower salary than male teachers, which was even lower if they taught in rural schools. It has also been noted that female teachers often, if not always, became the subject of prejudice and heavy social control, especially when they found themselves working in small rural or mountain villages. Women’s work in education was a slow path to emancipation, and even in the 1950s, discrimination and wage disparities between men and women were still present in the world of education, which would only be overcome at the end of the 20th century. In this regard, we have chosen to propose a historical-pedagogical reading of All for Love of Teaching as a significant testimony to these gender issues. Through the biographical story of Giuseppa/Josephine, from post-unification Sicily to 20th-century America, the book intertwines individual and collective history, providing an insight into the condition of women and the teaching profession between the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the text highlights the persistent structural inequalities that permeate the teaching profession: wage disparities, contractual precariousness, moral control, and the prohibition of marriage for teachers. The teacher thus emerges as an ambivalent figure: invested with a central public function in the education of citizens, but at the same time limited by legal and cultural constraints that reduce her full citizenship. Over the long period spanning almost a century, Josephine’s story shows how teaching can be a practice of resistance and democratic responsibility. School becomes a place for literacy, social advancement and the development of civic awareness, but also a space of tension with regard to contemporary cultural changes. The volume thus allows us to reinterpret women’s educational work as a crossroads between emancipation, professionalism and commitment to inclusive democracy.