Starting from the idea that gender differences are bounded to social and cultural factors (Francis & Skelton, 2001), that ‘gender’ cannot be understood as ‘being’ or as a coherent essential entity, but as ‘becoming’/‘doing’ (Butler, 1990), as an ambivalent construction (Essed, Goldberg & Kobayashi, 2005), we would like to see schooling as a social institution contributing to identification of youngsters with their allocated gender. Teaching programs, educational tools, school organisation, punishment and reward all hide a certain portrayal of man and society; a social system of meanings wherein youngsters are introduced by means of diverse ‘designs for learning’. Appreciations regarding man and society, implicitly or explicitly reflected in the ‘materialities of schooling’ (Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005), enforce rules and boundaries inspired on or extracted from historical defined values and norms. This ‘historical contingency’ of the school mentality undoubtedly marks the application of educational tools. By analysing a specific educational tool – the documentary film – I propose a reconstruction from a part of educational reality, namely from ‘departed’ educational ideals concerning gender patterns in the context of 1960s secondary girl’s education.

In visual representations men and women are ascribed consciously or unconsciously with different feelings, qualities and behaviours. The establishment of a certain image has everything to do with the synthesis people create or have in their heads about ‘what’ in this occasion ‘women’ and ‘men’ ‘are’, want and can do. Images and representations are not neutral, they produce meanings, relations and a social reality; they are the bearers of a ‘figurative regime of meanings’ (De Mulder, 1999). The documentary film bears the marks of particular cultural views and ideals about men and women and influences youngsters’ perception. With that, the documentary film is an impressive example of the ‘educationalisation’ of society (Depaepe, 2005) and the analysis of (re)presentations of men and women gets interesting because the ‘educationalisation process’ kept on prescribing a rather compelling and stereotype role for women – a remainder from the ‘offensive of civilization’ in the nineteenth century, allocating men and women with clearly distinguished tasks. The often postulated premise about the ‘second feminist wave’, affecting the traditional image of the ‘woman-mother’, and offering new (educational) possibilities for girls, appears to grasp only a part of educational reality. Emancipation, educational opportunities,… They seem spectacular shifts. But, are they reflected in the portrayal of men and women in documentary film? Setting the tone for a whole new idea of ‘womanhood’? Or is reality way more complex? Proceeding from these questions, we want to analyse if and how documentary film contributed to a particular construction of the ‘female student’ and a specific interpretation of ‘womanhood’ (Bloch & Popkewitz, 2000) in Flanders, or in other words to a ‘regulative ideal’ or ‘regime’ (Foucault, 1989) concerning ‘women’. How does a specified ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’ regarding ‘womanhood’ express itself in the application of documentary films?

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