In recent years historians have been interrogating twentieth century women teachers’ work  in a variety of contexts. History is Hers is based on interviews with Canadian women teachers, for example, and Weiler’s study of women teachers in rural California uses a combination of oral histories, memoirs and documents generated during the era in which they taught. Likewise, Cunningham and Gardner’s study of British teachers draws on teachers’ recollections as well as official documents. This paper focuses on the lives and work of women who trained as teachers at Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) in England between 1917 and 1947, that is during the tenure of its foundation principal, Lillian de Lissa.

Using a feminist framework, the main objective of the paper is to explore what teaching meant to women teachers and how it shaped their lives, whether or not they remained in paid work.

The paper begins with a discussion of Gipsy Hill’s teacher education program in the interwar years. Sponsored by influential New Idealists, GHTC was established to prepare teachers who would reform the educational system. Its specific focus was nursery and infant education but graduates were encouraged ‘think internationally’ and work for educational and social transformation. The following sections focus on the experiences of beginning teachers and then their lives and work at different stages of their life cycle. Although trained as nursery and infant teachers, GHTC graduates taught in a variety of schools in England and Wales. Most married but that did not necessarily end their careers; some transferred their skills into other occupations and others ‘carried Gipsy Hill to the ends of the earth’. Gipsy Hill graduates were thus participants in the circulation of people and ideas between European and non-European countries as well as around the British Empire in the interwar years.

P. Cunningham and P. Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies 1907-1950 (London: Woburn Press 2004). R. Coulter and H. Harper, eds. History is Hers: Women Educators in Twentieth Century Ontario (Calgary: Detselig, 2005). K. Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). K. Whitehead ‘A “break with tradition” in interwar teacher education’, Gender and Education, 22/3, pp. 279-294. K. Whitehead, ‘Transnational connections in early twentieth century women teachers’ work’ Paedagogica Historica (forthcoming 2012).