The paper explores the lived experience of marginalisation and the quest for meaningful participation in the social worlds of home, school and church on the part of six women primary teachers.  The work is underpinned by a theoretical framework which brings together understandings of power as hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense), of gender as ‘performance’ (BUTLER, 1990) and of the body as socially constructed (CONNELL, 1995).  Use is also made of the Foucaultian concept of ‘discourse’ which I employ as a body of language-use that is unified by common assumptions, the implicit nature of which renders them powerful.

In each area of their lived experience, participants drew on discourses that constructed the roles which they played as ‘natural’ for them as women.  These constructions, built around concepts of motherhood, child-centred pedagogies, and the ideology of separate spheres, seemed to draw on essentialised understandings of gender that rendered inevitable and unchallengeable their locations in spaces of relative powerlessness and invisibility.  Tensions arose between various constructions of faith as ‘private’, as cultural and as ‘real’ and the women deployed various strategies to negotiate positions in which they felt comfortable, and to demark boundaries which served to protect and legitimise the system of meanings through which their own faith tradition was produced.

The discursive practices at play led women to produce themselves, and their bodies, in particular ways: ways encoded as ‘nurturing facilitator’, as ‘woman’ and as ‘Christian woman’.  Discourses of child-centredness in primary education, such as those re-emerging across Europe and beyond, depend on the location of social actors within bodies, and serve to re-establish the equation of woman with the body. Thus women tended to minimise their bodily visibility in both school and church, as if the very materiality of their bodies was problematic or transgressive.  These productions, in turn, led to certain constraints and limitations for women.  These included the de-legitimising of paid work, an eschewing of academic or professional aspiration as teachers, and a distancing from active participation in the decision-making apparatuses of church and school.  Further, they led woman to construct as illegitimate any investment in the self, or any inclination to seek power or ‘place’ (such as might be offered in and through Feminism).  Thus silence and invisibility were produced as normative for women.

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