Abstract
Feminism has multiple definitions and even more manifestations, but many women working in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century for the development of early childhood education in Australia were undeniably feminists, part of what has been called the “first wave of feminism” (Krolokke and Sorenson 2006). This chapter looks at the views and activities of some of these women who were prominent in the establishment of kindergartens in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. Whilst active in the women’s suffrage movements, they also advocated innovative views of education which were only just being explored in Britain and the USA. Examining their views on education give an insight into the kind of feminism they represented. Debates on women’s suffrage were relatively straightforward and indeed women’s suffrage was established remarkably early in Australia. Debates in the field of early childhood at the time, though cutting edge in terms of educational theory, were more complex in practice. The debates were often about philosophies of education, control of educational institutions, and the necessity or otherwise for training early childhood teachers and the kind of character appropriate to such teachers. One writer has argued that these debates “exemplified the issues that fractured the field of early childhood education for most of the twentieth century” (Whitehead 2010, p. 87). The fractures manifest themselves in the “second wave of feminism” in the 1970s where childcare provision was a major concern. Bitter disputes on the value of childcare between different sections of the early childhood field meant that during this second wave of feminism there was no strong united voice for feminism from the early childhood field.
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- 1.
The history of Australian indigenous women suffrage is complex. The Australian constitution of 1902 gave the vote to all women who already had the vote in their state. This included only indigenous women in South Australia and Western Australia. It was not until the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act of 1983 that indigenous people in Australia were formally recognized for voting purposes on the same bases as non-indigenous (Norberry and Williams 2002).
- 2.
There is an interesting echo of this in the later period of feminism where primary school teachers complained that child care graduates were hard to manage (see Seyfort 2007).
- 3.
Feminist socialist who were followers of Robert Owen (see Taylor 1991).
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Coady, M.M. (2017). Feminism and the Development of Early Childhood Education in Australia. In: Smith, K., Alexander, K., Campbell, S. (eds) Feminism(s) in Early Childhood. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 4. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3057-4_2
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