By Celia Burgess-Macey
PART 3: Sexist Stereotyping in Books and Resources
During the 1970s and 1980s across the country, groups looked at sexism in classrooms and in the resources being used. Many wrote about their classrooms and teaching.
In 1982 The English Magazine (self-financed but supported and published by ILEA) a periodical for secondary school English teachers edited by Mike Raleigh and Michael Simons from ILEA’s English Centre was published. It devoted issue number 9 to the issue of Gender and Writing.
In London, ILEA’s Centre for Language in Primary Education (CLPE) actively promoted anti-sexist resources and articles by practising teachers on strategies and resources for the classroom. Their journal Language Matters, 1986 no 1 (in my personal archive) was entitled ‘Language and Gender’ and looked at the issue in the primary school. Issue 1995/6 No 3 contained my article on girls and writing entitled “I write Stories – I keep them in my perfume box.” In it, I summarised my dissertation detailing my classroom-based research on girls and how their creative writing in primary classrooms is affected by their gender.
All these magazines were written by practising classroom teachers and that really matters. Nationally there was the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) which held yearly conferences and also had their primary section. They produced NATE journal. Teachers wrote for their journal including on sexism and racism in books and critiques of children’s literature including popular authors such as Roald Dahl. His book The Witches had come in for strong criticism from feminists such as Catherine Itzin who wrote in the TES, December 1985, an article called ‘Bewitching the Boys’. She argued that women-hating is at the heart of Dahl’s writing and that this misogynistic text should never have been published.
In 1980 the radical publishing cooperative ‘Writers and Readers’ produced an edited collection of articles called Racism and Sexism in Children’s Books. This contained excellent critiques of the classics and some more modern classics. Marion Glastonbury writing in the New Statesman in November 1980, made stinging critiques of the patriarchal attitudes, both racist and sexist, faithfully transmitted to the younger generation in many of the classics (in my personal archive). Also, groups of feminists around the country were rewriting traditional fairy stories; an example was the Fairy Story Group in Liverpool who rewrote Little Red Riding Hood. (copies of stories in my personal archive).
There were also an increasing number of children’s books arriving from the United States inspired by the women’s movement there. London feminist bookshops like Sisterwrite as well as ones with strong feminist input like Centerprise community bookshop and Black Community bookshops like Sabarr and New Beacon, were all in existence and at these I could obtain the books I wanted. My well used collection of anti-sexist children’s books from this period was donated to the Feminist Library where I assume it remains.
Back in my classroom, sometime in the late 1970s myself and my colleague, Stef Blatton, had persuaded Princess May Infant School, to introduce the ‘Breakthrough to Literacy’ reading scheme, which claimed to be progressive and to take into account the actual language that children used and to base content on the lives of ordinary working-class children. So far so good. However, as I used this scheme day to day, I became more and more aware that the illustrations which appeared on every page of every book were incredibly sexist. Mother is always depicted with the accompanying apron designating her housewife status and dads all went off to work outside the home. The games the children were playing were stereotyped with trains, football and bikes for boys and dolls and skipping for girls. Caring roles were not equally distributed with mum being shown, putting children to bed and cooking all the meals et cetera et cetera.
I decided to analyse the whole of the scheme and to quantify the ways in which sex stereotyping was being reinforced. I have used this analysing books activity with school staff, pupils, and with teacher training students who are always surprised by the results. I was very angered and excited by the results, so I decided to write them up for a radical London teaching journal called Teaching London Kids (TLK). Breakthrough to Sexism was my first piece of published writing. (personal archive) I sent the article to Longmans, which was the publisher of the reading scheme but did not get a response! I was also invited to write up this work for the Schools Council Sex Differentiation in the primary classroom project, headed by my former colleague Gaby Weiner!
In my work outside the classroom, I continued to develop feminist approaches. When I became a tutor at the Centre for Urban Educational Studies (CUES), I ran a course in the community division. Teachers were released for one day, a week on full pay for a whole year which is unthinkable in today’s world. The course looked at issues arising in modern multicultural, multilingual, urban classrooms and how best to adapt teaching to this new context. An important aspect of the course was the projects that teachers undertook in the classrooms. I visited all the schools regularly to observe and evaluate. The teaching input on the course focused on counteracting racism and sexism and promoting equal opportunities. I still have some of the project materials including Anti-sexist alphabet by Mara Chrystie’s children at Harrington Hill primary school, which went on to be published by Centerprise books. Another project involved children writing their own version of anti-sexist stories and produced books like ‘Girls can play Football’ by the girls in a school close to Arsenal football ground. (50 years later we are only just winning this debate!!!) And in 1981 a group of teachers used their experience of the course to write a booklet ‘Anti-sexist Teaching Strategies in the Primary School’ which was later published by the Centre for Urban Educational studies (CUES).
When I left CUES, I received an Associateship at the IOE Centre for Multicultural Education headed by Dr Jagdish Gundara. There were four teacher research fellows, all funded by ILEA. My research topic was ‘The implementation of the ILEA’s anti-sexist and anti-racist teaching strategies in primary schools’, and at the end of the year, I wrote a research report for ILEA, a copy of which is also in Institute of Education (now incorporated into UCL) archives. I worked alongside teachers who had previously attended the course at CUES and some of this work, such as the project on Bikes, is also on the HOWL website.
In other work children looked at Black women in history and 10-year-old children working singly, in pairs or in groups collaborated to write biographies of Harriet Tubman, the leader of the Underground Railway. Kathleen Wrasamaa also visited the school. As a child she had been brought to London by Christian missionaries, who placed her with a farmer in Yorkshire, where she was cruelly treated. In the end she ran away. She spoke to the children about her story. The story of one very brave, black Londoner. The children also made a tape slide presentation using their paintings of the story and showed it to the school assembly. The correspondence between Kathleen and some of the children was very moving.
This is just an example of the day-to-day feminist activism that teachers were engaged in trying to force institutions to change in the 1970s and 1980s. After the abolition of ILEA, and the Thatcher years, the climate for this work changed considerably, with the introduction of the infamous Section 28 in 1988 and the national curriculum.
In the 1990’s I started work as research associate, then lecturer at Goldsmiths Department of Educational studies. I was lucky to work under Sally Tomlinson, Clyde Chitty and Debbie Epstein as Heads of Department who defended a progressive and questioning approach to educational practice and supported my work. I have continued to advocate for feminist approaches in the classroom during my time as a teacher trainer during the 1990s and 2000s, and as a tutor at IOE in the later years of my career. Some of the female students, however, were critical claiming that it was no longer necessary to be a feminist!
I would argue that in the second wave activism of the 1970s and 80s we made some considerable progress, and that a lot of that has since been undermined. There are many reasons for this, including the changing political climate under the Thatcher government and in London by the abolition of ILEA and the transfer of power to individual schools run on a business model. This has led to the imposition of increasingly despotic managerial cultures in schools and the micromanagement of teachers’ practice and the content of the curriculum. The pressure on teachers to meet external targets and to focus more on assessment and accountability has meant they have little room for manoeuvre and experimentation. Schools are now in competition with each other in league tables, and the collaborative approaches to sharing ideas across schools during free in-service sessions at teachers’ centres, which were also vital spaces for self-organisation and reflection, have disappeared along with many community spaces and bookshops.
It is important to remember what it was possible to achieve when we had the determination to organise together as feminists to put our ideas into practice in our workplaces, our communities and our lives.
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