Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary Educational Leadership

Kay Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000486377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely book explores how various feminist perspectives fruitfully explain women's experience of educational leadership, drawing on a contemporary conceptualisation of fourth-wave feminism that is intersectional and inclusive.

The book asks which and whose feminist theory is used to explain gender and feminism in educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA): the scholar's, the research participant's or a combination of the two in the co-construction of knowledge from an intersectional feminist perspective. It conceptualises intersectional and inclusive feminist perspectives on educational leadership, theorising research through a Black British feminist perspective, a gender and Islamic perspective and a queer theory perspective, depending on the self-identification of participants. It explores digital feminism and men's pro-feminism. The book identifies feminist leadership praxis as a focus for future research and explores how leaders can draw on funds of knowledge, identity cultural wealth and lead and educate diverse populations of students.

Highlighting the importance of intersectional feminist perspectives in ELMA, the book will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusive educational leadership and management, gender studies and feminism.

Part I Mapping feminist perspectives in educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA)

1 Waves of feminism

DOI: 10.4324/9780367855635-2

Introduction – A resurgence of interest

The twenty-first century has seen women’s exposure to, and revelation of, the worst symptoms of patriarchy: sexual harassment, abuse and violence against women. Social media campaigns such as #MeToo (from 2017) and #TimesUp (from 2018) are responses from women worldwide to high-profile cases of misogyny and sex crime. Nor are ordinary workplaces free of sex discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault. For example, in the UK, over half of women have experienced workplace sexual harassment (TUC, 2016). Gender pay gap statistics, first reported in 2018, reveal that educational organisations are among the worst offenders (GOV.UK, 2018). Gender inequalities persist in education, employment and wider society in the UK and globally. In 2020, during the global Covid-19 pandemic and resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, further racial and gender injustices surfaced with respect to what it means to work and lead from home outside education (Antonacopoulou and Georgiadou, 2020) and inside with equity and diversity matters in mind (Gedro et al., 2020; Wargo, 2020; Watson, 2020). Women were impacted by the pandemic because they dominate essential services in health and social care, cleaning and cashiering (essential retail) work; they balanced clerical work from home with childcare and home schooling; and they lost jobs in catering. They have provided education on- and offline throughout school and university closures.

Feminist activists and scholars maintain a critical perspective in their commitment to social justice. Goals of empowerment and emancipation specifically focus on addressing multiple intersecting gender injustices, such as economic, cultural and representative injustices (see Blackmore, 2016). Some might be forgiven for being confused by descriptions of a resurgence of interest in the experiences and perceptions of women leading in education (Torrance et al., 2017) and a fourth wave of feminism (Chamberlain, 2017). Immersed in projects focused on gender in educational leadership, scholars swimming in the wider ocean of feminism have been engaged in an ‘ongoing fight for equality’ (Chamberlain, 2017, p. 7) for over 30 years. We persist regardless of the ebbs and flows of interest in our work.

This book aims to provide a discussion of feminist perspectives on contemporary educational leadership in and for the twenty-first century. It charts stories of feminist resistance to neoliberal education policy and its focus on competition and compliance, efficiency and effectiveness and of systemic and structural inequalities. Wo/men’s voices speak clearly and loudly about their commitment to social justice and to achieving equity alongside excellence. They say what makes them angry and hopeful about social in/justice in education and society. So doing, they reveal an abundance of cultural and professional wealth brought to leadership in education. Theirs is a discourse of assets as opposed to professional deficit. This understanding of leadership work done in this context demonstrates that they have the critical thinking tools necessary for leading education in turbulent times.

The book begins with a chapter that notes a resurgence of interest in gender inequalities and injustices. There follows an account of four waves of feminism relating to multiple feminist theories of interest in educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA). I position myself as a white woman scholar and, following feminist scholars and a critically reflexive approach to research, provide accounts of my relationship with feminism. I describe the research projects that inform the book. Finally, I introduce each chapter that follows.

Feminist theory and waves of feminism

Feminist theory is predicated on the inclusion of women and their experiences in knowledge production. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequalities and injustices and support activism to challenge the status quo. It is emancipatory in intent. Feminist standpoint theory valorises ‘insider’ perspectives (see Harding, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 2000; Smith, 1979). Women’s individual standpoints uncover multilevel power relations in families, communities, organisations, institutions (including education) and society. It is concerned with the simultaneity of multilevel identity, institutional and social practices (Holvino, 2010). Standpoint must be

…wrestled out against the hegemonic dominant ideologies that structure the practices of daily life as well as dominant forms of belief, and […] thus hide the very possibility of the kind of understanding that thinking from women’s lives can generate.

(Harding, 1998, p. 185)

It is not automatically acquired by virtue of identifying as a feminist or woman. Even though Spivak (1993) posits that a scholar does not need to be the subject of knowledge production in order to produce it, there is a sense that epistemic privilege affords insiders insight and empathy (Narayan, 1988).

Feminists have long connected the personal with the political. An account of feminist theory is also an account of feminist identity politics and movements seeking to improve women’s and girls’ lives. As such, the feminist project is as important in the twenty-first century as it has ever been. Far from living in a ‘post’ feminist world where gender equality and gender justice have been achieved, feminist activism and scholarship remain indispensable to those concerned with equality, diversity and inclusion in creating a more socially just world, particularly in the context of global neoliberal education reform.

It is feminist theory’s association with feminist activism that results in a chronological perspective documenting each movement in terms of historical waves. The wave metaphor has been thoroughly explored and exploited by feminist scholars as ocean waves surging and receding, taking to the airwaves, women making waves, permanent waves (white women curling hair and Black women suppressing waves) and a new wave (David, 2016). Whilst the chronological organisation of feminist theories has been critiqued (Baxter, 2003; Kohli and Burbules, 2011), the feminist wave narrative persists. Each wave of feminism is characterised by contemporary debates and issues (Pillow, 2002) and therefore is sociohistorically and geopolitically context-specific. So how did these waves develop in their sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts? How do they connect with multiple feminist theories and perspectives? What is my relationship with them?

Pre-first-wave feminism

Women’s resistance to sex inequalities dates back further than most scholars acknowledge. Khadijah al-Kubra, the first Muslim woman (567–619 CE), was a leading businesswoman when early Islam advocated for equality between women and men in a patriarchal society (Ullah et al., 2015). Christine de Pizan (c. 1405/1999) wrote The Book of the City of Ladies (Willard, 1984), which begins with a critique of the prevailing misogynist writing by men. Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1792/2004)A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues for women’s right to education.

Oral histories of Indigenous and African-American women date back further (Pillow, 2002). Filomina Chioma Steady declared that African women were the first feminists; they had ‘an actual experience of oppression, a lack of the socially prescribed means of ensuring one’s wellbeing, and a true lack of access to resources for survival’ (Steady, 1981, p. 36 cited in Decker and Baderoon, 2018, p. 219). Feminism was a response to oppression.

First-wave feminism

First-wave feminism is associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was concerned with women’s suffrage, property ownership, divorce, employment rights and access to education (Kohli and Burbules, 2011). It is associated with liberal feminism in its focus on individualist and meritocratic goals of equality and inclusion. It achieved women’s suffrage in New Zealand in 1893, Australia by 1902 and several European countries before 1918. Suffrage was granted to women in the UK partially in 1918 and fully in 1928. It was granted in the US in 1920.

Accounts of first-wave feminism have been whitewashed by excluding Indian, African-American and Indigenous women, such as Catherine and Sophia Duleep Singh in the UK (Visram, 2002), Sojourner Truth in the US (Davis, 1981; Brah and Phoenix, 2004), E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) in Canada (Forestell and Moynaugh, 2014), Emily Stephens in Australia (Grimshaw and Nelson, 2001) and Māori women in New Zealand (Crawford, 2018). Black British feminists have long challenged the white Eurocentric and Western tradition of imperial feminism (Amos and Parmar, 1984/1997; see Devereux, 1999 for an account of the relationship between feminism and colonialism).

The re-narration of my story as a critical autoethnography in direct response to research that informs this book led me to recognise the place of white privilege in an account of social mobility (Blackmore, 2016; Caine et al., 2018; Fuller, 2020). An exploration of family history led me to think about my relationship with first-wave feminism. I am forced to acknowledge the juxtaposition of socioeconomic precarity and stability among my foremothers. Alongside the illiteracy of both maternal great-grandmothers, there was privilege in women’s ownership of property in the early twentieth century. One of my maternal great-grandmothers, having been widowed in a railway accident circa 1900, both was illiterate and owned her own home. Compensation was awarded as my deaf railway engineer great-grandfather stepped out of the way of one oncoming train into the path of another, driven by his best friend. My paternal grandmother bought the family home in 1913 because her husband was at sea fishing for long periods. Her continued ownership was insurance against fishing business failure, but the story was told to me as my grandmother’s refusal to sign it over to him when he returned from sea. He was subsequently bankrupted. Both sides of my family avoided homelessness in families raised largely by women who turned their homes into businesses by letting rooms to make or supplement a living. The expectation of a woman’s home ownership was instilled before I was born.

Women’s suffrage was awarded in 1918 to women property-owners who were more than 30 years old. I have not discovered whether my foremothers’ properties were sufficiently valuable to enfranchise them. There is no evidence of engagement with the Suffragette movement. Unlike Suffolk suffragettes, they did not boycott the 1911 census (BBC, 2011). However, there is photographic evidence of a Suffragette ‘Great Campaign for Lowestoft’ (my home town) that coincided with pro-suffrage motions proposed at the National Union of Teachers conference held there in 1914 and of Emmeline Pankhurst’s intention to speak at a ...