Constructing Contradiction: The Power and Powerlessness of Women in the Giving and Taking of Evidence in the Bryce Commission, 1895.

The underlying theoretical framework for this paper owes its genesis to three sources; first a late night street conversation after a WEA class several years ago with an unidentified woman who had won a scholarship from an elementary school to a girls' high school. She commented to my surprise at the time, 'Of course, Miss X never wanted us scholarship girls at the school'. Her words returned to me when reading the Bryce Commission. Second, it owes something to a loose appropriation of Foucault's notions of power/knowledge and 'power producing'. Within this framework, the state is viewed as 'a complex network of discursive practice . . . which achieves its regulatory effects . . . through dispersed, multiple and often contradictory and competing discourses'. J. Kenway (1992) Identity and Diversity, Gender and the Experience of Education, ed. M. Blair et al. (Multilingual Matters, 1995), 137, 134. See also B. Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (Routledge G. Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-structuralism and the Law (Blackwell, 1984)