Internationalism, Empire and Peace in the Women Teacher, 1920-1939

The vibrant political agenda that drove political and professional discussion in The Woman Teacher, the ‘official organ’ of the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT)(1) was rooted in the Union’s demand for equality on the same terms as men (King 1987: 35). The Woman Teacher challenged the view that a right to earn a living had been won as long as posts were closed to women and the statute book was ‘littered up with restrictions which class women with non-adults’ and contested Virginia Woolf’s contention in Three Guineas that the word ‘feminist’ was obsolete (17 June 1938: 300). During the inter-war period The Woman Teacher encouraged NUWT members to create the will to peace through their work in schools. Stimulated by the deepening international crisis during the 1930s, the journal adopted an increasingly radical political stance towards internationalism, militarism and fascism. This chapter argues that articulations of internationalism, peace, imperialism and anti-fascism made visible dissent within views of the NUWT membership but also facilitated opportunities for journal editors to continue to shape the NUWT’s egalitarian feminist message as the NUWT negotiated shifting understandings of feminism and rhetoric about married and single teachers linked with the pathologizing of spinsterhood (Oram 1996; Martin 2008).