UCLA

This dissertation concerns the feminization of the Italian teaching profession between the introduction of pre-Unification schooling in 1859 and the nationalization of that system in 1911. By feminization, this dissertation refers both to the gradual assumption of the majority of elementary teaching positions by women and to a transformation in the nature of the position itself. Through an examination of educational periodicals, school records, government inquests, and accounts by teachers and pedagogical theorists, it argues that rather than the unintended consequence of economic constraints or shifting labor patterns, feminization was fundamentally connected to larger processes of centralization and modernization in the Italian school system. Following an introductory chapter outlining the major national, religious, and gender debates of the Unification era, the second chapter of the dissertation argues that the figure of the female elementary teacher became embroiled in the contest between local and national interests, furthering the drive toward centralization. The third chapter examines a subject generally ignored in most studies of Italian women's education: the impact of international and domestic pedagogy. The chapter shows that the development of an Italian pedagogy combining positivism and progressivism with a maternalist, child-centered methodology was both a result and a cause of the feminization of the teaching profession. The fourth chapter focuses on the divide between the secularizing nation and the entrenched Catholic Church, arguing that carefully trained female teachers were employed as agents of the encroaching State and examining the connection between religious education debates and women's rights movements. The fifth chapter is an institutional history of the teacher-training normal schools; an analysis of institutional and government records reveals that normal school feminization reflected the centralization, secularization, and pedagogical reformation of the school system in general.