Educating Señorita: Teacher Training, Social Mobility, and the Birth of Costa Rican Feminism, 1885-1925

Teacher Education and Teachers’ Colleges

“…Normal schools likewise sprung up in Spain, Poland, Norway, Hungary, Italy, and most regions across the continent (de Vroede 1979). Crucial to modernization and nation-building projects in the Americas as well, the first normal school in the Western Hemisphere was founded in the United States in 1834, as Horace Mann looked to the Prussian model for inspiration, soon followed by Brazil in 1835, Chile in the 1840s, Argentina in 1870, the Dominican Republic in 1875, and Canada in 1902 (Palmer and Rojas Chaves 1998;Ducoing 2004;Ogren 2005;Souza Araújo et al 2008;Fraser 2014). Normal schools likewise appeared in Japan beginning in 1872 at the behest of the Meiji leaders, followed by China in 1895 with Beijing Normal University (Lincicome 1995;Katagiri 1994;Xiaoping 2007).…”

“…In many countries, feminization also became the twin pillar of professionalization, as liberal republican nation-builders such as the United States' Horace Mann and Catherine Beecher and Latin America's Domingo Fausto Sarmiento and Eugenio María de Hostos mixed romantic notions of women's "natural" role as teachers and republican mothers with the pragmatic demands of ballooning educational systems. Teaching therefore became both professionalized and feminized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the project of nationbuilding in many parts of the world, two characteristics that would create lasting challenges for the teacher education enterprise, raising issues of status, prestige, and authority (Albisetti 1993;Palmer and Rojas Chaves 1998;Fraser 2006Fraser , 2014.…”

“…The new millennium also brought more attention and sophistication to the previous decades' work on race, class, and gender, considering how teachers' colleges functioned to build feminist movements, for example, as in the article by Steven Palmer and Gladys Rojas Chaves on the role of the Colegio Superior de Señoritas normal school that functioned to both "modernize patriarchy" and provide a platform for a burgeoning feminist movement in Costa Rica in the early twentieth century, Christine A. Ogren's work on the liberating power of normal schools for women and the working classes in the mid-Western United States, or Sabyasachi Bhattacharya's work on Dalit and women's education in India (Palmer and Rojas Chaves 1998;Edwards 2001;Bhattacharya et al 2001;Ogren 2005). Scholarship also considered how the curriculum and training of teachers functioned to construct imperial hierarchies through the intimate relations of white teachers and non-white colonized students, as on the American and Australian Western frontiers or in the African colonies (Williams 2007;Padovan-Özdemir 2016).…”