Lisa Smulyan’s portraits of three women elementary school principals at work in the USA will appeal to readers wanting to know more about how individual women respond to the competing demands of staff, parents and institutional superiors in different organisational and community contexts. Her vivid accounts of the complex and shifting “balancing acts” that are negotiated is an interesting and useful addition to similar life history/ethnographic studies of women educational leaders (see, for example, Hall, 1996; Strachan, 1999).
For those new to the field of women in education, Smulyan sets the scene with a critical discussion of the historically constructed gendered divide in US education, between a mainly female teaching workforce and the predominantly male administrators who control their work. Such a split has occurred in educational institutions in most Western societies, and has contributed to the masculinist character of particular models of leadership and management. Smulyan’s literature review discusses how these factors have impacted on women’s access to leadership positions, and on the development of their own styles of leadership by the (few) women who do succeed in becoming appointed. It is now fairly well accepted that the focus of earlier research on identifying differences between men and women as groups overlooks differences within these groups and that studies of women practising a “feminine” leadership that emphasises relational and nurturing qualities run the risk of unhelpful essentialism. In Smulyan’s view, past studies in this field may have also over‐emphasised what she calls “institutional and social frameworks of behaviour and belief”, while under‐emphasising individual responses and possibilities for change. In pointing out these limitations, Smulyan argues that life history/case studies can “illustrate, challenge and expand our views of the styles and practices of women administrators” while also providing “insights into the complex factors that shape individual principal’s lives and work” (p. 38). Working within what another reviewer in this journal has called a feminist “politics of difference and politics of location” (Coleman, 2000), Smulyan sets out to show how individual women principals negotiate varying dynamics of gender, ethnicity, race and class (and age and religion as it turns out) within different school communities and institutional contexts.
Smulyan researched each woman over a period of one year, during which time she carried out repeat interviews with them and observed them at work. As did Hall (1996) in her study of six women principals in the UK, and Jane Strachan (1999) in her study of three feminist secondary school principals in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Smulyan explored with her three women questions about their backgrounds and upbringings and how they came to enter firstly teaching, and then administrative positions. She also interviewed teachers and parents, the district administrators and in one case, the headteacher with whom the principals worked. The narratives written from this rich data blend the principal’s own perceptions and accounts of her work with those of others, these being interpreted through the lens of Smulyan’s own insights and readings of the studies reviewed earlier in the book.
This form of grounded theorising works well in the organising of the narratives into four main themes. These are:
- 1.
(1) becoming a principal: negotiating the personal context;
- 2.
(2) serving others: defining leadership in the community context;
- 3.
(3) meeting institutional expectations: negotiating the culture of schooling;
- 4.
(4) balancing continuity and change: negotiating within the system.
Throughout each of the narratives, there are many anecdotes and details that bring the women alive, though I felt some unease about the way that the comments of teachers and parents were treated. There was often no indication of these people’s race, gender or class for example, and I agree with Hall’s (1996, p. 29) warning that “followers’ accounts can tell us more about the speaker than the leader. What they say reflects their values”. I maintained a level of skepticism therefore about others’ opinions as I read the accounts of the principals’ personal responses and interactions during different critical events that developed during the time of the research. Some examples of these are Jeanne’s growing commitment to providing programmes for racial minority children; Ann’s shifting reactions during the difficult time at the end of her administrative career as she ponders different possibilities and responses to her male headteacher’s demands that she should retire; and Ellen’s careful and patient documentation of evidence needed to successfully dismiss an incompetent veteran teacher. Throughout the narratives, Smulyan shows each woman thinking through particular dilemmas and facing both personal and professional anxieties. She does not shy away from portraying areas of weakness as she or others saw these: these women are not shown as super heroes, but as people who can, and do make mistakes sometimes. A strength of the case narratives is their illumination of the demanding nature of leadership work that involves issues of social justice and finding one’s way through moral dilemmas.
I also liked the way that Smulyan herself is present in this book, not only giving her own interpretations but also showing how she herself was engaged by the principals in some of their deliberations and situations. It is not out of the ordinary now, in feminist research, to find discussions such as hers in the method chapter about various dilemmas feminist researchers can face, but Smulyan’s discussions of these make good reading. The question of how a feminist researcher should treat her own understanding of the nature of gender discrimination, in the face of denials by her participants that this has any significance for them, is a hoary one. Smulyan addresses this in both the method chapter and in the narratives, where she deftly shows how gender does impact, albeit it in different ways, on the experiences of these principals. In each case, the women’s superiors are men and we see some familiar gendered power inequalities influencing their interactions with these men. For example, in one district meeting with her colleagues and superintendent, Jeanne’s repeated requests for training for a new initiatives are ignored by the superintendent: “Only when a male collegue makes the request does the superintendent respond”. In other situations, Smulyan describes how the women principals negotiate maculinist cultures, where to get what they want for their schools they feel they need to make their male superiors “look like a hero” as one woman puts it (p. 103).
The case narratives also demonstrate however, that gender cannot be viewed as the only factor shaping and/or constraining women principals’ work. There are few examples in the literature of how ageism and impending retirement are negotiated by women educational leaders and Ann’s story is especially interesting here. There are, though, an increasing number of studies that show how race and ethnicity is a primary factor for many indigenous and immigrant women in education (see, for example, in Australia, Tripcony, 1995; in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Tomlins‐Jahnke, 1997; Strachan, 1999; Waitere‐Ang, 1999). Race did not seem to be such a strong factor in Smulyan’s account of Jeanne’s experiences as an African American woman. I wondered about this as I remembered what one of my own African American woman colleagues, who is a principal of a large co‐educational high school, told me about her experiences. She said that being a woman in educational leadership in the USA was more constraining than being an African American. In Jeanne’s case, I would have liked to have been given a more in‐depth analysis of this set of intersecting power dynamics.
Probably unsurprisingly, given the current difficulties being encountered in theorising about “women”, there were some unresolved tensions in the book. For example, there is a tension between discussions of women negotiating “male definitions of power, authority and leadership” (p. 2) and criticisms of studies that work at the level of bi‐polar analysis of difference between male/female, men/women. This difficulty is one that is experienced by many of us who are trying to tease out a gender analysis that does not keep sliding into essentialism and simple dichotomies. I have found Blackmore’s(1999) approach helpful here. She avoids the term “male” (and its problematic links to biological essentialism) and makes useful distinctions between using the terms “masculinity” and “masculinism” in her analyses of dominant discursive practices of leadership and authority. When I had finished reading Smulyan’s book though, I felt that there was a kind of “fuzziness” about the theoretical analysis. At times, the discussion seems to read like a feminist post‐structuralist analysis of the place of individual agency within a discursive shaping of a limited range of responses, without the use of (sometimes obfuscating!) theoretical terminology. While I found this appealing, I wanted some more critical engagement with issues around contradiction and ambiguity.
A more minor quibble perhaps, is that it would have been helpful for international readers to have an explanation of the US education career structure provided early on in the book. The women Smulyan studied are called principals; however Ann, whose story is told in the second narrative, would not in Aotearoa/New Zealand be described as a principal, but rather as an “assistant principal”. Indeed, each of Smulyan’s women are shown as being in middle management positions, with their work overseen by district superintendents (senior educational professional administrators, who in Jeanne and Ellen’s cases, both hired and could fire them), and in Ann’s case also by her school’s headteacher. Although there are many differences between the experiences of those in middle management positions and those who hold “higher” positions of authority, there are areas of overlap when analysis focusses on the impact of interacting factors of gender, race, ethnicity and class. Smulyan’s study offers some valuable insights into how these dynamics and others are negotiated “on the ground” by individual women administrators and her interpretations sparked for me both recognition and reflection on the significance of institutional and cultural contexts. I found Jeanne’s experiences as she negotiated her district’s requirements for a “democratic” and consultative school‐based management, while the district itself was functioning as a strongly top‐down hierarchical bureaucratic system, particularly interesting in the light of my own country’s reform initiatives. Here, within a market managerial restructuring of educational administration in the late 1980s, the work of school principals remains heavily constrained within hierarchical audit and control mechanisms, such as performance management tied to promotion and salary. This is despite the reformers’ rhetoric that restructuring would devolve power to local schools and enhance parent/professional partnerships. Blackmore (1999) has described a similar centralised decentralisation as shaping the work of educational leaders in Australia. Overall, this is what I enjoyed most about this book. For me, its strength lies in the ways its vivid pictures of three women’s interactions with their superiors and their colleagues within their own varying school, community and institutional contexts sparked reflection – on educational systems in general and the experiences of individual women in particular.
