Conclusion

It is time in the anti-racist education of white students and teachers to turn the gaze inward. Instead of probing to find out about the "other," we must think about how our personal and collective histories and identities are produced in educational texts in relation to that of minority and immigrant children. As we have shown, constructions of white women teachers, such as Lady Bountiful, organize ways of thinking about gender, race, and ethnicity that serve to reproduce rather than challenge dominant relations of power. By analyzing this construct we hope the possibility exists to rewrite "Lady Bountiful," among other images, in texts of our lives and those of all our students.

Reprinted from WEdf, Fall 1994, Volume 11, Number 2.

Sheila Cavanagh is completing a Doctoral degree in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University. Her thesis concerns the role of white women teachers in multicultural education and English as a Second Language (ESL) program development. She is researching the history of women teachers as represented in the Federation of Women Teachers of Ontario magazine.

Helen Harper is completing her Ph.D. thesis in the Department of Curriculum at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This fall she will be teaching in the Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario. Her work is focused on issues of identity, representation, and pedagogy.

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