Lavinia seabrooke, gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia

This article relates the campaigns of Lavinia Seabrooke, the first headmistress of the girls' department of Grote Street Model Schools in South Australia, and her women colleagues, to a broader discussion of the impact of gender on state formation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that men's interests were constructed as hegemonic and that Women's voices were eliminated from the written records as the norms of state administration were established. Nevertheless, senior women teachers contested male dominance with some degree of success and created space for themselves to participate in the formation of the modern state.