Women educators and transnational networking in the twentieth-century nursery school movement

In this article I argue that women educators' personal and professional networks underpinned the growth of nursery school education into a transnational movement in the interwar years. Edna Noble White, Lillian de Lissa, Mary Gutteridge and Gwendolyn Watkins' interlocking networks facilitated and connected the nursery school movements in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Although these women educators were at the centre of a feminised domain, I also show that their work and the movement were impacted by gender relations in the broader fields of education and child development research. Just as nursery school education transcended national boundaries and was reconfigured in each national context, so too the priorities and tensions in education and developmental psychology.