4 - Gender, Professionalism and the Commensurability of Cultures

Summary

Many southwestern Pacific men clearly perceive risks to their own status from the education of women and girls. In this region, as elsewhere (Adely, 2012), girls’ education is entangled with moral, cultural and religious values, prompting questions about whether young women should pursue education to the same extent as young men, if the objectives of their education should be different, and what risks might be associated with their education (Munro, 2018, p 26). Processes of missionisation and colonisation that introduced formal schooling into cultures that already possessed sophisticated ideas about educated persons, and the processes for making them, also introduced new answers to these questions (see, more broadly, McKinley and Smith, 2019; O’Sullivan, 2021). As I describe in this chapter, the new answers opened more opportunities for men than they did for women and continue to do so. Although more women than ever are making it through schooling, many women face a backlash, framed as a re-assertion of ‘tradition’, that is often manifest in violence towards them (Hermkens, 2008; Spark, 2011; Macintyre, 2017, p 8; Hemer, 2018, pp 140–2).

These questions about the education of young women and appropriate roles for women and men certainly played out at the boarding schools. As I showed in Chapter 3, the moral basis of life in the village was an important part of life at school often because teachers and students made conscious decisions to put it there. In the process they found family resemblances among the diversity of their cultural practices. In this chapter I show that these family resemblances ran deep. They can be found in expectations for women, the ongoing presence of male violence, in how teachers define themselves as professionals and in how women seek to achieve influence in school decision-making. The family resemblances were even visible in how teachers experienced emotions like shame. However, despite the resemblances, what constituted appropriate relations between men and women was far from a settled matter, and one arena for the contest over gender roles revolved around what it meant to be a ‘professional’. There were noteworthy differences between teachers and students regarding how professional persons should behave, with young people less inclined to tolerate the excesses of male teachers.