This handsome and hefty volume offers a delightful, if somewhat uneven, trip through the history of women teachers. Geraldine Clifford, a distinguished scholar and professor emerita of history of education at University of California, Berkeley, worked on the research for more than 40 years, drawing on more than 600 archival collections across the United States and parts of Australia and Europe in her goal to write a complete history of women teachers' work. Ultimately, the breadth of research and the passion of the author is both the strength and weakness of the volume.

The sheer quantity of resources in this study is impressive and unprecedented. Educational historians have long bemoaned the absence of surviving sources by school teachers—for a literate work force, teachers have had little time to document their work, and what documentation they left is often buried in family letters or lost in school closets.

Designed as a type of collective biography, Clifford's emphasis on social history leads her to include literally hundreds of personal history narratives and life stories, drawing on a wide array of sources including obituaries, personal journals and correspondence, dissertations, and the eclectic and rich resources of local historical society archives around the country. The results are exciting and insightful, such as this description of gendered school politics in the late nineteenth century Pittsburgh region by a woman educator: “Our thick-headed school directors will take a young man so green the cows would eat him, and give him the highest position in the school…” (p. 293). Clifford also identifies significant quantitative data, such as a 1919 report that in 1900 there were only 15 African American women teachers hired west of the Rocky Mountains (p. 106). The delightful cover of Winslow Homer's young woman teacher at a blackboard, and 18 graphic and photographic reproductions round out this very good looking volume.

The book is strongest when Clifford relies on her primary sources to tell their tales. Chapter 9, emphasizing teachers' day-to-day work experiences, is especially powerful in this regard, as is Chapter 10 which consists of long excerpts of nineteenth and early twentieth century women teachers' diaries, memoirs, and letters.

Yet, for all its strength in historical evidence, the author is strangely silent on methodology, offering little analysis as to how or why we might interpret fictional representations, memoirs, census data, contemporary school reports and newspaper articles, or personal correspondence.

Readers who are not familiar with the history of education field should consider Good Gertrudes as a largely descriptive, old-fashioned narrative history. The history told here is a broad, expansive, and optimistic tale that is inclusive of many topics but largely dodges any explanatory causes. For a social history, the work is largely silent on the social forces behind individual lives, and most contemporary historians of education would see this as an awkward stance, given that few American institutions have been more subject to social, cultural, and political forces than American schooling. For example, although focusing on women teachers, Clifford barely touches on the larger question of how teaching became a feminized occupation, beyond occasional suggestions that, “cost was a factor” (p. 37) or that women's “time had come” (p. 44).

Rather, Clifford echoes liberal second wave feminist offerings of the 1970s, emphasizing women's accomplishments as teachers. In this, her approach is largely consensus and celebratory as she argues that teaching created a community of women or “sororal networks” (p. 294), and we hear little about the many conflicts between women teachers due to religion, teaching level and training, class background, race, or sexuality. Barely mentioned is the early-to-mid twentieth century teacher unionization movement in which women teachers struggled, often against each other, to reshape the emerging teacher profession into a more authoritative, respected, and democratic workforce.

The root of the problem here is that Clifford's extensive primary research is not matched by her secondary research, which is notably outdated, relying heavily on scholarship before 2000. In a very short bibliographic essay, Clifford cites Donald Warren's 1989 edited book, American Teachers (New York: Macmillan, 1989) as one of the “essential” sources on the history of teaching (p. 438). Certainly an important text, Warren's volume merely began what soon became a flood of exciting new research on teaching, women and education over the past 20 years, much of it offering decisive interpretive lenses and theoretical approaches, methodological explorations, and close analyses of the sharp political dynamics over women teachers' class, culture, behavior, sexuality, and unionization and professionalization efforts.

The absence of a strong argumentative thread runs the risk of making the primary references sometimes seem anecdotal and insignificant. What are we to make of the claim that gender is the only significant variable that connects an African American woman teacher in a nineteenth century New York City school to an Irish woman teacher struggling for recognition in late nineteenth century Chicago to a missionary teacher in early twentieth century Philippines?

A social history of teachers that is disconnected from the history of social forces does not offer a particularly helpful way for understanding the major themes and tensions and conflicts that continue in American education today. Fortunately, we have a good wealth of such analyses that readers can find in the pages of The History of Education Quarterly and volumes published since the early 1990s on the history of American teachers. Readers of this journal who are inspired by Clifford's lively descriptive accounts should move directly on to those sources.