Le métier d’institutrice indépendante francophone à Montréal, 1869-1915

Abstract

In 2006, I published an article, “The first female lay teachers in Quebec. A Montreal Case Study, 1825-1835,” in the French journal, Histoire de l’éducation (no. 109). The women teachers that I wrote about, most of whom were anglophones, owned small, essentially private schools in which they taught a significant proportion of Montreal’s young population. They inspired francophone female lay teachers who imitated their system, imported recently from Britain. These francophone women would make the model of independent schoolmistress their own, adapting it throughout the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth. This way, the women contributed through the schools they owned, which were often small, to educating a noteworthy margin of the city’s youth, notably in the nineteenth century. They did so despite the founding of the Montreal Catholic School Commission in 1846. Consequently, the present article deals in some detail with the educational contributions of these women teachers in this period, but more specifically between the years 1869 and 1915.