'Sentimentalists and radicals': The role of gender in the construction of progressive education in the 1930s

This dissertation uses the work of Elsie Ripley Clapp, a female progressive educator, as a case study to address gaps in the existing literature on progressive education. The study explores two interrelated areas: (1) the limitations of traditional categorizations of the strands of progressive education and (2) the position of gender in the historical construction of the progressive education movement. Of particular interest is what historians describe as the philosophical split between "child-centered" and "social-reconstructionist" progressives that occurred in the 1930s. A significant feature of this split is that it is often drawn along lines of gender with female educators categorized as "child-centered." In addition to questioning the assumed polarization of these approaches, the study highlights how untroubled binaries of progressive education obscure how these concepts were used in school practice.;The work of Elsie Ripley Clapp served as a site for exploring the implications of the narrative construction of progressive education in the secondary literature. Operating from a child-centered/social reconstructionist binary, many historians have classified Clapp as child-centered and presented her as an oppositional force to social reconstruction. She serves as a useful illustration of the exclusions produced by a reliance on these categories. Clapp's practice, like that of many progressive educators, exceeded the boundaries of the philosophical divisions that existed within progressive education.;Based on the analysis of the secondary literature and the work of Clapp, the study identified four key points of significance: (1) Thinking of the categories of child-centered and social reconstructionist as useful, but unbounded categories, rather than two mutually exclusive poles, opens up new possibilities for understanding the diversity of progressive practices. (2) The research on Clapp contributes to recent attempts to treat progressive education with greater specificity. (3) Problematizing traditional categories of progressive education intervenes in versions of the history of progressive education that feature men as social reformers and women as apolitical nurturers of individual children. (4) The dissertation explores the possibilities for using feminist theory and cultural studies to inform the use of biography in education.