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Discusses the sensationalist media coverage surrounding former teacher, Amy Gehring and allegations that she indecently assaulted former students in the British school to which she was recruited from her native Canada. News headlines about Gehring's sex scandal; Scandalous aspects of the case; Several school-based sex scandals involving female teachers.

This paper examines the female teacher sex scandal involving former Canadian teacher Annie Markson and false allegations that she indecently assaulted an underage boy student. Using feminist psychoanalytic theory I argue that the media coverage of the story had a voyeuristic quality to it that can best be understood by interpreting the role of the counter-transference in education. The news story also reveals a psychic anxiety about normative masculine identity development, heterosexual bifurcations of gender, and female teacher sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern interfered with the delivery of protective services to country teachers involved in contractual disputes. The model of professionalism was based on a composite portrait of the older masculinised European ideal of professional rationality, and distilled through a feminine ideal of conduct intelligible to white middle- and upper-class women in early twentieth-century Canada. The professional ideal was used as a measure of occupational success and applied as a criterion for granting or withholding protective services. As a result, rural women falling short of the ideal were denied protective services when embroiled in tenure-related disputes and, ultimately, they were excommunicated from the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]