This paper is a collation of the experiences of four Black women, all senior-level educational leaders in the United States of America. Considering the predominance of White males in educational leadership, our paper furthers the conversation around race-gender diversification in this realm. We employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach,…

This article is based on a STEM education case study that illumines the work that three Black women school leaders do specifically on behalf of Black girls, and in examining their asset-based approaches, conceptualises their work by articulating an intersectional leadership framework. By historicising and explicating the rich legacy of Black women…

In this empirical study, we describe how Muslim female school leaders prioritise equity, community, and resistance when leading American Islamic schools. Similar to prior critical feminist studies, this research centres female leaders' agency as an emancipatory praxis of resistance to injustice and oppression, aligned with our core assumptions of…

This essay examines the school leadership experiences of an infant school head teacher in Birmingham, England, during the Second World War. Drawing on the letters of Dorothy Walker, the essay offers insights into school leadership wartime deprivations. The impact of an international war on the home front was not head teacher Dorothy Walker's only…

This study explores Black girls' perceptions of school and the leadership of a Black woman principal. Portraiture as the methodology was used to understand the nuances of education by interviewing and observing six Black girls. In this article, Black girls are situated as experts and co-constructors of knowledge on what it means to be a Black girl…

While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa,…

In order to explore education at the first two Pan-Pacific Women's Conferences, this article builds on Campbell and Sherington's account of education in Oceania and on empirical research undertaken by Selleck and others, along with relevant primary source material. It traces elements of empire as they played out in inter-war women's education and…

The literature provides insufficient data on women's experiences of the principalship across generations in the USA and thus provides little understanding as to how the writing of women into the history of educational leadership has changed or maintained the social order. Research that addresses biases experienced by women who wish to advance in…

This article discusses the impact of including gender in the analytical framework in a study of the management and provision of education in Zambia from 1900 to 1939. It shows that a focus on gender allows females to enter the historical narrative and the leadership of women such as Mabel Shaw, Hannah Frances Davidson and Julia Smith can be given…

The historic connection of religion and spirituality to women, education, advocacy, and leadership is prevalent in Black American histories in general and the role of the religion and spirit in promoting education and socialisation. Important in this history is the intersection of spirituality and leadership for Black American women. This research…

As a British colony, New Zealand had early to grapple with how best to implement a state system of schooling. Inspectors of primary schools and governing boards of secondary schools were responsible for appointing school principals. This paper examines the ways in which they dealt with new situations: in the case of the primary schools where there…

At the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class educated gentlewomen in Ireland had established positions of authority and leadership in the relatively new professions of education and nursing. Acting in the roles of lady principals and lady superintendents, respectively, in education and nursing, many of these women had themselves participated…

This article explores the contrasting career routes and experiences of women leaders from differing socio-historical-political backgrounds in China, especially those in the city of Shanghai. In doing so, it seeks to examine why particular career patterns and routes to positions of leadership have emerged and how the women themselves understand and…

This article traces the way in which a study by a practitioner researcher into the experience of identity is interwoven into everyday practice, and impacts on the future development of the self and how research is framed. I am a woman, a headteacher, a wife, a mother, and this range of identities, together with the labels and the expectations in…

This paper highlights the intersections of history, gender and educational administration through a case study of an influential woman educator, Anne Whitelaw. It draws upon manuscripts, school archives, school histories, official files and periodicals from "both sides" of the world. Although known in New Zealand as the first…