Fit to Teach

Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century

Winner of the 2005 Critics’ Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association

Honorable Mention, 2006 History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award

From the cover:

Jackie M. Blount offers a history of school workers in the United States who have desired persons of the same sex as well as those who have transgressed conventional gender bounds. Despite recent impressive social and political gains for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons, schools remain a zone of great vulnerability for the larger LGBT movement. This thoroughly researched, vivid, and engaging book details the largely untold story of how this state of affairs developed during the twentieth century. It also profiles some of the remarkable people who have risked their careers by brilliantly organizing for LGBT rights, openly challenging discriminatory laws and practices, and educating their communities about conditions for LGBT school workers and students alike.

Reviews

“There is no more significant topic in the field of teaching and teacher education today than the one addressed in this book. Blount offers a thorough and sensitive examination of this controversial topic.”

—Wayne J. Urban, coauthor of American Education: A History

“The author’s use and description of ‘same-sex desire’ allows for an entire reframing of significant questions related to the history and sociology of education. This work taps into an area that, collectively we (educators and the society at large) know very little about. The author makes a convincing case for our need to know and begins to suggest the policy implications and pedagogical implications of the possession of such knowledge. This is a groundbreaking book.”

—Thalia M. Mulvihill, Ball State University

Available from SUNY Press.

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