Consuming passions: Women and leadership in times of uncertainty

Jill Blackmore
Deakin University

Judyth Sachs
The University of Sydney

Paper presented to the Joint Australian Association of Research in 
Education and Educational Research Association Conference, 
New Partnerships.
Singapore, Nov 25-29 1996


Over the past few decades change has been a constant feature of 
educational systems and organisations. The reforms and restructuring 
characteristic of systems and bureaucracies in Australia, the United 
Kingdom and the United States have not been without cost at the 
professional or personal level to workers in all education sectors from 
school education to higher education. Professionally these changes have 
had significant consequences on the nature and scope of the work of 
administrators and teachers. Teachers and administrators are expected 
to cope with multiple demands created by external pressures to be more 
efficient, effective and economic in how they go about their work. This 
intensification of work is compounded by increasing demands for 
external and internal accountability by governments and the community. 
Within such contexts the split between the personal and professional 
lives of education workers has become blurred, so that for many 
teachers and administrators their work is not left at the school gate 
but taken home and completed after hours. Significantly, the personal 
costs of working in an environment with constant change has meant that 
there has been considerable emotional investment by administrators and 
others working in schools because of the uncertainty and ambiguity 
inherent in this changing environment.

Leadership has in times of social, political and economic uncertainty  
been offered up by management as the solution to a range of complex 
social, political and economic problems.  In the new management 
rhetoric, the so called women's ways of working as leaders - their 
conciliatory, cooperative and consultative approach-- is seen to be the 
way to go. The Karpin Report on Management Education (1994) therefore 
imagines the postmodern manager of the 20th century to be more likely 
to be female and of nonAnglo background, in contrast to the white 
middle class male of the the modernist era.  The contradiction is that 
despite the new management discourses about leadership best practice 
being inclusive of female styles of leadership, that the material and 
discursive conditions which are arising out of a range of highly 
modernist management practices are constraining such possibilities.  
Women principals confront on a daily basis the contradications between 
their own desires and others expectations for  consultative and caring 
approaches to leadership, often the reason for their recruitment,  and  
highly  authoritarian and hierarchical management practices which 
significantly undermines collegial social relationships.  

In this paper we draw on the experiences of a group of women in 
leadership positions in primary and secondary schools in a large 
non-metropolitan region in Victoria and Queensland, Australia during a 
period of educational reform and school restructuring.  For many of 
these women, leadership is a consuming passion in their lives. We argue 
that school reform is a highly emotional activity and that there is a 
need to understand the complexity of the emotional investment of people 
involved in change.  Specifically, there is a need to understand and 

how the women in this study are negotiating the emotional terrain that 
is a consequence of the contradictory nature of change in their 
schools. This, we suggest, has significant consequences in terms of how 
they conceive and act out their leadership roles. 

The Women and Leadership Project

Before developing this argument it is necessary to present some brief 
information about the broader project from  which this paper is 
derived. During 1995 and 1996, we have been collecting data for a 
project on women and educational leadership in an era of educational 
restructuring. At its most broad level, the research aims to 
investigate why some women become educational leaders and some do not 
in schools, universities and Technical and Further Education colleges. 
The project aims to explore the cultural conditions, the personal and 
institutional strategies as well as different approaches to leadership 
that are most conducive to women gaining and maintaining educational 
leadership. The project seeks to contextualise individual choice within 
wider social processes by:

¥identifying the ways in which systemic and structural factors as well 
as more subtle cultural and discursive practices are articulated in 
gender regimes of power in a range of institutional sites, and this in 
turn is effected by individual aspirations, expectations and actions.

¥gaining a better understanding of how women in leadership positions 
and not, perceive administrative work and educational leadership, of 
how others (both males and females) perceive women in these roles, of 
how women perceive themselves and other women as leaders, and how these 
sets of perceptions frame individual women's decisions in the light of 
their own experiences, aspirations and expectations.

¥determining whether particular conditions (personal, institutional, 
professional)enable/disable women's access into formal leadership 
positions, or advantage men more.

¥considering how women negotiate and contest the dominant power 
relations which enable or disable their access to higher positions.

The project works from the proposition that `choices' for women arise 
out of a set of discursive practices and power relationships in 
institutions which position women, individually and collectively, in 
often contradictory ways. Theoretical interest has shifted away from 
viewing women's decisions as merely a matter of `individual choice' to 
considering the ways in which `choice' is constructed socially, 
materially, and psychologically and of how perceived options are 
constrained within the multiple cultural contexts in which choices are 
made. That is, emphasis is more on the interaction between the 
individual and the social. The focus is increasingly upon how 
organisational and occupational cultures are highly gendered , of how 
women and some men are excluded by dominant images of 'good leadership' 
and particular hegemonic organisational cultures, and how  particular 
institutional environments and occupational cultures are more receptive 
to women in leadership.

The focus of the project is upon how life cycle, institutional, 
structural and cultural factors interrelate and interact for individual 
women within specific contexts in ways that neither individualise the 
problem nor deny individual agency. It considers the ways in which 
structural factors, particular dominant organisation cultures, images 
of leadership and perceptions of administrative work and professional 
cultures may exclude or unequally integrate women as individually or 

collectively. In other words, it seeks to identify the disabling 
factors that that prevent women from successfully  negotiating 
organisational cultures. On the other hand, it considers which 
conditions in a specific work context may encourage women to apply for 
formal leadership positions, that is what are the enabling features to 
facilitate women accessing leadership positions. In the process of 
doing this project  it has been clear that women in leadership 
positions are involved in a variety of ways coping and negotiating the 
ambiguity of the everyday experience of living restructuring.   Our 
work is moving in quite intersting ways into new areas of sexuality and 
the body --the corporeality of leadership. In this paper we will direct 
our attention to considering the emotional investment and cost to these 
women in their everyday lives within complex organisations called 
schools.

The Climate of Reform

At the core of restructuring and reform initiatives in Australia is the 
rhetoric of replacing traditional bureaucratic structures and 
procedures with those from the corporate world . As Logan, Sachs and 
Dempster (1996) argue the rhetoric of public sector restructuring and 
reform is both nationalistic and managerial. The nationalistic 
arguments revolve around the call for a necessary connection between 
schooling and the nation's economic, cultural and social development. 
The managerialist arguments are based on the assumption that increased 
productivity is contingent on adopting the practices of industry. One 
key principle is decentralisation thought local self management. 
Blackmore et al( 1994, 1996a) argue that the claims of the advocates of 
self management both locally and globally-- that schools will be more 
autonomous, flexible, address  diverse student needs better, develop 
community and be more efficient and effective-- are not empirically 
well founded.  Indeed, the bottom line of much reform has been 
efficiencies and not quality, and there are disturbing patterns of a 
reconstructed gender labour market in education emerging locally and 
globally .

At the level of the school, the combination of devolution, 
marketisation, reduced expenditure, and the casualisation, feminisation 
and deprofessionalisation of educational work has meant that principals 
and teachers in Victoria are now confronted with difficult dilemmas. In 
1994,  a national report on Australian principals in all state systems 
refers to the 'pressure of unrelenting change which is not seen as 
being necessarily to education's advantage; the increasing, multiple 
and sometimes conflicting expectations which result in an excessive 
workload for the principal filled with a growing tension, stress and, 
increasingly, burnout; and the perception that education has become an 
economic / political football in which the principalship is not 
valued'(Grady et al 1994 : 36). Principals see their energies  being 
deflected away from the core work of education- teaching and learning; 
a depersonalisation of the system; a burgeoning administrative and 
paper warfare; and a focus upon 'being seen to perform' against a range 
of externally imposed 'indicators' and not upon substantial educational 
issues (Blackmore et al 1996, Grady et al 1994). Yet principals are 
positioned in  the principal centred policy of Schools of the Future as 
key change agents. The 'faxing of the crisis down the line' to schools 
has meant that principals in self managing schools are positioned as 
the instruments of radical change over which they have little control 
and in which they have reduced discretionary power due to limited 
budgets (Watkins 1993).   

Paradoxically, in Victoria there has been considerable investment by a 
'radically conservative' Liberal-national Coalition government in Women 

and Leadership Programs eg. Victorian Ministerial Review of Employment 
Equity for Women Teachers (1996). These policy initiatives feed into 
the new management discourses about 'women's special contribution to 
leadership' as good communicators, facilitators, collaborative 
managers, change agents and  the need to better manage diversity 
(Shakeshaft 1987, Adler 1993, Ozga 1993). These 'initiatives' for women 
(mentoring; shadowing of principals; training in financial management, 
application writing and presentation at interview; post graduate 
courses etc) produced an increase from 20% to 30% since 1992 of women 
in the principal class. They also 'captured' the cumulative effects of 
equal opportunity policies of the previous decade with a pool of highly 
eligible and enthusiastic women. At the same time the public sector, 
particularly in health, education and welfare, has been downsized. 
Australian public education systems have been shrinking during the 
1990s, only in part due to demorgraphic shift,  and more doe to down 
sizing, outsourcing, and amalgamations / closures with the effect of 
increased class sizes in larger schools. This 'restructuring' has been 
accompanied by new career structures, moves towards individual 
contracts undermining centralised industrial awards, and the devolution 
of  responsibility  of policy implementation, resource allocation and 
staffing to principals in self managing schools. The effect has been 
the intensification and downgrading of teachers' work conditions at the 
same time as the expectations placed on schools are greater and 
employment conditions of teachers are more precarious.

Once in positions of leadership, many principals have found they lacked 
the power or resources to implement change in the way they desire, as 
the intensification of work and shrinking budgets reduced their 
discretionary capacities (see also Ozga and Walker 1995, Whitty 1996, 
Gewirtz et al 1995 for comparable English studies). More specifically, 
local patterns in education markets increasingly now indicate a 
disturbingly widening gap between rich and poor schools as costs are 
increasingly privatised and school communities are expected to raise 
funds or gain business sponsorship (See also Gordon 1994a, Gewirtz et 
al 1995 ). In Australia, women principals are more often located either 
in schools with high ethnic, socioeconomic and racial diversity because 
of their high social justice profile or smaller rural primary schools 
where the load is doubled as they are both teachers and principals 
(Grady 1994). These are the schools where the resources are most 
limited and spread most thinly to  cover a range of ever expanding 
competing demands: gifted student programs compete with integration 
funding for students with disabilities; English as a Second Language 
classes with drama, art and music; career opportunities and staff 
development for women teachers to encourage them to apply for promotion 
competes with employment of more (and cheaper) contract staff in new 
areas of need. The capacity for principals in less advantaged schools 
to improve outcomes is limited, thus setting them up for failure. 

School restructuring can be seen to have considerable social 
implications beyond schooling itself. Watkins (1990) suggests that 
locating education within a decentralised framework of schools that is 
based on free-market business principles and practices can be seen to 
lead to the disintegration of the communities social fabric. 
Furthermore, Blackmore argues that the market is not gender neutral and 
how the market works with regard to the redefinition of teachers work 
has highly gendered implications ( Blackmore, 1996b; 1996c). 
Alternatively, as Caldwell (1994) argues, self management can be seen 
to enhance community participation and to enrich an emerging social 
fabric that is based on the principle that small is not only the most 
beautiful but also it is the most powerful. Differentiating the merits 
or consequences of school restructuring is not the task of this paper. 
That would be the challenge of another paper ( See for example,  

Blackmore et al 1996a). 

The principal is the linchpin in self managing systems. The principal 
acts as the buffer between the strong centralising tendencies and the 
weaker decentralising tendencies which typify most self managing 
systems ( Blackmore 1997).  Within this new regime educational leaders 
are being asked to do more with diminishing resources, both financial, 
materiel and personnel. Their work is significantly different, in scope 
and intensity from that of their predecessors. For many working within 
the restructured organisation the certainties of their positions, both 
in terms of responsibilities and demands, have changed profoundly. 
Leadership in these situations is considerably more demanding both 
professionally and personally. Within current school restructuring 
debates there is little attention paid to the emotional costs or 
consequences associated with these changes. This paper is concerned 
with how restructuring at the system and school level impacts on the 
emotional labour of women in leadership positions.

Emotional management
While all principals are positioned ambiguously and in contradictory 
ways by recent reforms, the issue is still highly gendered. Principals 
are being positioned as 'emotional managers' in schools in a quasi- 
market education system which is under increased financial constraint, 
accountability and social pressure for easy solutions. Indeed, there is 
an increased dissonance between the employer's job descriptions of the 
principalship and the attributes of leadership so valued and deemed 
necessary by principals and teachers --the former prioritises 
management, public relations, financial skills and strong leadership; 
the latter prioritises educational vision, people skills, compassion, 
trust, genuine love of the job, humility, respect and pride of others 
achievements, reciprocity, life long learning, collegiality and 
professionality (Grady 1994 : 36, Blackmore 1995). Principals 
increasingly  look to their people skills as they are required to do 
the emotional management work of the system as teacher morale falls to 
a low due to the intensification of labour and youth unemployment 
remains high and intransigent (Blackmore 1996b).  Women principals in 
these studies spoke of the tension between the market survival and 
their educational beliefs, and the impact this had on 
principal/teachers staff relations. 

So I am caught in that you almost have to create an environment of fear 
about our very survival  in order for people re-committed to what is 
important in education again. 

Recent change theory in management literature (eg.Senge 1990, Drucker 
1992) has  also focused upon creativity and strong corporate cultures 
in effective organisations. The current management guru, Peter Drucker, 
is well aware that the dilemma for management in flatter, less 
hierarchical organisations with more autonomous  multiskilled workers 
is how to tap into the creativity of intellectual labour the essence of 
the new productivity but also how to control them (Waring, 1990). One 
way is to channel their desires and pleasures into  organisational 
ends. Corporate culture is just a better way of managing the managers 
by capturing their 'hearts' as well as their minds in ways that make 
coercive power unnecessary (Hochschild, 1983). Emotion becomes a 
commodity itself to be exploited. But the 'new' management  which 
focuses upon  'strong corporate culture' to bind together the messiness 
of change fails to address the level of emotional investment in 
bringing about or resisting change. First, it ignores the 
superficiality of adherence of many workers to 'strong' corporate 
cultures and their self governance of emotions (Flam 1993). Anxiety and 
fear in uncertain employment times is readily converted into, and can 

be read as, work enthusiasm. Second, while there is a renewed interest 
in organisational theory about emotions ( eg.Fineman 1993), it is 
largely psychologically oriented. But emotion also has political, 
ethical and moral dimensions which are often ignored. People have a 
high level of emotional investment in their values and professional 
beliefs-- and express their concern about shifting political terrains 
in highly emotional ways. Third, the expression of emotion serves a 
communicative role in developing a sense of community, a tolerance of 
ambiguity and greater understanding through empathy. In denying overt 
displays of emotion in appropriate contexts, the individualisation of 
social life is further attenuated to the detriment of a sense of 
community in the political and social sense. Denial of emotion is a 
form of boundary maintenance work to control workers because it depicts 
emotion as irrational, subjective and an individual pathology.  

And when recent management literature does concentrate on emotion -it 
is in the positive sense of passion, enthusiasm, verve, zest and 
empathy. Little is said about how 'feeling individuals worry, envy, 
brood, become bored, play, despair, plot, hate, hurt and so forth' 
(Fineman, 1993, p.10). So while emotion has the susceptibility to be 
both productive or non productive for organisations, repressing 
'negative' emotion is a major aspect of organisational control. 
Crucially, the socially connected emotions embarrassment, shame and 
guilt are central to many aspect of organisational order. They are the 
emotional springs to self control...they are emotions which relate to 
how we thinks others are seeing us, or go our performances are judged. 
The discomfort of personal embarrassment can itself ensure that most 
people walk do more or less the right ( organisational) thing with 
clients, customers, colleagues and bosses (Fineman,1993, p. 17). 
Particular emotional displays are seen to be counterproductive (stress, 
anger, fear, alienation, lack of  job satisfaction) at the very time 
that  restructuring has led to the intensification of work, the 
colonisation of private life as work moves into the private domain both 
in terms of time and energy. There is little space for emotional 
release.

Jeff Hearn (1993) argues that conventional wisdom constructs both men 
and organisations as unemotional. The public is also constructed as 
un-emotional compared to the emotional domains of the private and 
family on a masculine / feminine bipolar divide. Indeed, the dualism of 
mainstream educational administration thought positions emotion (as the 
feminine) in opposition to reason ( the masculine), and therefore not 
to be countenanced. To display emotion is to indicate weakness. Emotion 
is personalised and individualised as a pathology and not to do with 
dominant models of strong leadership. As Hearn suggest, the 
conventional wisdom  is powerful in perpetuating mythologies about the 
rationality of organisations and men, but is not an accurate 
representation of what actually happens in organisational life. 
Further, he suggests that if organisational life is deconstructed, the 
mythology of rationality is underpinned by a view from those who are in 
less powerful positions that 'men are too emotional, too much out of 
control especially when it comes to anger, sexuality and violence'( 
Hearn 1993 p. 143). But he also points out that management is about 
managing emotions -- and balancing between control of one's own 
emotions and others-- but is still constructed as non-emotional. 
'Management, men and emotions are inextricably bound together in power' 
because men largely run organisations' (Hearn 1993 p. 143). Management 
men control the emotional labour of women and less powerful men, who in 
turn manage the emotions of others--clients, patients, lay people, 
members of the public'.

Much of the literature on the strong corporate culture, a key concept 

draw on in educational reform in Australia (Angus 1994, Ball 1995) 
tends to assume that the 'social glue' of strong cultures results from 
shared visions and that success was a primary motivating factor (as 
represented in effective schools literature). But Fineman (1993) 
suggests thAT fear, in a period of rapid change and uncertainty, Is an 
equally 'binding' factor. A female principal spoke of how the current 
relationships in the new model of decisionmaking with reversion of 
authority to the principal 'was infantilising not only the kids but the 
bloody staff as well' by constructing a dependency upon the principal 
rather than professional relationship premised upon equality and mutual 
engagement. Just as the caring aspects of teachers work is being 
extended towards students (Acker 1995), so the caring aspects of the 
principalship is being extended to teachers in times of change. But it 
not a positive or productive form of care which develops out of 
mutually beneficial relationships in which individuals learn the 
benefits and pleasure gained from caring for someone rather than just 
being cared for  ie reciprocal engagement (Noddings 1992). It is more 
about being in some sense 'protected' which derives out of power 
relationships which are uneven, and in which the more powerful protect 
the powerless. This often can revert to control rather than care. 
Principals described themselves as a 'buffer' against the deluge of 
policies and change initiatives so that the teachers could get on with 
the real work of teaching and learning ( Blackmore et al 1996). Acting 
as a buffer was at significant emotional, physical if not moral cost to 
principals.

Even within the feminist literature on women in educational 
administration upon which the popularised discourse of 'women's styles 
of leadership'has drawn,  emotion has been the missing dimension. There 
is a significant literature about women's preferences for more 
democratic and collegial forms of leadership, about their interpersonal 
skills and caring and sharing approaches in education (eg.Noddings, 
1992; Shakeshaft ,1987; ). Women's maternal (and pedagogical) skills 
are, in this literature, translatable into leadership skills. Women 
principals are expected to good at handling people and all their 
emotions. 

The language of care which is naturalised as women's emotional labour 
needs to be treated with care. Nancy Folbre speaks of the notion of 
caring labour--how it often refers to child care or of elderly with the 
end results of being cared for. She suggests that 

any labour can be described as 'caring': in the sense that it result in 
activities that help meet the need of others...Also, people 'care' 
about many things other than people:  animals, vegetables, their 
environment, their principles and so on. But the real challenge of the 
phrase lies in its emotional connotations, as a type of labour distinct 
from that which most economists analyse in terms of measurable output 
per hour (Folbre, 1995, pp.73-4)

Folbre (1995, pp. 74-5) defines caring labour as 'labour undertaken and 
out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no 
expectation of immediate pecuniary reward'.  She argues that this is 
what motivates many individuals, usually women, to care in a voluntary 
sense for children, the elderly and sick. Caring is about 
responsibility,  altruism and reciprocity. One can also be caring 
dispassionately for a particular individual. This is not to suggest 
that it is totally altruistic. Indeed, caring and doing emotional 
labour can be satisfying and lead to mutually a satisfactory reciprocal 
relations ( as in collegiality in teaching). But it is dangerous for 
one to specialise in non- market labour ( usually in the home and 
usually related to care). One could argue that now principals have 

extended their caring labour into the educational market in that they 
are bearing the emotional burden of  systems in crisis.

The image of the teacher (and leader) as nurturer...offers service, 
dedication, patience, and love as the dominant trope for teaching, 
making teaching full women's work, work that needs no financial 
compensation or reduced loads for the time that is spent. To ask for 
money or fewer students or "A life" only evokes the crass masculinist 
values of power and self interestedness. The nurturer, then much remain 
silent and thereby deny the contributions of and reinscribe the 
invisibility of women's work ( quoted in Acker 1995, p. 40). 

But the maintenance of the dualisms which positions emotional labour in 
opposition to intellectual labour presents a dangerous divide for 
women. 

Women principals can be trapped as they are expected to provide the 
positive and nourishing  emotions of care, warmth patience and calm 
which maintain the 'greedy organisations'(Cozer 1974). In so doing deny 
their negative emotions of passion and anger which are not acceptable 
in the corporate culture. Women merely have to exercise their 
'positive' female skills and change will occur.To display their 
emotions even in justifiable contexts is their downfall-- both in terms 
of their own survival and in terms of being seen to be 'weak', 
non-rational, psychologically inadequate or inappropriate managers. For 
as Hargreaves ( 1995,p. ) comments, for teachers some emotions are 
still more acceptable than others--

carefully regulated and tempered emotions like warmth, patience, 
strength, calm, caring,  concern, building trust and expressing 
vulnerability are preferred and privileged over anger, rage, passion 
and sometimes even love; over emotions which are portrayed as fiercer, 
more negative, intensive, regressive and unruly in nature. 

These are highly gendered views of emotion. Marian Court argues:

that the expression of anger has been seen as culturally acceptable for 
men, but not for women. Sanctions against women's anger has long been 
applied.Within modern popular discourse negative terms such as dragon, 
spitfire, bitch and nag are applied to women and girls, but not to men 
and boys.  Women's anger is associated here with characteristics of 
being sharp tongued, cruelly nasty, whiningly unpleasant or 
persistently annoying , while a woman expressing her anger with tears 
risks being described as typically emotional or manipulative (Court, 
1993, p. 151) 

There are few equivalent phrases about male anger. So 'emotions, while 
they may be linked to mental and physical states, are also social and 
ideological constructs that simplify and dilute contradictions from 
thought, feeling and action' ( Hearn 1993 p. 146). So while women 
principals may be seen to have considerable power they are both 
vulnerable and strong. While in a privileged situation, they still 
encounter various forms of discrimination and institutionalised male 
dominance (Chase, 1994).

The Emotional Labour of  Educational Leadership

The discourses of leadership privilege headwork over heartwork. That 
is, the intellect and the mind shape and control educational practice 
while, the emotions and feeling which are central to human interaction 
are left unacknowledged and in some cases even denied. We argue, that 
the social activities of schools, the interactions between 

administrators and teachers, teachers and teachers, teachers and 
parents, teachers and students, students and students and so on produce 
as well as reflect emotions, as those of us who have worked in schools 
well know. Any time spent either in staffrooms, playgrounds or 
classrooms affirm the emotional dynamics of these sites, how they can 
be predictable and yet at the same time unpredictable. How the meanings 
of these emotions may be transparent to some while alien to others. Or 
how certain conditions, physical, social or temporal, may produce 
different kinds of emotions in various individuals. Women principals, 
when asked about what they find pleasurable in leadership speak of 
seeing children gaining a sense of place and belonging, self esteem, 
getting a program changed to better address the needs of kids, helping 
a parent.  

In these respects life in schools is characterised by the interplay of 
competing emotions. That schools  are emotional arenas is self evident. 
The passions of leadership itself, care for students' and teachers' 
welfare, impatience with bureaucracy, exhilaration and joy at students' 
success, and even grief at the loss of a student or staff member or 
graduates at the end of the year are all emotions that are felt keenly 
by teachers and administrators working in schools. Whilst there is a 
resilient echo within the literature on meoaiton, that emotional 
experiences are somehow distinct and separate from rational behaviours, 
our assertion tha schools are experienced as highly emotional 
organisations actively disputes a dichotomous view of emotional 
experience and rationality.  

Rational views of administration also have their own ideological 
baggage; about how schools should work, about the nature of individual 
motivation and organisations. Particular rationalities are embedded in 
the processes which have re-constructed principal /teacher relations in 
recent times. New career paths assume that teachers are motivated 
through monetary rewards and not personal and professional job 
satsifaction. Principals in Schools of the Future, for example, in the 
name of school autonomy and shifting the responsibility for making the 
important decisions about distribution of resources to the local, have 
greater discretionary power over teachers with regard to the allocation 
of work and rewards in schools, staff appraisal, recruitment and 
curriculum priorities. This in itself is welcome to many principals. In 
the wider context of the shift towards casual contractual employment of 
teachers within the system rather than previous tenure of position in 
the public service, the principal's power was heightened. New 
hierarchies had emerged.  Principal's work is marked as different from 
teaching with different performance bonuses, decisionmaking 
responsibilities and new industrial relations awards.  Both principals 
and teachers are conscious of the shift in the locus of power away from 
teachers to principals, in the ways principals practised leadership, 
and particularly  in principals' relationships with staff at a personal 
level (Blackmore, 1996; Nicholls and Ozga, 1994). The restructuring of 
teachers' work there has significant implications for the change in the 
social and emotional relationships in schools-- in which the negative 
emotions of guilt, fear, despair  and anger are increasingly evident 
but which principals must control. 

In particular, the way schools are organised and how people are 
socialised to behaviour within various circumscribed limits indicates 
that norms of rationality are invoked to regulate emotionality 
(Ashforth and Humphrey 1995). Andy Hargreaves observes that in the 
current climate of school reform acknowledgment of these emotions has 
been regulated away. Hargreaves (1995: 25-26) argues that: 

in one sense, passion, desire and other intense feelings, emotions have 

always been central to  teaching. but governments, bureaucracies and 
even professional developers have ignored them, driven them 
underground, or sought to tame and regulate them in pursuit of 
`technical efficiency, planned change , and rational reform that have 
characterised the modern mission. ...joy has been planned away by 
meetings, mandates and school development and growth plans. Anxiety, 
frustration  and guilt have become widespread consequences, burnout and 
cynicism their legacies in the classroom.

A problem for many administrators is how to manage or even control this 
desire so that is does not transgress the unwritten codes of 
professional behaviour. Hochschild (1983) refers to this as emotional 
labour. 

This labour requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to 
sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind 
in others. ... This kind of labour calls for a coordination of mind and 
feelings, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honour as 
deep and integral to our personality. (Hochschild, 1983, 7)

Labour in the feeling world consists of learning and maintaining the 
proper affective tone (by proper management, gesture, appearance, words 
and deeds) (Van Maanen and Kunda 1989, 54). Being a leader in schools 
involves immense amounts of emotional labour. This is not only in terms 
of performance or `acting out' feelings superficially, but also in 
terms of consciously evoking the necessary emotional engagement 
required to undertake one's job effectively in one's own eyes but also 
in the eyes of others. This emotional labour, is informed by `feeling 
rules' (Hochschild 1983) which are contextually and situationally bound 
which provide a framework for judging our own and others emotional 
presentations.

A challenge for many women and some men in leadership positions, is the 
management of their emotions. A code of unwritten rules circumscribes 
how one is to act in public arenas. Hochschild (1983) and Hargreaves 
(1995) both suggest that these feelings are bureaucratised. Feeling 
rules are for these women habitual and automatic they are a by product 
of the complex process of occupational training, interpersonal 
relationships and organisational experience (Putnam and Mumby 1993). 
These rules are part of an unwritten `professional' code of behaviour 
which directs women to be consistently compassionate, empathic and 
understanding with students and staff. These feeling rules are implicit 
in their professional area; fairness and professional detachment 
disguises and defends against any private feelings of pain, despair, 
uncertainty and so on; feelings which would otherwise interfere with 
the professional relationship (Fineman 1993).

Interviews with women administrators in primary and secondary schools 
made it very clear that there were implicit rules which were learned 
very early on in their teaching careers about emotions and their 
display. The most consistent and dominant of these was that `you never 
showed that you couldn't cope'. Being in control of your feelings and 
emotions was important if you wanted to be taken seriously in the job 
and if you were to be rewarded by promotion. Hall (1995) describes this 
as managing your inner self was the basis for managing others and the 
environment. To this end a public and professional face was developed 
by all of the women interviewed as part of their professional persona. 
All of the women interviewed spoke of being professional and presenting 
themselves as professionals. Being professional was a code word for 
being in control, being perceived as efficient by both peers, 
colleagues and members of the community and was expressed in their 
dress and general demeanour. As one of the principals reported `they 

all think I'm an iron lady, that nothing has affected me'. However, she 
herself claims that the emotional costs of having a difficult staff are 
very high.

The women

We have interviewed over  60 women teachers and principals in primary 
and secondary schools in Victoria and Queensland. The data we draw on 
here will only be from those who are in principalship or deputy 
principalship. many of the women are principals of 'difficult' schools, 
with transient populations and with many of the families on welfare and 
in lower socio-economic areas. These schools, are in the main, 
considered to be 'difficult' because of the nature of their catchment 
areas, high unemployment, welfare families, high levels of domestic 
violence and lower levels of educational achievement than is the norm.

All of these women had stories to tell of their lives of working in a 
system that was undergoing significant change. Their stories were ones 
of courage, pain, disappointment, dissatisfaction and even depression. 
All of these stories make it very clear that effective leadership is 
about managing emotions or making emotions invisible. They point to how 
organisational and personal change is about understanding the emotional 
investments, of acknowledging the personal costs of changing or not 
changing. Jill Blackmore (1996) points out that these are the aspects 
of leadership which tend to be neglected, played down, even denigrated 
in the literature, largely because emotionality has been cast in 
opposition to, and lesser than rationality in highly gendered ways. It 
is to the emotional labour of these women that I now turn. 

Emotions at work

The complexity of life in schools and the daily exigencies of their 
professional and personal lives gave rise to a variety of emotions. In 
varying degrees these women internalised their `corporate identity' in 
ways which came to govern their emotions as well as their behaviours, 
at least in the workplace (Blackmore, 1996). For all of these women 
there was pleasure and pain in their jobs. 

Most of the women interviewed experienced disappointment and grief 
about not getting jobs they had applied for. For all of them, their 
grief and disappointment was not something that could be shared among 
staff at the school or expressed publicly. Several women told stories 
of going into the bathroom and crying their eyes out at the 
disappointment at being passed over for promotion yet again. Once they 
got this out of their system they `put on some makeup and faced the 
world again'. They felt that their private agony and pain could not be 
seen within the school grounds by their colleagues. This private 
dimension of emotional labour was not something that was talked about, 
or even acknowledged publicly, but certainly was part of the implicit 
emotional rules that was part of the complex tapestry of professional 
life. As one principal said `I had to put on a brave face, and not let 
anyone know how devastated I felt'. Another secondary principal, who 
had been acting principal for twelve months, missed out on the 
substantive position in the school to a male outsider.  Her response 
was `I will work collaboratively and cooperatively with the new 
principal. I am a professional, and will have to put my own 
disappointment behind me'. Fortunately, she was transferred into 
Central Office to take a different kind of job. However, for Jill, the 
initial disappointment of not being short listed for a job was a real 
blow to her self esteem and sense of professional worth. She said that 
`initially I felt that I would never make it.  ... After some time 
though I knew that I could do'. By working is a variety of acting 

positions Jill found out that she could do these jobs. Her success in 
these jobs gave her confidence and made her `more determined to 
achieve`. For many, frequent knock backs in applications was too 
emotionally demanding. They just gave up. 

Disappointment was also the result of being let down by other members 
of staff. Anne reported that some staff were threatened by some of her 
new policies and set out to discredit her and to make her life in the 
new school difficult. An incident where one of the disruptive teachers 
behaved inappropriately in the eyes of Anne exemplifies the 
professional disappointment felt by some women for the actions of their 
staff.

Disappointment and being let down by colleagues and the system was 
closely associated with feelings of isolation and loneliness.  This 
loneliness was both emotional and professional. Judy, principal of a 
large Victorian secondary college, commented 'I feel very much alone I 
think. I feel very much alone because the few people that you probably 
could work with within the school are just as busy and frenetic'. In 
part, she attributed this to the fact that she was new to the school 
and lacked longer social relationships with the staff and in the 
community. At the same time, she saw this isolation as being part of 
the job because ' you tend to distance yourself because you've been 
appointed in as the principal and I mean you have to be careful about 
using colleagues' and not being seen to favour individuals or groups. 
At the same time this did not provide her with space to indicate anger, 
although she said the office staff, as relatively neutral , were used 
to her sounding off occasionally. Judy was also aware that she had to 
maintain a constant display of energy to keep everything going, there 
were periods of emotional and physical exhaustion and despair. After a 
particularly bad day she went and cried through all of   'Sleepless in 
Seattle' 'Tuesday was a much better day,because , like the film, it was 
really nice and things worked happily ever after in the end. Both the P 
and VP used  humour as a means of reducing tension and getting people 
to feel more comfortable

Marshall (1993) talks about the politics of denial where many women 
principals down play their isolation and the sexism of the system and 
their colleagues in order to survive. In a region where most of the 
senior positions were taken up by men the lack of supportive female 
colleagues and the sexism of their male colleagues was talked about by 
some women. Having people who did not share your vision or philosophy 
of education compounded the loneliness felt by some. Anne reported 
that:

... after having spent two days at a principals conference `I looked 
around, I did a lot of soul searching last week end, because there is 
about 20 out of 190 who I can identify with. I went home to my family 
and said ` I wonder if its just me. Is there something wrong with me 
that I can't ...(at this point the interview was suspended because of 
the emotional pain at recalling the story) I need to be more stately 
and less passionate about things and more arrogant in a way. I watch 
the male and think `oh yeah. I don't fit the mould, so when they look 
at you they don't see Principal ...

However, this isolation was less so in schools where the administrative 
team worked closely together. At one high school, the administrative 
team was all women. Here being part of a team helped to alleviate some 
of the stress of working in a demanding school, but the stress and 
isolation was still there on occasion. Margaret however, felt that 
being part of an administrative team where I knew Liz so well `made me 
feel very confident. We had trust, mutual respect ... having a good 

staff made my job much easier.'

Several women described themselves as being `not much of a networker'. 
In some cases women talked to friends outside of the school about 
problems and issues that confronted them in their schools. They had 
`lots of informal telephone conversations'. Again with these women 
there was a wariness about asking for advice, for as Kay, a secondary 
school principal, indicated

you have to be careful about the people you ask for advice from ... I 
wouldn't ask for advice from another principal, especially if it was 
male because I would be afraid that they would be making judgements 
about my not coping. 

In many schools, women principals looked for collegiality and emotional 
support outside their school. Networks amongst principals were often 
formed for this purpose. Usually informal, such networks often replaced 
for women the types of support provided to men through the principal's 
associations  which were, by many women,  not seen to be supportive of 
women. In one inner suburban area, a group of female primary school 
principals formed such a network. But even these relationships were 
fraught with dilemmas and conflict. In an increasingly competitive 
market system, these women had agreed as part of the same 
neighbourhood, to put out a joint publication about their schools to 
local preschools and kindergarterns and not advertise independently in 
competition with each other. It was part of the broader commitment to 
public education and the realisation that competition was often at cost 
for individual schools.  But one school, faced with a more 
entrepeneurial council and declining enrolments, embarked on an 
advertising campaign. The principal, confronted with community pressure 
and matters of survival, was conscious of what was seen by her 
colleagues as betrayal. This issue left her with considerable emotional 
turmoil and guilt, and required significant time to mend her collegial 
relationships. 

Guilt was a common emotion expressed by all of the women. Guilt was 
mainly their own construction and developed in response to the 
pressures of balancing home and school life. Having a supportive 
partner, who helped with home obligations eased but did not diminish 
these feelings of guilt. Balancing home and school became more 
problematic for single parents and women with unsupportive partners. 
Not being at home when the children got home, having to work at night 
and sometimes on weekends or not being able to attend school functions 
such as sporting carnivals when their children were at other schools 
caused some anxiety and guilt for some women as the following 
statements attest. The following from Brenda who is recently divorced 
indicates the personal and professional dilemma she is confronted with 
on a daily basis.

I have a 12 year old at the moment who is on the verge at the moment of 
becoming a school refusal. So I've got to think `hey whose child is 
more important, my 12 year old or somebody else's? Do I forsake my own 
child? I'm driving nearly an hour each day to get to work; that means 
he's at home from 7 o'clock in the morning by himself - he has to get 
himself off to school. I make his lunch and the rest of it and at the 
moment nothing has happened. But he's teased me at times, that's at 12, 
that's grade 7, come grade 8, grade 9, I don't really know.

Julie, a newly appointed acting Deputy Principal, makes similar 
comments. She talks of being perpetually exhausted and of having to cut 
down on outside commitments, which had previously included teaching 
part-time at a university and working at various fitness centres. (This 

was part of her life that gave her great personal satisfaction). The 
competing demands of home and work added to her exhaustion and her 
feeling guilty about home commitments. For Julie:

Two years ago I would not have contemplated doing this. Now that my 
children are older I think that I can manage it. My children feel that 
they are loosing out, although I leave earlier in the morning that I 
used to leave, I still do everything for them that needs to be done. 
I'm still there of a night time for them and weekends and don't start 
my work at home until after their needs are met. Ultimately they whinge 
a lot, but they also have to learn to give a bit because I've given 
year and years and years to their needs.

Time and competing demands placed on women was a constant theme that 
emerged during the interviews; demands on time, not having enough time 
and so on. Robyn, as secondary school principal comments:

Time is a major issue. I would really have to say that if I didn't have 
a family, the job would be a hell of a lot easier because then it 
wouldn't matter if I came in to school on Saturday, or it wouldn't 
matter if I didn't get home until 7 o'clock every night. but it does 
matter. I do have someone to take to sport, I do have someone who 
participates in sporting activities. Who needs his mum to see him...

Anne, who was another new principal talked about having to balance her 
life. In particular she mentioned that after regional meetings she 
declined offers to have a drink `with the boys'. 

I have other priorities in my life. I distance myself from a drink 
because I don't want to do that ... I want to go home ...I've got two 
young children so balancing a career and home life certainly takes 
priority over them having their little boys games and I don't need to 
be part of it, and they seem to accept that, I don't participate.

Quality of life was seen to be important to all of these women. Chris, 
indicated that she had to work hard at doing other things than work. 
She made time to spend with her family, but also indicated that because 
of the stress an strains of the job she had been sick during the school 
holidays on various occasions. Jane, seen as a successful principal by 
many of her peers, indicates that she couldn't have got to where she is 
now if she had children. However, the stresses and strains of being a 
high achiever, and in her words `a perfectionist' has had an effect on 
her health.

Satisfaction that the job provided was important for all of the women 
interviewed. It was one of the pleasures of the job that the women 
talked about. Getting a sense of a job well done, that was either 
acknowledged by peers or by past students was frequently reported. For 
Anne, who described the difficulties of her job in some detail and 
indicated that she had been told that she had been `set up to fail' it 
was this satisfaction that sustained and energised her. She talked 
about `making a difference and touching the lives of those kids'. The 
delayed gratification and the pleasure that this has elicited is clear 
in the following interview extract:

I had a girl ring me, 2 or 3 years after I've worked with her and she 
rang up and said Mrs G. I've ...how did you find me? She said `Oh I've 
tracked you down, she said `Remember me?' Yes and she said `Oh a friend 
of mine is a street kid and she's 13 and she's illiterate and she's 
been excluded from all the schools and she wants someone to teach her 
how to read and I told her `Well you could do it'. Oh its a tall order, 
I'm not sure I can. You see that's where I get all the pleasures from.


For Liz, building something from the ground up was very gratifying. 
Being a leader and making a difference to kids was very important. 
Giving people the opportunity to `fly with ideas' was part of the 
excitement of teaching. Liz took the view of `why not ...what have we 
got to loose ...everything is a learning experience ... lets not stand 
still'. This was all part of the excitement and exhilaration of doing 
her job and an integral part of the pleasures of being an 
administrator. 

All of the women spoke of feeling frustrated with many aspects of the 
jobs. Few of them spoke of feeling anger or even love. This is an 
interesting point because anger is not seen to be a professionally 
sanctioned or appropriate emotion. The unwritten emotion rules meant 
that anger or the more unacceptable emotion of rage had to be 
controlled. Nias (1989) sees intense emotion as a source of dangerous 
volatility in the safe places that classrooms and schools should 
otherwise be. Thoits (1985) goes as far to argue that expressions of 
intense emotion, whether negative or positive, tend to be unacceptable, 
except under certain conditions (e.g. celebrating a significant 
achievement) since they are believed to impair routine task 
performance. To display emoaitons

It may well be for these women that they have consciously or 
unconsciously developed feeling rules that act to circumscribe their 
behaviour. Alternatively, behaviour cues, such as a side glance, an 
embarrassed silence or a slight change in body position from one of 
their peers is enough to provide a rule reminder. It is this, what 
Goleman (1995) calls, emotional intelligence that helps people to 
manage their emotions in ways that are socially acceptable and 
appropriate. Within social interactions emotional intelligence provides 
a basis for preventing anger turning into rage, happiness into hysteria 
and sadness into despair. All of which are significant in the emotional 
labour of people working in complex and demanding jobs. 

These behaviour rules and emotional intelligence serve to regulate the 
emotional of people working in schools. Expressions of love and rage 
are effectively `neutralized' (Ashforth and Humphrey 1995) because 
these are seen as unacceptable emotions to exhibit in schools. Emotions 
such as caring, concern and empathy are `prescribed' (Ashforth and 
Humphrey 1995) emotions that are appropriate for women to display in 
their administrative and leadership positions. Not surprisingly then, 
as Ashforth and Humphrey 1995, 105) argue, `emotional prescriptions 
typically reflect a meld or organizational and extra-organizational 
influences'.

These stories tell us that leadership, particularly in a period of 
rapid change,  is about emotions -- desire, fear, despair, caring,  
disillusionment, pain, anger, stress, anxiety and loneliness.  A key 
aspect of organisational and personal  change is about understanding 
the emotional investments of different individuals and groups 
(Hargreaves 1995). Yet these are the aspects of leadership which tend 
to be neglected, played down, even denigrated in the literature, 
largely because emotionality has been cast in opposition to 
rationality; the former as lesser and the latter privileged. 

The coping strategies: resistance, controlling, distancing, exit.

The women principals in these projects were therefore faced with both 
managing their own and other people's emotions. They did so in a range 
of ways. Principals develop  social defense systems which they practice 
to face the anxiety that threatens to overwhelm them. Some of the 

strategies include reducing familiarity by increasing space between 
themselves and their staff; by depersonalisation through the 
quantification of personal data; by developing a rhetoric of coping or 
detachment and coping; and by  doing checks and counterchecks with 
regard to who makes the final decision and a well as rituals such as 
task lists and regulated relationships as routine (Fineman, 1993, p. 
29-30). Most women called upon all of these strategies at particular 
moments. For many, the emotional work of organisations was physical as 
well as emotional . One principal responded when asked how she reacted 
to the demands put upon her: 'Anger. Chest pains and pains down my 
right arm are common'.

One defense for the conflict and contradictions arising from the 
dissonance between felt and displayed emotion is disengagement or 
distancing.  A  typical response of many of these principals to being 
expected to act in ways which they found antithetical even repugnant  
to their personal values, was to 'distance' themselves from the 
decision, and to say  'We have been directed to do this'. One female 
principal commented:

I guess the thing at a philosophical or value level that I have found 
most difficult is lack of acknowledgment by this government that 
students who have traditionally been seen as disadvantaged ( disabled, 
poor, kids of non English speaking background, homeless....) probably 
don't deserve anything different. The special needs staffing was 
slashed away from under us...I guess what you do is to try and make the 
best of what you can. If I had that decision I couldn't have morally 
made it. But given that it was put upon me, you make the best you can 
of it.... I guess it is a coping mechanism, because if you get angry 
about this you lose your effectiveness,  and it is not good to the kids 
or staff.  

Marshall and Mitchell (1989) refer to the strong pressure of  
'organisational socialisation' which occurs due to  the 'formal, 
authoritarian, detachment orientation' of education systems which is 
disabling to more collegial and connected, caring and sharing 
approaches. One middle manager in education spoke about how she had 
come to survive through frequent restructuring : 'the cardinal rule was 
not to cry or show emotion as this was judged to be a weakness'. 
Emotion is viewed as antipathetic to  management, a private and 
personal matter, and that emotion undermines the appearance of being 
'objective', a key  signifier of administration (Gray, 1993, p. 109). 
Gray comments:
 
The plea for objectivity is often a way of blocking the confrontation 
of the affective realities and preventing a personal reflective 
process. Women may be as ready to block as men, and the ethos of school 
management has been one that encourages Heads to perceive themselves as 
the most objective and least emotional members of staff ( Gray 1993 p. 
109).

While this 'distancing of emotion' temporarily shifts the immediate 
responsibility from principals, many speak of how over time its begins 
to make significant inroads into their sense of self and 
professionalism.  For some, the emotional energy arising out of the 
dissonance between their beliefs, values and their actions is too 
great. Their response was to exit the organisation as a form of protest 
which is seen to be less disloyal  and dangerous than speaking out.  
One principal took an early retirement package after being in the 
department of education for nearly 40 years and a principal for 
eighteen. She had overseen significant and numerous educational 
restructurings. But in the most recent, she felt that she could no 

longer work with the same level of commitment and energy as before 
because of the continuous undermining of her capacities as a leader to 
maintain what she felt was sound educational practice or her ability to 
exercise moral and professional  judgement. She also felt that there 
was increasingly close surveillance and that 'the rules implicit in the 
profession were becoming more rigid- about being rational, objective 
and efficient'.

In the context of devolved governance and emerging educational markets, 
many women principals expressed the negative aspects of emotion-- 
anger, despair, disillusionment-- arising out of their incapacity to 
produce the types of changes they felt educationally desirable. This 
was attributed to the lack of resources and policy constraints, the 
system's devaluing of teaching and principals, the low morale of 
teachers due to community perceptions about 'the failure of public 
education, the 'disappearance' of issues of equity and social justice 
out of educational policy, and the culture of compliance and 
competition endemic in the system. This countered their earlier 
pleasure of being in the position of leadership and able to produce 
change which was of benefit to their students. It also points to the 
culture of care which entraps many women principals.

Conclusion

The myth of rationality dominates the discourses shaping the activities 
and life in schools of administrators and teachers. Putman and Mumby 
(1993) suggest that in organisations rationality is privileged as an 
ideal for effective organisational life. In this respect schools are no 
different from other organisations. Accordingly, reason, cognition and 
thinking become processes linked to rationality, while passion, affect 
and feeling become indices of emotionality. In daily life rationality 
is seen to be a virtue and revered while emotionality is seen to be an 
encumbrance and reviled. It is seen to be an inappropriate dimension of 
life in schools as in other organisations.

In effect, the power of discourses of rationality is that they are 
subtle technologies of control. They provide the justification and 
legitimation for reason dominating affect or emotions. As Lutz (1990: 
72) observes people typically talk about controlling emotions, handling 
emotional situations as well as emotional feeling and dealing with 
people, situations and emotions. This was certainly the case for the 
women interviewed in the study. Great importance is attached for the 
necessity of emotional control for the effective and efficient 
functioning of organisations. A set of roles - one strong and defensive 
and the other weak and invasive - that are hierarchized and linked with 
gender roles (Lutz 1990) are produced and reproduced. Women are seen to 
be emotional while men are seen to be rational. The emotional dimension 
of school life and leadership is one of the great silences in the 
analysis of the diversity and complexity of these sites. 

It is to the emotional dimension of school life that we have focussed 
on in this paper. The emotional costs of school reform and 
restructuring have been left silent in much of the literature. much of 
this literature focuses on systems and changes in organisational 
arrangements and how the work of people has been intensified and 
changed significantly. However, apart from recent work by Andy 
Hargreaves (1995, forthcoming) and the identification of the subjective 
aspects of change by Michael Fullan (1991) and the gendered nature of 
emotional work in the market ( Blackmore 1996) there is little work 
that focuses on  the personal costs of reform, particularly the 
emotional costs of people individually or collectively.

In this paper we have indicated the complexity of the emotional labour 
of a group of women working in primary and secondary schools. We have 
suggested that schools are complex emotional arenas where they are 
constantly assailed by the emotional demands placed on them by their 
peers, students and members of the community. Furthermore, we have 
indicated that the emotions of these women are regulated by emotional 
rules that are implicit within the organisational ethos of the 
education system and the school itself. These women's emotions are 
managed by the contextual exigencies in which they work, through 
emotional rules and their own emotional intelligence as much as they 
manage their emotions themselves.

There is a need to undertake more systematic work on the area of 
emotions and emotional management within schools during periods of 
restructuring and change. Following Fineman (1993) we need to establish 
an emotional research agenda. To this end, some areas for future 
investigation might be: what are the competing emotionalities between 
administrators, teachers and students?, what are the contexts which 
give rise to emotions and how are they displayed and negotiated by all 
of those involved in the life of a school? Are the patterns of emotions 
different in different kinds of schools, primary/secondary, 
urban/rural, state/private and so on. To what extend does the emotional 
management and leadership of a principal filter down to the rest of the 
school staff? Finally, how do teachers and students manage and 
negotiate their emotions. These areas of study could provide us with a 
more complete picture of the emotional dynamics that constitute schools 
as active and restless organisations. In this study the women are 
survivng leadership, but there is a price - that of sustaining and 
nourishing their emotions.












Questions
Nor were the 'superwomen' in the principal positions the role models to 
which many women aspired, as they saw those women in leadership 
positions struggle to uphold their long held values and beliefs about 
education and social justice, the long hours and the need 'to put your 
social life on hold', in the face of an increasingly unsympathetic,  if 
not antagonistic, system. Women teachers watch their female colleagues 
struggle with the moral dilemmas between educational leadership and 
management, and  often 'chose' not to undertake the considerable 
physical, emotional and ethical burden.
 
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