Minette Jee’s Working Life as a British Progressive Educator in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Using a transnational framework to focus on women educators in the mid-twentieth century, this chapter explores Minette Jee’s (1918–2002) working life from the late 1930s to the 1980s, problematising her national identity and the dynamics of progressive education. Graduating from Gipsy Hill Training College as a modern British woman teacher in 1939, Jee took advantage of expanding opportunities for work in teacher education and school inspection in Britain, transnational humanitarian agencies such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Morocco between 1959 and 1962, then the Kindergarten Union of South Australia and the British Pre-school Playgroups Association in the 1970s. Jee’s working life was enmeshed in national and international politics, and this chapter demonstrates that whatever the institutional context, Jee’s racialised national identity as a white-British middle-class woman educator was intertwined with her decision-making, relationships and commitments to a universalising model of childhood and progressive education.