schoolmistress

The young ladies are dressed in their lacedup boots and clean aprons, schoolmistresses in their high-necked dresses, and boys in their thick woollen jackets and breeches.

That sort of thing is all over: schoolmistresses in their 30s fall passionately in love with young teenage boys, but the roles seldom seem to be reversed.

Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1995).

This had once s been a teacher training college, set up in 1856 to provide an educas tion to Catholic schoolmistresses by the Sisters of Notre Dame.

The next schoolmistresses, 21-year-old Miss Jane Allen and her 16-year-old sister, Mary, stayed 20 years.

However, credit where it's due, and I would like to propose a vote of thanks to the more imaginative layers for opening up our horizons over the last decade like obliging schoolmistresses giving special tuition to 13-year-old boys.