Maria Tamboukou links Foucauldian ideas to feminism and education. Its central argument is that the Foucauldian notion of 'technologies of the self' needs to be gendered and contextualized. This argument is pursued through a genealogical analysis of autobiographical texts of women educators in the UK at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is a new theoretical approach, since Foucault's work has proved to be of great interest to feminist scholars but as yet, his theories have only intermittently been used in educational feminist work.