This paper discusses representations of women teachers' work in early twentieth-century state schools, especially well-qualified and experienced women who taught in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. While there is a range of discourses that could be applied to these members of the profession, the paper focuses on three discourses in particular--vocation, character and career--that are registered in many texts of the era. The paper begins with an exploration of these discourses, pointing to ways in which they have shifted across time and demonstrating that they interweave to form a matrix within which the teacher-self can be constituted. Then it shows how each of the discourses was manifested in the recruitment and training of teachers, their daily work, particularly in the classrooms of city schools, and in the rewards, material and otherwise, that were said to attend the profession. (Contains 113 footnotes.)