Much of what is known about Canadian teachers and occupational stress relies heavily on stress surveys and questionnaires. Such literature typically fails to represent the complexity of teachers' experiences. This qualitative study explores the way six female beginning teachers, working in two large "inner city" schools in the same school board in southeastern Ontario, experience and cope with occupational stress. In these schools, a significant number of students are identified as "special needs," and the levels of student apathy and behavioural problems are high.This research contributes to a greater understanding of the ways six female beginning teachers in large urban working class schools experience and manage occupational stress. This study begins a conversation about the gendered nature of teacher stress, coping strategies, and their implications for policy, teacher education and school administration.This study shows the ways that, in addition to personal factors, various institutional factors/stressors can be implicated in these women's difficulties in boundary maintenance. In the current era of education, where the rhetoric of higher standards is offered alongside severe cuts in educational funding, resource-poor schools continue to rely for their functioning on the altruism and labour of love of their caring teachers. The data based on a series of in-depth interviews show the gendered nature of the ethic of care in teaching and the implications of this in the possible exploitation of female teachers. In order to avoid burnout, it is important that caring teachers balance the work of caring for others with self-care.I refract these teachers' occupational stressors through the analytical lens of what I call "difficulties in boundary maintenance." That is, many beginning teachers have difficulties in asserting and maintaining self-protective boundaries between caring for others and self-care. When boundaries are excessively "porous," teachers are likely to normalize the denial or deferment of their own needs. For the majority of women, this is a familiar (and often familial) mode of interaction rooted to female patterns of socialization. Brought to bear on the world of teaching and its never-ending demands, difficulties in boundary maintenance can lead to self-abnegation, and, eventually, to burnout.