1. How Teaching Became Women’s Work
Dana Goldstein
New America Foundation
June 20, 2012
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10. “Many of the self-styled teachers…are
shown to be low, vulgar, obscene,
intemperate, and utterly
incompetent…I simply ask if it would
not be better to put the thousands of
men who are keeping school for young
children into the mills, and employ the
women to train the children?”
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16. “The first vocation of every school is to
train up the young in such a manner as
to implant in their minds a knowledge
of the relation of man to God, and at
the same time to excite and foster both
the will and strength to govern their
lives after the spirit and precepts of
Christianity.”
18. “I should rather have built up the blind
asylum than to have written Hamlet.”
19. “As a teacher of schools…how divinely
does she come, her head encircled with
a halo of heavenly light, her feet
sweetening the earth on which she
treads, and the celestial radiance of her
benignity making vice begin its work of
repentance through very envy of the
beauty of virtue!”
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22. “Do you not see that so long as society says a
woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister,
or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher,
that every man of you who chooses this
profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no
more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the
reason that teaching is a less lucrative position,
as here men must compete with the cheap
labor of women?”
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24. “…the average skill of the teachers in
the public schools may be increased by
raising the present low proportion of
male teachers in the schools. Herein
lies one of the great causes of the
inferiority of the American teaching to
the French and German teaching.”
26. “…Are these men fools or are they
knaves? Do they know the facts or are
they simply uninformed? Are they
consciously boosting big business? The
facts in regard to the inadequacy of
revenue for school purposes had been
written on my consciousness so
indelibly by the tax fight, which we had
just won in the Illinois Supreme
Court…"
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28. "All too often…in the history of the United
States, the schoolteacher has been in no
position to serve as a model for an introduction
to the intellectual life. Too often he has not only
no claims to an intellectual life of his own, but
not even an adequate workmanlike competence
in the skills he is supposed to impart. Regardless
of his own quality, his low pay and common lack
of personal freedom have caused the teacher’s
role to be associated with exploitation and
intimidation.”
29. “Honestly all I can do is laugh. I feel as
though instead of spending the
time, energy, and money to support
those amazing teachers we already
have, we simply try to recruit new ones
and the cycle continues.”
Editor's Notes
In 1800, 90 percent of American teachers were male. By 1920, 86 percent of teachers were female. Today, 76 percent of teachers are female.,
Social upheaval. Anti-Catholicism.Ursuline Convent and school was burnt down by an angry anti-immigrant mob in Charlestown, MA on Aug. 11, 1834. Horace Mann called this a “horrible outrage.”
Temperance. This temperance fountain is in Tompkins Square Park – alcoholism seen as cause of the rise in crime and vigilantism as in the anti-Catholic mobs
Go West, Young Man (or Woman)“American Progress,” by John Gast. Westward expansion/manifest destiny as a Christian patriotic project. We’ll return to this image later on.
Different ideas on how to deal with this upheaval. The old idea:orthodox Calvinism. Rev. Lyman Beecher and the First Congregational Church. Litchfield, CT. Lyman Beecher first came to the public’s attention after he delivered a passionate sermon against dueling in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s 1804 death at the hands of Aaron Burr. By 1815, Lyman was the head pastor at Litchfield’s Congregational church, and celebrated as a sort of national moral compass. In sermons and articles, he opposed Catholic immigration and the spread of liberal Unitarianism; supported the gradual elimination of slavery and the “re-colonization” of African Americans to Africa; and celebrated the violent American expansion into the West as a sign that God intended the Protestant United States to lead as “a light to the nations”—a phrase he coined.Importance of reaching “conversion” – a sort of hysterical period of communion with God in which his plan for your life would be revealed -- as a mark of being heaven-bound. Carrying this expectation could be a relatively traumatic experience for young people of this generation, including many of the early Common School reformers, who saw their project not only as a way of educating the citizenry for democracy, but also of spreading a more loving, forgiving, form of Christianity focused as much on “good works” as on notions of sin or private communion with God.
Catharine Beecher, the important education reformer, wasn’t the only Beecher to split from her father’s version of Christianity. Beecher Clan. “The Kennedies of the 19th century.” Catharine to Lyman’s right; Harriet on our far right, Henry Ward Beecher top right. They all became more liberal to varying degrees, focused on Christ’s love and social justice.
Catharine Beecher and Alexander Fisher. Catharine was a poet and teacher-in-training; Alexander the youngest-ever tenured professor and Yale and nationally recognized as a math and physics prodigy. He grew up three doors down from Horace Mann in Franklin, MA. Neither converted as young adults and both struggled with doubts about their parents’ strict Calvinism, particularly the doctrine of original sin. Yet when Alexander died in an 1822 shipwreck off the coast of Ireland, Catharine was distraught not only at his death, but at the thought he had not gone to heaven.
Hartford Female Seminary, the school Catharine founded after Alexander Fisher’s death. Going through AF’s papers to help his family prepare them for Yale University’s archives, Catharine realized the deficiencies in her own education, which had taken place at a traditional girls’ finishing school. No algebra,trigonometry chemistry, or physics. The majority of the day—”mournful, despairing hours,” in Catharine’s words—were devoted to practice in the “domestic arts:” needlepoint, knitting, piano playing, and painting, all skills that would raise a girl’s value on the marriage market. At Hartford Female Seminary, on the other hand, girls practiced the domestic arts, but also took classes in Latin, Greek, algebra, chemistry, modern languages, and moral and political philosophy. Catharine opposed rote memorization and overt academic competition; her school gave out no awards, which Catharine believed inflated students’ vanity when they should be motivated to learn by simple love for God, their parents, and their country. She also believed in hands-on learning based in children’s “experiences” of the world, such as through field trips and science experiments. This type of thinking was far ahead of its time; it would be another 70 years before John Dewey articulated similar ideas in his treatises on progressive education. CB saw the school as creating good citizens and teachers in particular, perhaps to settle the west. She wanted women to be educated so they could be good mothers, but also so they could assume a role outside the home if they remained single. A particular part of this vision was finding a socially useful role for “old maids,” which CB saw herself becoming after she determined, in the wake of AF’s death and another broken romance a few years later, to never marry. Ironically, she opposed women’s suffrage and had a lot of arguments with more radical feminists of the time.
What was the status quo Catharine wanted to change? In the early 19th century, the typical schoolteacher was an upwardly mobile man in his early 20s, teaching part-time to pay his way through legal or medical training. Ichabod Crane, the protagonist of Washington Irving’s 1820 classic short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, epitomizes the type. Described as a sort of petty tyrant “lording it”—through the generous use of a birch rod—over a poorly maintained single-room schoolhouse filled with rambunctious country boys, Crane is “tarrying” away his youth before, he assumes, beginning a more illustrious career. The schoolmaster fancies himself an intellectual, but in truth, is a bit of a simpleton who has “read several books quite through,” Irving teases. Paid so little that he must board with villagers and spend afternoons performing farm labor, Crane’s real interests are thumbing through the ghost stories of Cotton Mather, gossiping with housewives, and courting the daughter of a wealthy local landowner.
Catharine Beecher on male teachers in her famous 1846 lecture, “The Evils Suffered by American Women and Children: The Causes and the Remedy,” This is where she first floated her plan for “missionary teachers” a la TFA. This nasty appraisal of male teachers didn’t necessarily comport with reality.
Horace Mann, a friend of Alexander Fisher and Catharine Beecher’s, was similarly traumatized by his fire-and-brimstone upbringing. When he was 12, his older brother drowned in a local lake and fishing hole, while he was playing hooky from church. At church the following Sunday, the town minister used the death as a warning to other children about what would happen if they ditched church or died before they converted. This had a horrible affect on Horace’s mother and he never forgot this moment of cruelty toward a grieving family. So from a very young age he yearned for a more loving, forgiving version of Christianity, which he eventually looked to spread through the Common Schools system. His first wife, Charlotte Messer Mann, the daughter of the president of Brown University (which Horace attended and later taught at), also died young – in her early 20s, after they had been married only two years. Horace first met Catharine Beecher when he was a law student, and was very impressed, writing to his sister that Catharine was “a lady of superior intellect” to whom “Professor Fisher is making love.” He praised her poetry and concluded she would be a good “help-mate” to Fisher…..CB had bigger plans than just being a wife, however. He would get back in touch with her years later, when he was serving as MA’s first secretary of education, a position to which he was appointed in 1837. He borrowed some ideas from Catharine, especially regarding female teachers, while rejecting others. The debate between them on the role of the curriculum, in particular, shaped American education.
As a young politician,Mann joined the Whig party, which was anti-slavery, pro-Common Schools, pro-health care (asylums/schools for disabled and mentally ill) and supported by wealthy industrialists: railroads, shipping interests, etc. These folks had progressive social values but generally didn’t want to pay higher taxes, which really influenced Mann to keep his plans for education low-cost. As a state legislator in 1830s, he had advocated successfully for the creation of a state Board of Ed to oversee local schools and hold them accountable on teacher quality, student performance, supplies, and mandatory schooling for children through about 8th grade. He asked for $2 million for this project and was allocated $1 million; this was an important lesson for him on keeping costs down as he advocated for school reform, and this was the more pragmatic reason why he became very interested in women as teachers, because they were paid only about half of what a male teacher could earn. Ex: $25/month for a man and $12.50/month for a woman. Less than a skilled craftsman’s wages– like a carpenter – and about the same as a manual laborer.
But there were also cultural/intellectual movements that pushed Mann toward female teachers, and these are the ideas he emphasized politically to raise support for his plans, to give them a do-gooder sheen, as opposed to t tax-cutty sheen. The key phrase is “moral suasion” – the idea of Common Schools as a place where a diverse group of children could be socialized into Christian patriots with high morals. George Combe, the Scottish founder of phrenology, became a close personal friend of Mann.
Phrenology calipers and chart. Mann was reading Combe’s primer on phrenology when he was appointed Secretary in 1837. Combe saw intemperance and crime as the problems of a class of “bad heads” Though this seems a particularly Calvinist way to view the world – a sort of predestination – and indeed it may have appealed to the old Calvinist in Mann, Combe, Mann, and other “progressive” phrenologists believed that with the proper education early in life, the children of “bad heads” could learn better values, and thus the entire human species could be improved over time, with actual physical heads changing shape from generation to generation.
Another influence on Mann was French philosopher Victor Cousin, who visited Prussia in the 1820s and wrote a highly influential report on the nascent German school system, which had centralized teacher training in normal schools and created national regulations for local schools, including minimum pay for teachers and laws against them holding other jobs, as well as pension systems that made the job more attractive. Mann. Beecher, and other Common School reformers read this report as a bible and agreed improving teaching was the key to improve schooling.
Prussian public school law of 1819, which Mann emulated. Cousin was wary of this, however, writing that the French system should weigh classical studies more heavily. “Classical studies keep alive the sacred tradition of the moral and intellectual life of the human race. To curtail or enfeeble such studies would, in my eyes, be an act of barbarism, a crime against all true and high civilization, and in some sort an act of high treason against humanity.”
But where Mann in particular departed from Cousin was on how heavily he weighed intellectualism as the goal of education. This is Mann’s phrase for problems with the French system, which he considered too overly intellectual, and not focused enough on Christianity and morality. He lamented that although France’s population was the most literate in the world, atheism was “rampant” there. After his first wife Charlotte’s death, Mann was known as anti-intellectual, repeatedly saying that if schools could only either teach math or teach good morals, they should focus on morals. CB agreed with Mann about morals, but remember she also believed in a rigorous classical education. But Mann was really a black-and-white person.
Mann’s second wife was Mary Peabody, and her younger sister Sophia was married to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great novelist and short story writer of The Scarlet Letter, who abhorred moral absolutes. In a letter to Mary gossiping about her sisters’ scandalous romance with the writer – they were known to lie in bed together before they were married -- this is what Mann said. The idea was that an act of charity is more valuable to society than an intellectual or cultural contribution. This framed all Mann’s ideas about what public schools should do. This quote is sort of absurd, and if you reversed it, it would also be absurd. Strange to see charity and intellectualism as in competition in this way.
Mann saw women as the people who would perform these acts of charity as low-paid teachers. Quote from his 1853 lecture, “A Few Thoughts on the Power and Duties of Woman.” The idea was that because politics, law, and business were closed to woman, she would bring to teaching a sort of pure ethic of volunteerism, totally self-sacrificing, as a mother to her own children. CB opposed women’s suffrage while Mann supported it, but both were pretty constrained in their feminism.
An allegory for Manifest Destiny is an idealized female form, because women had an important role to play in the Christian patriotic project of Westward expansion: as teachers with a moral imperative.
By the time Susan B. Anthony was teaching in upstate NY the early 1850s, four-fifths of New York’s 11,000 teachers were women, but two-thirds of the state’s $800,000 teacher-salary fund was paid out to men. Anthony organized female teachers across New York state to demand equal pay with their male peers. The connections she made as an activist led directly to her career as a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage.
Susan B. Anthony, at an 1853 meeting of the New York State Teachers’ Association. This speech resulted in scandalous headlines, less so for what Anthony said, and more for the fact that she spoke publicly at all, which caused debate among the 300 male teachers, professors, and administrators at the meeting. While there is truth in what she is saying, as we’ll see, it’s important to note that low opinion of teachers was pervasive even when most teachers were male, and that this was the problem Mann and Beecher had been addressing by bringing women into the profession.
Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 – 1909, longest serving president in Harvard’s history. He helped bring the German research university model to the US, and also took an interest in reforming K-12 education. He was a defender of the liberal arts in the face of vocational education, but he also had an opinion on women teachers.
Eliot, 1901, “Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses”
The rise of the feminist and labor movements empowered teachers in the face of critiques from elite male reformers like Eliot. In turn of the century Chicago, teacher pay had been frozen at $875 annually for 30 years – about $23,000 adjusted for inflation -- and teachers demanded aggressive action. Union leader Margaret Haley, a sixth-grade teacher, became a national political force after she launched an investigation into the school system’s budget. She found that major Chicago corporations, including the Chicago Tribune and the city’s railroad, gas, and electrical utilities, had been issued 100-year “leases” of land owned by the Chicago Public Schools for far-below the market rate—and were paying no taxes whatsoever on the land. Haley brought a lawsuit against Chicago’s leading corporations, which was eventually decided by the Illinois Supreme Court in the union’s favor. This is how a local businessman slandered her during the lawsuit.
Margaret Haley explaining why she advocated for the Chicago Teachers’ Federation to split in 1897 from the National Education Association, which was dominated by admins. From there the CTF allied with the the blue-collar AFL-CIO (because women couldn’t vote, and Haley wanted teachers to have political power). This alliance and others like it in cities and states across the country established teacher unionism as a potent force in American urban politics, and earned Haley the ire of the conservative elite. She also became a national suffragist leader because she wanted to protect teachers’ political power regardless of their relationship with more blue collar unions, which was forward-looking.
Think back to the ideas Mann borrowed from CB – about women teachers – and the ideas he didn’t, about the importance of a rigorous classical education. American public schools went from having a goal of patriotic religiosity – “moral suasion” – to a more vocational goal at the turn of the century, readying students for the economy, with only about 10 percent getting a college-prep curriculum. In the 1950s, historian Richard Hofstadter warned about the anti-intellectualism of the system.
Hofstadter. This is a pretty mean quote. This sense that schools are anti-intellectual has less to do with the character of teachers than with the particular job we’ve asked teachers and schools to do for so long, which is focused not on knowledge, but on many other things, from Christianity, to citizenship, to patriotism (Red Scares), to racial healing, to anti-poverty work (social work).We want male teachers – role models – but we also want teaching to be respected regardless of who does it. Chris Christie and his public attacks on teachers.GOOD: Common Core will raise standards; holding teachers accountable for student learning; concern about where the US stands internationally puts some focus back on academicsBAD: Too many state tests, not enough teacher-driven assessment as other nations do; pre-packaged curricula/lesson plans take away teachers’ creativity; use of technology to replace traditional teaching as in the “flipped classroom” risks turning teachers into tutors and taking away the creativity and intellectualism of preparing a lecture, which draws many to teach; not enough teacher voices in reform can lead to problems like over-emphasizing standardized test data in teacher assessment, as opposed to more holistic measures of teacher quality and student learning
