"Lady Teachers" and the Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization in Gilded Age Cities History of Education Society "Lady Teachers" and the Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization in Gilded Age Cities Author(s): Karen Leroux Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 164-191 Published by: History of Education Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462056 . Accessed: 05/08/2014 16:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . History of Education Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of Education Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hes http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462056?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp "Lady Teachers" and the Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization in Gilded Age Cities Karen Leroux May the work of the L.T.A. go on ever upward and onward-gaining ground year by year; so that in future it will have its voice in the community, not low & sweet-but clear and resonant showing power and strength; may it gain that strength by increased membership, held together by strong bonds of love. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing Learn to labor and to wait.' Miss Ophelia S. Newell believed that teachers occupied a public office of unappreciated responsibility. As the secretary of the Lady Teachers' Association (LTA) in Boston, she penned these hopeful remarks as a coda to her 1875 annual report, borrowing the last stanza of a popular Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. For Newell and her fellow teachers, "learn to labor and to wait" underscored their steadfast commitment to the schools. They founded the association attempting to bring womewteachers "nearer together in sympathy and friendship and also for a mutual benefit in debate and parliamentary rules." Frustrated with being "accused of a lack of enthusiasm in our profession," they hoped such criticism could "be remedied by an organization of this kind."2 Honing their debating skills represented one of Karen Leroux is an assistant professor of history at Drake University. She received a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University in 2005. She would like to thank Nancy K. MacLean and Stacey M. Robertson for their encouragement and suggestions. Financial support for this research was provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Board of Alumnae of Northwestern University, and the Spencer Foundation. This essay won the History of Education Society's Henry Barnard Prize as the best essay by a graduate student. 48 February 1875 secretary's report, Volume I, Box 2, [Boston] Lady Teachers' Association [hereafter LTA] records, Massachusetts Historical Society. -'Minutes of first meeting [undated], Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Study of parliamentary rules was common in early teachers' organizations, see Marjorie Murphy, "From Artisan to Semi-Professional: White Collar Unionism Among Chicago Public School Teachers, 1870 1930," (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Davis, 1981), 161. History of Education Quarterly Vol. 46 No. 2 Summer 2006 This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 165 the women's objectives, but they aspired to do more than polish their chances for professional advancement. Through association, these women hoped to provide each other with the professional and social security they needed. The drumbeat of demands for teachers' selfless service to the public presupposed access to resources that most women teachers lacked. Most were unmarried or widowed; they did not enjoy the family support that enabled middle-class women to work for community betterment without concern about remuneration. School boards employed men with the presumption that they supported themselves and sometimes others, but they did not extend that recognition to women, regardless of their family status. Obtaining school employment required some education and social graces, marking women who taught as socially privileged while masking their financial plight. To protect their precarious independence in the wage-based urban economy, women organized among themselves to replace the kinds of family support they had foregone. Like many other nineteenth-century Americans, teachers looked to voluntary organization to fulfill needs unmet by either family or state. They enlisted the "sympathy and friendship" of other teachers as a substitute safety net. Most narratives of teacher activism begin at the turn of the twentieth century. Though historians acknowledge the formation of earlier local associations, they tend to dismiss them as merely "social organizations."3 The clubs that teachers formed between the 1870s and 1890s were indeed social, but I argue that their social character did not preclude serious occupational concerns. This research reveals urban women appropriating elements of educator associations, women's self-improvement societies, and fraternal orders to protect themselves against loss of income due to illness and infirmity, while attempting to strengthen their position as female professionals in the service of the public. Gilded-Age "lady teachers" began to develop a collective identity, construct networks to protect themselves from dependency, and formulate a critique of their peculiar employment relationship with the state. "It is a high crime and misdemeanor," one teacher wrote in 1879, "for the State to ask teachers to expend their best energies in the instruction of her youth, and then require them to use the balance in solving the problem of how to make the week's wages meet the week's necessary expenses."4 How could a self-supporting teacher labor selflessly and still fulfill obligations to her landlord and other creditors? Like professionals, women teachers viewed their skilled service to others as part of an exchange that ought to make possible the self-sufficiency required by good citizenship. Yet they were Tor one example, see Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 9. 4"The Teacher's Profession," Journal of Education, 15 May 1879, 312. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 166 Histowy of Edutcation Quarterly not like professionals; they were women obliged to sacrifice themselves in the service of the schools. Confronting this untenable dilemma, Boston teachers dubbed themselves "inexperienced citoyennes" and attempted to reconstruct genteel public service as a basis for their claims on the state and a means to their empowerment.5 Embracing the moral distinction between serving the public and working merely for wages, they hoped their public service would translate into desired professional privileges. From the 1 870s until the turn of the century, teachers' clubs formed in cities small and large, including Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. These organizations, typically local, sometimes represented a single neighborhood. Highly attuned to hierarchy, they often defined themselves by their gender or rank in the schools. Status consciousness had implications for organization: by 1900, the city of Boston (not including its suburbs) had at least eleven different teachers' organizations and St. Paul had at least four.6 Most of these organizations either kept poor records or failed to preserve them, but two associations-one in Boston and one in St. Paul-kept detailed minutes of meetings which form the basis of this study. Seemingly unexplored by previous historians, these sources show strikingly similar concerns about teachers' income security and comparable strategies taken to address them. Indeed, teachers' clubs in different parts of the country shared advice on programs, organization, and membership.7 This essay peers into these local associations, where teachers began to trace the practical difficulties they experienced to their vulnerable status as professionals, women, and citizens. The Boston women who founded the LTA sought self-culture, friendship, and mutual aid-opportunities unavailable to them in the 5M.P. Colburn, "Lady Teachers' Associations," Journal of Education, 4 December 1875, 254. The Lady Teachers' Association in Boston formed in 1874, the Women Teachers' Association in Buffalo in 1889; the Chicago Teachers' Club in 1892, and the St. Paul Grade Teachers' Association in 1898. Minneapolis teachers organized sometime before 1879; and teachers in Chicago formed the School Mistresses' Club sometime in the 1880s. See "Teachers' Organizations in Buffalo," Education 16 (May 1896), 570; Julia E. Sullivan, "The Boston Teachers Club: 1898-1948," Boston Teachers'Newsletter 36:3 (December 1947), 17; Michael J. McDonough, "St. Paul Federation of Teachers, Fifty Years of Service, 1918-1968," 3 in Folder 1, Box 8, Series V, St. Paul Federation of Teachers Collection, [hereafter StPTF Collection] Walter Reuther Library; Financial Secretary to Mr. Thos. McLachlan, 18 November 1904, Folder: Sept-Dec 1904, Box 38, Chicago Teachers' Federation Papers, (hereafter CTF) Chicago Historical Society; John T. McManis, Ella Flagg Young and a Half-Century of the Chicago Public Schools (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1916), 94; Ella F. Young, "Women in Education in Illinois," Journal of Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Illinois State Teachers Association and Sections (Carbondale: ISTA, 1904), 16-17. 7The Lady Teachers' Association in Boston recorded inquiries from teachers in distant cities like Louisville KY, as did Chicago teachers. See minutes of meetings, March 1877 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; J.E. McKean to Catharine Goggin, 25 December 1899, Folder: 1868 1899, Box 35, CTF. They also made inquiries with other associations, see minutes of meetings, 11 March 1890 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Sullivan, "Boston Teachers Club," 17. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 167 wor-kplace or from existing educator associations or women's clubs. All unmarried or widowed, they described yearning to create between them "a nearer bond than that which exists." Country schoolteachers endured long separations from friends and family, but even those in city schools complained of feeling isolated in their classrooms.8 Progressive educator Ella Flagg Young explained how teachers' working conditions left them feeling detached, powerless, and lonely in her 1900 book, Isolation in the Schools. Teaching in the Chicago area since the 1 860s, Young synthesized the problems she had seen throughout her career. By "establishing a means of mutual improvement and culture in teachers, and assistance as friends," these Boston teachers hoped to alleviate the sense of alienation Young would eventually address.9 State and national teachers' associations did not offer women a sense of belonging either. Quite the opposite, they kept women at the margins of membership. Dominated by men, annual meetings of the National Education Association (NEA) brought a few high-achieving women to the attention of the profession. But the NEA made no effort to develop local branches and thus held limited appeal for women whose small salaries left little to pay membership fees and travel to annual meetings. Moreover, the NEA downplayed problems of teacher pay and welfare, issues far more important to women than comparatively well-paid men. Though female teachers had outnumbered males since the Civil War, NEA meetings continued to attract more men until 1884, when organizers made an effort to appeal to female delegates as a "penance for past shortcomings."'" Larger numbers of women attended state association meetings. Yet even when the numbers of women exceeded the men, few women joined in discussions. In Massachusetts, well-known and accomplished teachers like Electa Walton and Annie E. Johnson might decry "the injustice which every woman teacher suffers in this Commonwealth," but the women for whom they claimed to speak often preferred to keep silent. Many urged the "necessity for both local and general organizations among lady teachers ... to accustom ... members to speaking on the various questions of the day, Constitutions 1874 and 1879, minutes of meetings 20 February 1874 and 11 March 1875, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. On feelings of isolation, see 11 December 1894, 12 December 1894,4 January 1895 and 6 February 1895 entries, Louise Bailey Diaries ( Microfilm edition, 1976) State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Katherine Reddington Morgan, ed., My Ever Dear Daughter, My Own Dear Mother: The Correspondence of Julia Stone Towne and Mary Julia Towne, 1868-1882 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); and "A Fit of the Blues," Western Journal of Education, (August 187 5): 181 -2. 9Ella Flagg Young, Isolation in the Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900); Jackie M. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendent, 1813-1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 167; Minutes of meetings 20 February 1874, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. 10"A Word from a Country Teacher," Woman's Journal, 26 November 1870, 370; Edgar B. Wesley, NEA: The First Hundred Years, The Building of the Teaching Profession (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 334, quotation is from 260. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 168 History of Edication Quarterly and for systematizing plans for the improvement of their position." I1 Lack of practice in public speaking, however, was not the only problem women teachers needed to overcome. When male superintendents and principals controlled meetings, female teachers weighed carefully the costs and benefits of participation. Some teachers' meetings did not invite discussion. Male supervisors used the guise of voluntary association to bring teachers to administrative meetings, often on Saturdays, without having to pay for their time. Teachers were not invited to meetings like these to engage in discussions of interest to them but to receive instructions from their supervisors. Although deemed "voluntary" meetings, the men presiding often determined teachers' reemployment each year. Decades later, American Federation of Teachers activist Ruth Gillette Hardy labeled these male-led teachers' associations as "company unions," observing that they operated in the interest of school authorities, not teachers. The didactic nature of these meetings often carried over to state and national association meetings, suggesting why many women teachers chose not to attend and why the men leading them complained about women's lack of enthusiasm and commitment to teaching. In a session on primary teaching at a state association meeting, one woman observed that of the hundred or more women in attendance, only three joined in the discussion. In contrast, she noted that "every gentleman present spoke, some more than once, though probably, with [one] exception ..., not one of them had ever actually taught a primary school."''2 Women comprised the majority of teachers, but male educators' power inhibited their participation. Gilded-Age women's clubs offered teachers only slightly more of a sense of inclusion. In Boston, the New England Women's Club (NEWC) and the Woman's Education Association (WEA) sponsored public meetings on education, occasionally inviting teachers to speak. Strong supporters of self-improvement and community betterment initiatives, these elite groups also organized lectures to help teachers supplement their knowledge of ""Massachusetts Teachers Convention," Woman's Journal, 24 January 1874, 26. Annie E. Johnson became the first woman principal of a state normal school in Massachusetts in 1866. She quit in 1875 for a higher paying position. Electa Walton also taught in several Massachusetts state normal schools, serving temporarily as principal in 1849 when Cyrus Pierce became ill. She was passed over for the permanent appointment, which went to a man. See "Gov. Bullock's Remarks," Thirtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1867), 37-40; "Framingham," Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1876), 27-28; and Historical Sketches of the Framingham State Normal School (Framingham: Alumnae Association, 1914), 42, 51,96-97. 12"The Teachers Meeting Yesterday," St. Paul Daily Press, 13 October 1872, Roll 81, Frame 242, Annals of Minnesota microfilm, Minnesota Historical Society (hereafter Annals). For another example see Minute Books, Box 1, Folder 1, Atlanta Normal Schools, Georgia Department of Archives and History. Ruth Gillette Hardy, "Historical Setting of the American Federation of Teachers," Folder 1, Box 2, StPFT; "Massachusetts Teachers Convention," Woman's Journal, 24 January 1874, 26. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 169 advanced subjects like chemistry, geology, and rhetoric."3 Perhaps most importantly, women's clubs in cities around the nation organized to place members on school and library boards, hoping to bring their influence to bear on public education in ways that teachers could not. Focusing on shared educational attainments and moral values, many Americans regarded teachers and club women as natural allies, despite their class differences."4 At best, however, club women treated teachers as junior partners in educational reform. The WEA boasted that club work placed members "en rapport with the actual practical work of teaching," but the organization tended to treat teachers as objects of reform or as gatekeepers whose support was needed for reform initiatives to succeed. Even Ednah Dow Cheney, a NEWC member and long-time champion of gender alliances between reformers and teachers, thought teachers could benefit from the "advice and guidance" of club women but failed to consider how much club women could learn from teachers as well. The WEA claimed to seek teachers as members, even waiving membership fees for them, but like most elite women's clubs, it did not even schedule meetings so that working teachers could attend. Though it could count most of the city's female school officers among the membership, few public school teachers joined. Still, LTA members invited club women, as well as male educators, to their meetings as honored guests and speakers. Teachers cultivated these relationships for the social and professional advantages they might bring but always with the knowledge that economic necessity and lack of political influence rendered them "a group apart.""15 13"Report of the Committee on Education," Woman's Journal, 13 July 1872, 224; "Women and Public Schools: A Report to N.E. Woman's Club," Woman's Journal, 17 August 1872, 258; Third Annual Report of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, 1874 (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1875), 8-13; AnnualReport ofthe Woman's Educational Association (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1878), 6; Polly Welts Kaufman, Boston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905 (New York: Garland, 1994), 68-69. On similar developments between club women and teachers in Chicago, see Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 62. 14Julia A. Sprague, A History of the New England Women's Club from 1868 to 1893 (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1894), 17; Kaufman, Boston Women; Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts, 33. The Minneapolis Woman's School and Library Organization worked to place women on school and library boards. See Box 2, Volumes 5 and 6, Political Equality Club of Minneapolis Records, Minnesota Historical Society. Atlanta women undertook similar initiatives in the 1890s. See Scrapbook 1 (1895), Atlanta Women's Club Collection, Atlanta History Center. xs Second Annual Report of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, 1873-74 (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1874), 9, 4-5. See also First Annual Report of the Woman's Education Association for the year ending January 16,1873 (Boston: W.L. Deland, 1873), 7,10; Third Annual Report of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, 1874. (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1875), 3, 8-13; and Annual Report ofthe Woman's Education Association for the year ending January 16, 1878 (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1878), 6; Ednah Dow Cheney, "Place of Women in our Public Schools," Woman's Journal, 23 October 1875, 341, 338; Sprague, History of the New England Women's Club, 17; Kaufman, Boston Women, 76; "St. Paul Federation of Women Teachers," p.l in Folder: 1, Box: 2, Series II, StPFT. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 170 History of Edlucation Quarter-ly The source of women teachers' marginalization was the simple fact that most women who taught were unmarried or widowed and needed to earn their living. The antebellum practice of hiring young women to spell off the men who taught winter schools paved the way for school boards to replace higher-paid male teachers with women in need of income."f The Civil War and western migration contributed to rising numbers of widows and spinsters seeking employment, casting new attention on the inequalities of a market economy which presumed "all men supported all women." The oversupply of unmarried women needing employment became the stock explanation for why women teachers were so poorly paid, but women's rights activists like Mary Livermore, a former teacher who became an honorary member of the LTA, countered that it was not the quantity of women seeking employment but the few lines of work open to them that fostered the excess of women workers and depressed their wages. In a narrow field of options, teaching became especially sought-after work because it conferred the respectability of motherhood on self-supporting women.'7 Teachers could take pride that their work served the nation's children and remained at a distance from the market. Women's work in schools set them apart from other wage-earning women, creating a new and growing category of economically needy but morally deserving single women. Some women taught until they married, but others saw in teaching a potential alternative to marriage and family life. After the Civil War, the prospect of living apart from family was becoming a real, though difficult, life choice for women. Changes in attitudes towards matrimony led the journal The Nation to ask "Why is the Single Life Becoming More General?" The answer described singlehood as a personal choice, not merely the result of a demographic shift: "Men and women can less easily find anyone whom they are willing to. take as a partner for life; their requirements are more exacting; their standards of excellence higher; they are less able to find any who satisfy their own ideal and less able to satisfy anybody else's ideal."'8 lfiAntebellum schools often employed a male teacher in the winter and a female teacher in the summer, when the older boys were likely to be working. Schools replaced male teachers with women to economize on labor costs. Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750-1820," History of Education Quarterly 33 (Winter 1993): 528-529. 17Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband. Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 29. Quotation is from Mary A. Livermore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1883), 59, also 85. See also Caroline H. Dall, "Woman's Right to Labor, " Or, Low Wages and Hard Work (Boston: Walker, Wise & Co., 1860), esp. 5-9; and Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopedia of Woman's Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co, 1863), 37-39; "Too Respectable!" Journal of Education, 16 October 1879, 207-8; Hiram Orcutt, "A Circular Letter to Public School Teachers," Journal of Education, 13 January 1881,21. l8The Nation, 5 March 1868, quoted in Zsuzsa Berend, "The Best or None! Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century New England," Journal of Social History 33 (Summer 2000): 948. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 171 Teachers' responses to marriage confirm the article's thesis. When members of the LTA announced nuptials, their colleagues celebrated their good fortune to find a man worthy of matrimony. Though marriage and motherhood were idealized, those who did not find a man were not pitied. Far better not to marry than to make a bad match or risk a "degrading alliance." No longer simply a temporary condition of women in their youth, singlehood became understood as a perfectly respectable decision not to settle for an unworthy man. Nineteenth-century spinsterhood, as historian Zsuzsa Berend has shown, signified a woman's "uncompromising morality," and came to represent "a respectable variation on motherhood rather than its antithesis."19 Calls for professionalizing the work of teachers reinforced the development of teaching as unmarried women's work. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot denied women's potential as professional teachers because marriage prevented them from devoting their lives to work beyond the family circle. Putting Eliot's views into practice, one school superintendent explained: "[J]n every contract with a teacher there is an implied stipulation that he shall put his whole being into his work .... This is a service which admits no divided empire .... It must have the whole heart or it is nothing." While a man could marry and still "put his whole being" into his school or profession, few believed a woman could do both. The growing emphasis on affective labor in teaching and the rising respectability of spinsterhood, however, led the Reverend A.D. Mayo to spearhead arguments for single women as lifelong professionals in the service of the schools. He preached that "public instruction in America cannot be conducted by teachers who come to it with half a mind, regard it a hateful drudgery, and toil with mechanical stolidity while the soul is far away. It demands the complete consecration of human powers. It is a thing to work up to, to pray over, to purify one's self for."20 Alluding to male teachers who aspired to more lucrative and prestigious employment, Mayo envisioned a professional corps of spinster teachers wholly devoted to the vocation of teaching. Coupled with the assumption that respectable women had families to support them, Mayo's arguments helped shape postbellum education as a low-paying branch of public service employing mostly single women. 19"The Matrimony Clause," Brooklyn Eagle, 2 February 1876, 2; Minutes of meetings: 18 February 1875 entry; also see 10 June 1884 entry, Volume I, Box 2, and Annual Report of Secretary for Sept 1901, p.166, Volume II, Box 2, LTA; Berend, "Best or None," 941. Also on positive views of spinsterhood, see Ruth Freeman and Patricia Klaus, "Blessed or Not: The Spinster in England and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Journal of Family History 9 (October 1984), 395. 20Charles W. Eliot, "Wise and Unwise Economy in the Schools," Journal of 'Education, 29 May 1875, 254; "School Committees' Reports," Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1876), 26; "American Teachers," Minnesota Teacher 1 (September 1868): 11. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 172 Histo;y of Education Quarterly Regarding teachers as models of purity and patriotism, northern school boards continued to hire teachers with the image of white republican motherhood in mind. The teaching corps in nineteenth-century city public schools remained far more segregated and ethnically homogeneous than their classrooms. School boards seldom hired women who were not native born and English-speaking. Even as late as 1910, one source reported nearly three-quarters of teachers were native-born, though growing numbers had one foreign-born parent. Only the daughters of Irish immigrants made significant inroads into teaching, comprising about one-quarter of the teachers in several northern cities in the early twentieth century. Yet even in Boston, where Irish families had settled for decades, school board preferences for hiring Yankee Protestants kept the numbers of Irish-American teachers low until the turn of the century.2' Very few black women found employment in northern public schools. Though a number attended state normal schools in Massachusetts-Charlotte Forten and Olivia Davidson among them-one black normal graduate who applied for a position in the Boston public schools was reportedly told, "Go down South among your own people."22 While some states willingly trained blacks as teachers, blacks stood little chance of teaching in public schools that were not strictly segregated. Some light-skinned black women probably worked in public schools while passing as white, but nineteenth-century northern school boards seldom knowingly employed blacks, unless they were hired to teach in all-black schools.23 21Urban, Why Teachers Organized, 16; Lotus D. Coffman, The Social Composition of the Teaching Population (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1911), 55-56, 59. Irish-American women comprised about 20 percent of teachers in Boston and San Francisco and about 30 percent in Chicago and New York by the 1910s. See Janet Nolan, Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); John L. Rury, Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling (Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 97; Kaufman, Boston Women, 232-233, 240 n40, 241 3. "Before 1900, Boston public schools reportedly employed only one black teacher full time, as well as one substitute and three evening teachers who were black. Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston 1865-1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 34. Sarah Deutsch found four black women teaching in "greater Boston's public schools" by 1902; they included Miss Maria L. Baldwin, Miss Hattie Smith, and Miss Gertrude Mabel Baker. See Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 368, n232. Baldwin was principal of an interracial Cambridge, Massachusetts public school from 1887 until 1922. See Dorothy Porter Wesley, "Maria Louise Baldwin," in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 79-80. Forten attended the State Normal School at Salem. See Brenda Stevenson, ed. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimk? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Davidson attended the State Normal School at Framingham. See Olivia A. Davidson to Ednah Cheney, 28 August 1881, Folder #43, Ednah Dow Cheney Papers, Boston Public Library. 23John B. Reid found a few black teachers in nineteenth-century Detroit and Chicago; nearly all taught in segregated schools located in black neighborhoods. See John B. Reid, "A This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 173 School boards' preference for hiring white spinsters of respectability was inextricably tied to the women's race, class, and marital status. They assumed that without families in need of their labor, unmarried white women could choose to devote themselves to the public schools. The Boston school committee regarded normal school graduates as the "daughters of our citizens," presupposing their family dependency. School boards across the nation defended low salaries paid to women, contending that they lived in comfortable homes, had no dependents to support, and needed no more than a token wage for a few years until they found a husband who could provide as their father had. Even the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledged that women teachers did not earn enough to support themselves-sometimes less than needlewomen and factory operatives but justified their low pay arguing that teachers, unlike other working women, could rely on relatives and friends to meet living expenses.24 While school boards continued to imagine that teachers' families supported them, teachers' difficulties supporting themselves proved all too real. The lure of higher-paying work in city schools separated women from their homes. In 1882 Minneapolis teachers reported only 20 percent could live with family members if they chose; 80 percent had come to the city on their own. Newspapers poked fun at the things teachers did to supplement their earnings: "Schoolma'ams run reapers during vacation in Dougals county" sneered the Minneapolis Tribune. The image of refined city teachers running heavy farming equipment made for humorous headlines, but it spoke directly to the inability of women teachers to support themselves. Former teacher and suffrage lecturer Mary F. Eastman charged the nation treated teachers like half-paupers, denying them wages for two months of the year. Even teachers expert enough to lead state teachers' institutes, like Career to Build, A People to Serve, A Purpose to Accomplish: Race, Class, Gender and Detroit's First Black Women Teachers, 1865-1916," in "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women's History, Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, Linda Reed, eds. (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995), 310; and "Race, Class, Gender and the Teaching Profession: African American Schoolteachers of the Urban Midwest, 1865-1950," (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1996), 142. On black women's mostly private school teaching, see Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On passing, James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; New York: Vintage, 1989); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Collier, 1971). 24"Reportof the Board," Thirtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1867), 8, 12; "Report of the Committee on Normal School, 12 March 1872," Box: 1872, Boston School Committee Records, Boston Public Library (hereafter BSC); "Report of Visitors of the Normal Schools-Bridgewater," Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1876), 40; "Teachers' Salaries," Journal ofEducation 1 June 1882, 345. For the criticism of Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics see "New England Woman Suffrage Association: Address of Mary F. Eastman," Woman's Journal, 31 May 1873, 173. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 174 History, of Education Qzarterly May Church, had trouble piecing together a living. Emphasizing her plight as a widowed mother, she appealed to a new female county superintendent for help locating summer employment: "My wages amount to only three hundred and twenty dollars here and you know that will not with closest economy last twelve months when one has a family of four and board to pay. "25 Teachers' wage dependency became impossible to ignore after the depression of the 1870s, when numerous cities slashed women teachers' salaries while preserving other public employees' pay. Widespread retrenchments exposed the fallacy that women teachers enjoyed family support, but instead of placing them on an equal footing with other wage earners, revelations of their dependency put teachers in the ironic position of needing to defend their moral fitness to teach.26 Women's prowess as teachers had long been assumed to be rooted in domesticity, but neither the overcrowded classrooms of city schools nor the rough-hewn surroundings of country schoolhouses shared much in common with the fictive sanctuary of the middle-class home. Women perceived to work for material rather than spiritual rewards ran the risk of being dismissed as unfit to teach. In her pursuit of more money, May Church attempted to preempt criticism by emphasizing her tragic, "unprotected" status and all the professional institutes she had led. She also addressed her appeals to a superintendent who was a former teacher and had experienced her own share of financial troubles. Other educators proved less sympathetic. Addressing primary teachers in Boston, reformer and future school supervisor Louisa Hopkins acknowledged that teachers' pay ought to be better, but she blithely advised, "in the meantime you must bear up as best you may." Infusing feminine benevolence and middle-class morality into the definition of teacher professionalism, she insisted teaching was "too noble a work and too near your heart to be measured by money." Discounting women teachers' financial needs, Hopkins called for their sacrifices as proof of their fitness for the privilege of teaching. "If you merely 25Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 86; "Teachers' Salaries: What the Teachers of Minneapolis Have to ̂y," Journal of Education, 1 June 1882, 346; Minneapolis Tribune, 19 August 1878, Roll 80, Frame 1305, Annals; "New England Woman Suffrage Association: Address of Mary F. Eastman," Woman's Journal, 31 May 1873, 173; May Church to Sarah Christie Stevens, 15 February 1891, Folder Feb-Mar 1891, Box 14, James C. Christie and Family papers(hereafter JCC), Minnesota Historical Society. 26On depleted city treasuries and subsequent retrenchments, see Murphy, "From Artisan to Semi-Pro fessional," 18-19; David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 177-178; Kaufman, Boston Women, 92; "Women Teachers," Woman's Journal, 28 December 1878: 413; Annual Report of the School Committee of Boston, 1878 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1878), 15-16; "Teachers' Salaries," Journal of 'Education, 24 March 1881:197. This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization 175 want high wages, and teach only because you can get your living by it, you are not a teacher in any high sense of the term."27 By organizing, women teachers attempted to defend themselves as female professionals. LTA founders agonized over the public image they conveyed. They considered calling themselves the teachers' club but decided that "club" had masculine connotations and might be perceived as a challenge to the existing principals' club. Their concerns had a precedent in Boston. Six years earlier NEWC founders had the same debate, some members shying away from the word "club" and others insisting that it would mark their organization with a "combination of sociability and freedom" and "a degree of exclusiveness." While the elite women of the NEWC decided the gamble worthwhile, teachers were unwilling to risk reproach for not knowing their place. They settled on calling themselves an "association," only to confront fears that a Women Teachers' Association would be confused with a Women's Suffrage Association. Ultimately they arrived at the name Lady Teachers' Association, a prudent choice they thought would reflect their genteel, not strident, pursuit of professionalism. Teachers in other cities likely went through the same process, for that name was not unique to Boston. But prudence failed the Boston teachers. Male principals mounted a "strenuous opposition" to their proposed organization, attempting to discredit the women as agitators.28 But as LTA president Lucy C. Bartlett explained, the LTA did not seek to be associated with either the woman question or the labor question, but rather to "be a teacher's union in the highest sense of that term." They worried that even the perception of political ambitions might hinder their occupational aspirations. Instead LTA members pursued an agenda of reform and self-help, emphasizing their ladyhood in an attempt to make it commensurate with professionalism and wage earning.29 27Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 58-59; May Church to Sarah Christie Stevens, 15 February 1891, Folder Feb-Mar 1891, Box 14, JCC; Jean Christie, "Sarah Christie Stevens, Schoolwoman," Minnesota History 48 (Summer 1986): 246-48; Louisa P. Hopkins, "An Address to Primary School Teachers," Journal of Education, (4 November 1880): 309. See also Rev. E.A. Rand, "The Teachers High Privilege," Journal of Education, 18 September 1879: 145. 28Minutes of first meeting [undated], Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Sprague, 3; "Lady Teachers' Association," Woman's Journal, 22 November 1873: 348. For another women's club, Sorosis, with similar concerns about their name, see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 20-21. Isabella L. Bissett, "Fifty Years of the L.T.A.," Boston Teachers' Newsletter n.d. [1924?], 24, Massachusetts Historical Society. The formation of the Chicago Teachers' Club in 1892 also incited opposition from male principals. See Financial Secretary to Mr. Thos. McLachlan, 18 November 1904, Folder: Sept-Dec 1904, Box 38, CTF papers. 29Minutes of meetings, 20 February 1874, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Also quoted in Bissett, "Fifty Years," 24. On concerns about being labeled as suffragists, see "School-teachers," This content downloaded from 192.84.11.60 on Tue, 5 Aug 2014 16:07:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 176 History of Education Quarter