In Honor of Women’s History Month, A Look At Female Teachers in Post Civil War America
The MIT Press is proud to present From the Archive Friday (FTAF). Each Friday, we select an article from the depths of our online Journals archive and make it freely available for one week.
We have celebrated Women’s History Month through our FTAF program since 2014. This year is no exception. For the fifth year in a row, we will bring you a stellar lineup of journal articles about women and feminism, covering everything from 19th-century women inventors to the legacy of Margaret Cavendish, and from the history of feminist biography to the “China Girl” in film.
We’re excited to relaunch our FTAF program here on Medium. We hope this move will encourage more reading and sharing! Check back here each Friday for a new current events-related gem from our journals.
Without further ado, here is the third of five selections from our journal archives for Women’s History Month.
(Check out the first selection on women inventors and the second selection on Margaret Cavendish!)
Politics, pedagogy & gender
Dædalus
Volume 134 | Issue 4 |
Fall 2005
Author: Jill K. Conway
“‘[Women] are endowed by nature with stronger parental impulses, and this makes the society of children delight-
ful, and turns duty into a pleasure.’”
Excerpt:
“The story of women’s opportunities to enter teaching as a respectable occupation for single women outside the home is a case study in the meaning of access. Examination of the case of women teachers’ recruitment in the mid-nineteenth century should make us rethink the incremental model of change that is presumed to characterize the liberal state.
The number of women involved in this recruitment is certainly striking. By 1848 women greatly outnumbered men as annual entrants to the teaching profession; in absolute numbers their predominance was established. In that year 2,424 men taught in the public (or common) schools of America beside 5,510 women. During the 1850s the same pattern was replicated in the Midwest. After 1864 one of the impositions of the victorious North on the southern states during Reconstruction was the establishment of a predominantly female cadre of elementary school teachers. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century the same pattern emerged in the public high schools. By 1890, 65 percent of all teachers in the United States were women. Members of the new female profession were remarkably youthful, averaging from twenty-one to twenty-five years of age in different regions of the country.
Popular attitudes encouraged single women to become teachers but discouraged their presence in the schools once they married. The country’s teachers were predominantly daughters of the native-born, from rural families. In comparison with European teachers, American teachers were not well educated. As late as the 1930s only 12 percent of elementary teachers in the United States had earned bachelor’s degrees. In the nineteenth century many entrants to the profession had not even completed high school. Because so many teachers were drawn from rural farm families, most had not traveled more than 100 miles from their place of birth. Their experience of high culture was minimal. Surveys carried out at the turn of the century recorded that most teachers had never seen reproductions of works of art during their own schooling. As adults their only reading was an occasional novel and the standard popular magazines of the day. To compensate for these deficiencies, the normal schools offered teaching programs that were largely remedial” (134–135).
Politics, pedagogy & gender will be freely available from March 16th to March 22nd on the MIT Press website.
