The Teacher Wars (7 page)

Anthony was valued in reform circles as a tireless organizer, but Stanton was considered the women's movement's true intellectual—a graceful writer and speaker who probably would have become an attorney or journalist had she been born male. Like other radical feminists who wanted to see women argue court cases, run for Congress, and launch businesses, Stanton did not bother to hide
her disdain for “schoolmarms,” who were doing, after all, a job that had become socially coded as demure and traditionally feminine. Teachers who defended gender-segregated normal training were “an infernal set of fools,” Stanton wrote to Anthony, and the education profession was “a pool of intellectual stagnation.”

Stanton was a wealthy woman who educated her own seven children at home. She did not acknowledge the pride so many female teachers took in their work, and she seemed to lack a sophisticated understanding of why so many advocates for female education, like the aging Catharine Beecher, felt attached to gender-segregated normal schools—some of the very few institutions in nineteenth-century American life that formally trained women for the workforce. Stanton often spoke about the exhaustions of her own pregnancies and child-rearing responsibilities, and she seemed to see teaching in exactly the way Beecher and Horace Mann had portrayed it—as mothering outside the home. In Stanton's popular
1880 lecture “Our Girls,” she offered parents advice on the rearing of daughters, explaining that if girls were offered the same education as their brothers, they could become postal workers, preachers, physicians, or even president of the United States. “Are not any of these positions better than teaching school for a mere pittance?”

For Anthony, it was frustrating that so many female teachers did not see that coeducation would likely raise their own professional status, by ensuring teachers were trained at more elite colleges, not second-rate normal schools. But unlike Stanton, she reserved most of her ire for the male administrators who were actively preventing female colleagues from advancing in the profession, regardless
of their demonstrated skill.
After a particularly tiring protest at a Lockport, New York, teachers meeting in 1858, Anthony wrote to a friend that the experience was “rich. I never felt so cool and self-possessed among the plannings and plottings of the few old fogies, and they never appeared so frantic with rage. They evidently felt their reign of terror is about ended.”

By 1860, Anthony's efforts to organize female teachers slowed as the nation braced for the war over slavery. In the years after the terrible conflict, she and Stanton became caught up in debates within the American Left about how to balance the all-too-often competing drives for female and African American suffrage. The two women's rights leaders were distraught when the Republican Party and former allies from the abolition movement chose to push for a Fourteenth Amendment that extended the franchise to black men, but not to women of any race. In their anger, Stanton and Anthony increasingly made common cause with outright racists, those who said educated white women were more deserving of the vote than uneducated freed slaves.
The women's movement split into two hostile camps.

It would be another half century before female teachers won equal pay and access to administrative jobs in education, in part by allying themselves with male blue-collar organized labor—a constituency that, because it could vote, had the power to amplify female workers' demands for fair pay. In the meantime, the idea of teachers as non-college-educated, unmarried, low-paid mother substitutes lived on, and men continued to react by streaming out of the classroom.

By 1873, every northern state except Indiana and Missouri had more female than male teachers. In his annual report that year,
federal commissioner of education John Eaton expressed muted concern about the new “difficulty … in finding fully educated men for the various departments of school work.” But he hesitated to make any grand pronouncement on what, if anything, should be done to counteract the trend, suggesting more evidence was needed on how students performed under male versus female teachers. One Rhode Island superintendent was more forthright in stating his concerns
about the feminization of teaching, claiming that because men were more intellectual and women more emotional, a well-rounded education could be provided only by both sexes working together. “
The two types of mind and heart (i.e. Male and female) are distinct and were designed to have their combined effect on the youthful character,” he wrote. “Any scheme of education and training that leaves out either is defective and cannot secure that symmetrical development which is possible under the other plan.”

One clear downside of feminization—that, because of sexism, the political class would be unlikely to respect and thus fund a profession dominated by women—never seemed to occur to nineteenth-century male education reformers. In 1869 Charles William Eliot, a patrician Bostonian, became president of Harvard College. Eliot was an advocate for the modernization of schooling and hoped to reorganize Harvard according to the model of a German university, in which faculty performed research and undergraduates chose to major in a specific discipline. In his inaugural address, Eliot laid out this agenda, but also
cautiously addressed the Woman Question. He expressed reluctance to admit female students to Harvard, noting that educating men and women of “immature character and marriageable age” together could lead to “very grave” consequences. Like John Eaton, Eliot seemed genuinely befuddled by women's recent appearance on the scene of American scholarly and professional life. “The world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex,” he said. “Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman's natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities.”
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Given his biases against working women, it is unsurprising that Eliot emerged as the nation's most influential critic of the feminization of teaching, especially at the high school level. “
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,” he wrote. “Herein lies one of the great causes of the inferiority of the American teaching to the French and German teaching.”

In a June 1875 essay in
The Atlantic
, Eliot shared a number of ideas for reforming public education. His main complaint was that local governments were too hesitant to spend tax dollars on schools, which led to classes that were too large—forty to sixty students—for anyone other than “an angel or a genius” to effectively teach. The same chronic underfunding led to low teacher salaries, which made it difficult to keep talented people in the classroom over the long haul, especially men. Eliot wrote:

Eliot associated the problem of high teacher turnover with the influx of women into the classroom. While the common schoolers had celebrated softness and femininity as virtues, Eliot believed women were physically “
weaker than men … more apt to be worn out by the fatiguing work of teaching,” and he complained about female teachers quitting their jobs after marriage. Of course, Eliot's essay was casually sexist. Instead of questioning, as Anthony had, why school districts expected, and often actually required, women to leave their jobs after their wedding day, he took it as given that women wanted to stop working and become housewives. His assumptions about female physical capabilities were unfounded. Yet in arguing for higher teacher pay, and even “some permanence of tenure” for teachers, Eliot made a powerful case for teacher professionalization, one that reached an audience that was more
mainstream than that of women's movement leaders like Anthony, who made similar points. He also pushed back against the Mann-Beecher fantasy of the “angel” teacher—a person so consumed by a spiritual calling to educate that she would labor in overcrowded, under-resourced classrooms for far less than adequate pay. Working conditions, Eliot said, do matter for teachers, just as they do for any other professional.

These warnings went unheeded by policy makers, however, and the pace of feminization quickened over the subsequent decades. In 1890 only about one-third of teachers across the nation were men.
The wealthier and more developed a state became, the faster male workers fled education in search of higher-paying fields. In Massachusetts, women made up 90 percent of the teaching force, despite a statewide program in which female teachers' already unequal salaries were lowered further in order to pay male teachers more.
Across New England, only 10 percent of normal school students were male. There was now powerful evidence that the lofty rhetoric of Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher had come down to earth. American public school teaching had developed less as a female ministry and more as a working-class job for young women barely out of adolescence. American teachers earned only about as much as weavers.
When a teacher took a sick day, her salary was suspended and paid to her substitute.

Mann had been inspired by the Prussian school system, yet German visitors to the United States observed that American teachers were far less well trained and well respected than their European counterparts.
Dr. E. Schlee, a German principal who toured American schools in 1893 on a trip organized around the Chicago World's Fair, linked the “extraordinary preponderance of female teachers” in American public schools to a general anti-intellectualism that pervaded American education. Most students never encountered algebra or a foreign language. State teacher licensing exams tested applicants less on curricular knowledge than on morality—asking them whether they agreed, for example, that alcohol and nicotine were forces of social evil. Schlee complained that too many American teachers relied solely on rote lessons from textbooks. All these problems were confounded by feminization, since “woman, by
stepping out of the domestic circle to compete with man, seems to increase the unrest, precipitation, and tension in all relations of life.” To attract higher-skilled men to the profession, Schlee argued that teachers would have to be paid much more.

Stephan Waetzoldt, a Berlin professor who attended the same conference, agreed that the United States needed to recruit more male teachers. But he thought this might be difficult to do, since unlike in Germany, American teachers received no uniform nationalized training; benefited from no tenure protections or retirement pension; and had no organization dedicated to representing their interests. As a result, “In many cities the teacher is a poor day-laborer who earns his bread in sorrow and fear of the Damocles sword.… I believe we Germans have no reason to be envious of the school system of America.”

A half century after Horace Mann began to open normal schools that admitted only women, the new moral panic was less about uncaring male teachers than about undereducated female teachers.

The toxic mix of uneven, highly localized training; low pay; anti-intellectualism; and lack of social prestige pushed not just men but ambitious women, too, out of the classroom. One was Belva Lockwood, another early feminist pioneer from upstate New York. Born in 1830, she became a rural schoolteacher at age fourteen, earning $5 per month plus room and board, less than half a male teacher's salary. She married at eighteen and by twenty-three was a widow, with a three-year-old daughter to support. She returned to teaching, bringing her daughter, Lura, to the classroom each day, since she had nowhere else to put the little girl.

When she had saved up enough money, Lockwood enrolled in the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, a college that was experimenting with coeducation, offering women the option to study serious subjects, such as science and politics, alongside men. One evening, Lockwood snuck off campus to see a “young and handsome” Susan B. Anthony address a local teachers conference. From Anthony, Lockwood heard, for the first time,
the “startling heresy” that
women should be able to work not only as teachers, but at any job, from selling shoes to operating printing presses.

Over the next decade, Lockwood continued to teach across New York State. But she never forgot Anthony's radical charge for women to open up the professions. In 1866 she took Lura and moved to Washington, D.C., to explore her lifelong interest in politics. She taught at a girls' school until 1 p.m., and spent the afternoons observing congressional hearings and Supreme Court arguments. Lockwood longed to play some sort of role in civic life. She applied for a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, but her application was never acknowledged. Three Washington law schools rejected her on account of her gender, so she began studying the law on her own during the evenings. Lockwood had little reason to hope she would ever practice as an attorney; the number of women admitted to the bar across the country could be counted on two hands, and it was not until 1869 that an American law school, Washington University in St. Louis, admitted women.

Her legal dreams on hold, Lockwood joined a Methodist church whose congregants were active in the women's and freedmen's rights movements. Through these new connections, Lockwood befriended two female journalists, Emily Briggs and Mary Clemmer Ames. Both wrote often about the poor treatment of female federal workers. Women had begun serving as government clerks to replace male workers who were conscripted during the Civil War. Now that men were back at work, stark, gender-based pay discrimination became clear: Women who cut and counted currency notes for the Treasury Department, for example, earned only half what men earned. In some cases, federal departments reported that women were more efficient workers than men and asked Congress permission to pay female clerks more. Lawmakers refused.