by Sarah Jaffe
Teachers thus occupy an uneasy place in our understanding of the world: expected to be a reservoir of emotional and intellectual support for new generations, they become a receptacle for all the blame when their teaching does not manage to overcome all the obstacles placed in their students’ way. They exist on the edge of a class boundary, not quite granted the respect given to doctors or lawyers, but not quite perceived as the working masses, either. Teaching has been the professional occupation most accessible to immigrants and to Black people, a fact that has also contributed to its complicated status both as a path to upward mobility and as an easy place to lay blame. For a long time teaching was considered a stopgap job, either on the way to a real career (for men), or on the way to having one’s own children (for women). The teaching profession is still overwhelmingly female, teachers’ labor considered similar to mothering—an essential job nevertheless to be done out of sheer love. Teacher and author Megan Erickson pointed out, “Thus the failure of teachers is like the failure of mothers—unthinkable, monstrous, disgusting, the final antisocial act that threatens not only the fabric of the political economy but its perpetuation.”1
Teachers are, in other words, perhaps the ultimate laborers of love. Expected to do more with less every time budgets need tightening, and yet to take the blame every time those budget cuts do harm, teachers epitomize the trap that has all laborers of love in its grip. If they demand better conditions for themselves, they’re called selfish, even as their demands are often ones that would improve their students’ lives as well. Yet teachers have a long history of militant organizing, of challenging the boundaries placed around them by politicians and administrators, and of bringing their communities along with them.
Teaching was not always or inevitably women’s work, though. In the early days, before the institution of compulsory public education, teaching was a young man’s job, often a part-time one. Students were clumped together in a one-room schoolhouse or tutored privately, and teachers sometimes traveled between multiple teaching gigs. Women teachers began to appear with the first “Dame” schools, an English transplant to the colonies where children were educated by women in their private homes—a type of work close enough to mothering to be considered an acceptable occupation for women.2
The “feminization” of teaching began in earnest as publicly funded schools expanded. The first generation of school reformers explicitly advocated it. Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame and a prominent social activist, opened a training school for women teachers in 1830 and became the loudest voice calling for women to enter the field. Women, by teaching (and Beecher herself, by teaching the teachers), could gain “influence, respectability, and independence,” she wrote, while maintaining their womanly virtues. Teaching could also, Beecher noted in a somewhat more forward-thinking moment, give women an alternative to marrying out of economic necessity. In speeches, she extolled the ability of women teachers to prevent uprisings like the French Revolution, where the “common people” had taken it upon themselves to overthrow their leaders. Women teachers, akin to ministers or missionaries, could soothe such fires and instill moral values in the nation’s youth with their boundless love for children.3
But it wasn’t just women’s angelic goodness that led to them being hired en masse as schoolteachers. There was the simple fact that staffing schools was expensive, states wanted to keep pay low, and men could find higher-paying work elsewhere. Women, meanwhile, had few options. They were perceived not to need a wage—they would be supported by their fathers before marriage, and their husbands after it, with teaching as an interlude. Advocates explicitly called for the hiring of women to keep budgets down. Even if, as Beecher intimated, some women saw teaching as an escape hatch from marriage and the family, it was hard to fully get free. Teachers who lived away from their families often boarded in the homes of school board members, leaving them under 24/7 supervision from the boss. And most school districts explicitly banned married women from teaching—another implication that the work done in schools and the work done in the home were equivalents, neither deserving of pay.4
The weight fell even harder on the teachers in schools for Black children, where every dollar spent was begrudged by white people and where teachers had an even more urgent mission. Teachers of Black children held in their hands not just individual children’s futures but the need to prove that Black children as a group could achieve just as much as white youth, given half a chance. And half a chance—or a third of a chance—was often all they were given, with segregated Black schools receiving sometimes as little as a third as much funding as white schools. More than any other teachers, Black teachers were expected to perform miracles out of pure love.5
By 1900, nearly three-quarters of all American teachers were women, and that number was even higher in urban areas. In European countries, teaching held closer to a 50/50 gender split, and pay and benefits were comparatively higher. The percentage of male teachers increased as students grew older (and the work, presumably, less like mothering and more intellectual), and most administrators were male. But despite all the stereotypes of saintly, self-sacrificing “motherteachers,” women teachers were in fact acutely aware of the less-than-optimal conditions in which they often worked, and they were getting angry.6
The resistance began in the 1890s in the same city where it would restart a century later: in Chicago. Schools had been formalized, though battles over taxation still meant they were often underfunded. Public employees in many places had won benefits such as pensions, which, as historian Marjorie Murphy wrote, offered women teachers “an attractive alternative to the adulation of the feminine, which would give them no financial solace in their old age.” Money, not love, after all, paid the bills. Still, male administrators retained control, and male-dominated legislatures—elected by male voters (women did not yet have that right)—decided where schools would be and how much would be spent on them. These men had no intention of letting women teachers have a say.7
Without the right to vote, and without the legal, formalized collective bargaining that would come much later, teachers needed the support of the broader community behind their demands. They were able to use the close relationships they built with students, as well as their reputation for selflessness, to build bonds inside and outside of the classroom that enabled them to win improvements in the schools. It was a lesson that teachers like Rosa Jimenez later drew upon as they rebuilt their unions in the 2000s. These teacher activists took the responsibility of care seriously. Rather than chasing the respectability politics of professionalism, a path they had been denied in any case by virtue of their gender, they decided that if they were going to be treated as women first and workers second, they would use those stereotypes to build power.8
In the early years of public schooling, teachers had been told that it was their femininity, not their brains or carefully honed skills, that was important in the classroom. Asking for higher wages, though, made them seem less feminine. Teachers were highly trained and heavily supervised and yet told their work was a product of natural talent. To all of that, Margaret Haley and the early Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF) said, “Enough!”9
Haley and the other Chicago teachers taught in cramped classrooms with up to sixty students in them, many of those students freshly arrived immigrants who among them spoke half a dozen different languages. (Conditions, in other words, not too dissimilar from those faced by Rosa Jimenez today.) But Haley and the CTF scoured the tax rolls to catch those who weren’t paying taxes and campaigned to have the city recover that money and spend it on schools. Their work earned the teachers a major raise in 1899, and the federation—not yet a union—national attention.10
The National Education Association (NEA)—a professional organization dominated by (male) administrators, who resented the incursion of women classroom teachers on their professional prerogatives—had existed for a number of years at that point. But the CTF teachers
drew on their experience in the classroom and their skills as communicators (also honed on the job) to build an organization that fought for teachers and their working-class students along class lines. Haley was a fierce critic of industrial elites, telling a crowd, “Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today; one the industrial ideal dominating through the superiority of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machines; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.” The joys of teaching, Haley argued, would only exist if teachers were preparing their students for a world in which they would be full democratic participants, not merely drudges.11
In response to the rabble-rousing Chicago teachers, the NEA reached out to women’s clubs and social organizations—the forerunners of today’s nonprofits. But these women were mostly bourgeois activists rather than working schoolteachers. Haley and her colleagues preferred to rally alongside the working class, bringing together teachers from several cities to form the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). They also allied with the Chicago Federation of Labor to help organize women factory workers; the AFT joined the national American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1916. Yet the teachers’ relationship with organized labor was fraught—officially, the AFL supported the “family wage,” which assumed workers were men with a wife at home doing housework. The teachers, meanwhile, demanded equal pay for women, even married women, who were still too often banned from the classroom.12
There were still tensions within the teaching profession, too. Despite all of Haley’s leadership, a man, Charles Stillman of the Chicago Federation of Men Teachers, was elected founding president of the new AFT. Power struggles remained between men and women teachers over issues of professionalism, privileges for high school teachers, and even support for the world war then raging around them. Black teachers were admitted in segregated locals, but the specific challenges they faced teaching Black students in separate and most definitely unequal facilities were often ignored in favor of other debates. Were teachers workers like any other, or were they members of the professional middle class? Were they to be troublemaking trade unionists, or lobbying wheeler-dealers? And always at the bottom of such questions: Was the work done for love or money?13
WHERE TEACHERS HAD AT FIRST BEEN EXPECTED TO CARE FOR THEIR students, once they’d unionized, administrators found such caring workers unruly. Instead of saints, they had become hell-raisers. School officials began to look to the new “science” of management, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about compartmentalizing and deskilling work, to control their troublesome workers. Teachers’ interpersonal skills had never been recognized as such, and now those skills were being defined out of existence entirely. Standardized testing, the bête noire of today’s teachers’ unions, first arose at this time, along with the idea of tracking students by class background into vocational or more elite programs.14
With the advent of the first Red Scare, after the Communist revolution in Russia, administrators found a new way to control educators who might have ideas about running schools. The first loyalty oaths for teachers appeared in New York in 1917 and had spread to two-thirds of the states by the 1930s. As the teachers’ unions fought for academic freedom in the classroom, they also joined their communities in organizing outside of it—some advocated freedom for leftists like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, or for members of the Industrial Workers of the World, who had been accused of violence but railroaded for their political beliefs. It was often the women teachers who led the charge for these causes, against World War I, and for racial equality in schooling, while male teachers were more likely to hew to the ideology of professionalism. The progressive women teachers—these early Rosa Jimenezes—were still holding to a caring ideal, but they expanded the range of things that they cared about. And for that, they began to lose their jobs.15
The first teacher to go on trial—not technically a legal trial but certainly conducted and publicized like one—was a Quaker, Mary Stone McDowell, who opposed the loyalty oath in keeping with her faith. She was fired in 1918 for “conduct unbecoming a teacher.” There would be many more like her after World War II, when, the fight against the Nazis over, Americans turned all their energy toward the Cold War with the Communist USSR.16
During the Depression of the 1930s, the teachers being hired were more educated than ever, and more diverse than ever—particularly, as journalist Dana Goldstein wrote in The Teacher Wars, in New York, where many of the teachers (a majority of new hires by 1940) were Jewish. Jews were newly able to access higher education through the City University system, but unlikely to be hired outside of the public sector even with their degrees. New teachers, politically radicalized by circumstances and paid through President Franklin Roosevelt’s temporary relief programs, had flocked to the unions, and young leftists in turn flocked to the Communist Party. The Depression pressed teachers to their limits: public budgets in places like Chicago were so stretched that teachers were paid in scrip or sometimes not paid at all. Yet the teachers were still targets of rage from the public for being relatively well off (which, in that era, often meant having a job at all).17
After the Depression, the economy was growing again, the Baby Boom was on, and the schools were expanding. Yet that resentment remained, and teachers remained a politically soft target. They were easy to paint as radicals undermining America while sponging off the public dime, in a preview of the language later used to demonize the “welfare queen.”18
Some of them—though certainly not all of them—were in fact radical, though their ideas were far from the caricatures promoted by the red-baiters. Communist teachers emphasized organizing alongside the community, particularly the working-class and underserved Black and Latinx communities in the cities where they taught. They fought for improved working conditions, but similar to the reform movement headed by teachers like Jimenez in the 2010s, they understood those working conditions to also be their students’ learning conditions.19
In New York, Communist members ran the Teachers Union (TU), which argued that an “organization like ours cannot confine itself to a narrow line of economic activity only. Teachers, like other humans, do not live by bread alone.” It pledged to end “discrimination in education on account of sex, color, race, religion, or political beliefs, or affiliations” in the 1940s, well before Brown v. Board of Education put an end to legal separate-but-equal schooling. The union lobbied for smaller class sizes, for recreational spaces for children, and for special attention to underserved areas like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where children of color attended crumbling segregated schools. The leftist teachers advocated for culturally relevant curricula that taught Black history and immigrant history and grappled honestly with the American legacy of racism.20
The Teachers Union fought, too, for the rights of women teachers, including the right to marry and remain in the classroom, something that was banned in many states up until World War II. In 1941, Bella Dodd, spokeswoman for the TU, proposed the creation of publicly funded nursery schools (more than sixty years before New York mayor Bill de Blasio made universal prekindergarten his central campaign plank). The union wanted to both create jobs for teachers and to “aid working women with small children.”21
The Red Scare sprang from the top down—it was Washington-led fearmongering in support of US foreign policy—but locally it became a useful whip with which to discipline teachers who were making trouble. The first teacher to feel its sting in the postwar era was Louis Jaffe (no relation), a Brooklyn high school social studies teacher who was driven from his post despite the support of ninety of his colleagues. Jaffe was punished for teaching about the Soviet Union in a way that upset his supervisor. Another New York teacher, Minnie Gutride, was dragged from her class and questioned in a “surprise hearing”; a cancer survivor, Gutride was so traumatized by the event that she committed suicide.2
2
Despite the bad press that Gutride’s death gave the district, administrators continued the witch hunt, eventually purging 378 teachers from New York schools. A TU lawyer commented, “These were people well along in years and careers. Many became menial salesmen, burdens on friends and families, moving about like beggars. Some were totally shattered. And they had all been good teachers, some great.” Parents coming forward, telling administrators, as they did of one Harlem teacher, “We love Alice Citron because she has fought for us and our children,” had no effect. Citron, who had taught in Harlem for nineteen years, was known for “writing an African American history curriculum, inviting students to her home, and using her own money to buy needy children eyeglasses, books, shoes, and food.”23
In other words, the teachers who were purged were doing what they had been recruited to do: care for the children in their charge, fight for them, put those children before themselves. They built connections with the local families and used their power as a union to make those families’ demands heard.24
In response to the Red Scare, the Teachers Union went deeper into the community, demanding desegregation, construction of schools and play spaces in Black neighborhoods, and the hiring of Black teachers. This was in spite of spying, police infiltration, and sometimes racialized hate mail—one anti-Semitic hate letter “juxtaposed a loyal and patriotic ‘American mother’ to Godless Jewish Communists.” It was in spite of the threat, for immigrant teachers, of deportation (one administrator was on the lookout for those whose citizenship might be “amenable to cancellation,” presaging the Trump administration’s attempts to get rid of those it considered undesirable), and constant attempts to find proof that Communist teachers were plotting to overthrow the US government. All the spies found during their snooping were debates about racism, gender bias, and US foreign policy.25