Anthony read about the convention in her local newspaper, and for the cash-strapped young schoolteacher, so long denied raises and promotions, the Declaration’s bracing opposition to gender-based pay must have been truly revelatory:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.…
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.
The Declaration of Sentiments was a far cry from the writings of Catharine Beecher, who believed in empowering women to teach, but who never expected—nor even wanted—women to win broad equality with men beyond the schoolroom. By midcentury, the terms of the debate over the so-called “Woman Question” had changed. Women’s rights activists were demanding admission to male colleges and access to careers in medicine, the law, journalism, and even the ministry. They hoped to earn equal pay for their efforts. For many of them, like Anthony, teaching had accelerated their sense of outrage, by giving them a taste of independence and a view of workplace discrimination.
In 1850, four-fifths of New York’s eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state’s $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers. These inequalities became the subject of Anthony’s first famous speech, which she made at age thirty-three, at the August 1853 annual meeting of the New York State Teachers’ Association. Three hundred of the five hundred teachers present in the Rochester convention hall were women. Yet by the second evening of the conference, not a single woman had risen to speak. When the conversation shifted to why teachers were not accorded more respect by the public, Anthony could no longer sit silently. She rose from her seat at the back of the room, cleared her throat, and said loudly, “Mr. President.”
The hall fell silent. “What will the lady have?” answered West Point math professor Charles Davies, who was presiding over the meeting in full military regalia, including a blue coat with conspicuous gilt buttons. He was appalled.
“I wish, sir, to speak to the question under discussion,” Anthony responded.
The hall erupted in shouts. For a half hour the male teachers debated Anthony’s simple request. The convention leaders eventually offered Anthony the floor, but only begrudgingly.
“It seems to me, gentlemen, that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain,” Anthony said. “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?” A few other female teachers, emboldened by Anthony’s performance, also rose to speak. One was Clarissa Northrop, a Rochester teacher and principal who reported that she earned $250 per year, while her brother, who held the same job at a different city public school, received $650.
As she left the hall that evening, Anthony was mobbed by well-wishers and horrified traditionalists alike; her speech made the next morning’s newspapers. The Rochester Daily Democrat editorialized, “Whatever the schoolmasters might think of Miss Anthony, it was evident that she hit the nail on the head.” On the conference’s last day, Northrop introduced a resolution acknowledging women’s low pay and committing the New York State Teachers Association “to remove the existing evil” of gender-based wage inequality among teachers. It narrowly passed.
Anthony became a full-time women’s rights activist. When she met Beecher in 1856 at a Manhattan meeting of the American Woman’s Educational Association, she found the older woman hopelessly outdated in her advocacy for women-only normal schools. Anthony believed it was critical both for women and for education that prospective teachers, no matter their sex, be trained at prestigious colleges and universities, which were then closed to women. Anthony wrote to Stanton about the frustrating encounter, calling Beecher’s ideology “strange” and her rhetoric on female education “stupid” and “false”—more a play for respectability among conservative men than a serious effort to improve women’s lives as teachers or raise the quality of public schools.
The differences between Beecher and the younger feminists were not just generational. Beecher had been raised by a mainstream minister. Anthony grew up among freethinking Quaker radicals. At the Quaker meetinghouse, women were allowed to preach. She had seen her father refuse to physically hand over his tax dollars when the tax collector visited, in pacifist protest against funding the U.S. military. So it was unsurprising that Anthony took a confrontational, theatrical approach to her activism.
Female teachers across New York hailed Anthony for taking on the seemingly quixotic causes of equal pay and access to male colleges for training. “I am glad that you will represent us at the Troy gathering,” one wrote as another teachers conference approached. “You will bear with you the gratitude of very many teachers whose hearts are swelling with repressed indignation at the injustice which you expose.” Anthony’s efforts were about more than just rectifying the pay inequality she had endured as a teacher. She had noticed female educators tended to be enthusiastic about a broad array of social reform issues, not only women’s rights, but also antislavery work and temperance. Yet because of their low wages, teachers had very little disposable income to donate to philanthropic causes, and local political groups founded by women often floundered. What’s more, Anthony was becoming interested in labor politics. At women’s rights conferences she had befriended Ernestine Rose, a Polish-born Jewish socialist whose magnetic oratory attracted attention wherever she traveled. Rose was a follower of Robert Owen, the Scottish factory owner and philosopher who believed in liberating female workers by providing them with a fair wage and full-time child care and education for their offspring. These social democratic ideas were deeply resonant for Anthony, who had always been fascinated by her father’s cotton mill and the poor women who labored in it.
Being middle-class, teachers were just the most visible of a vast landscape of mistreated female workers—a group Anthony hoped would make up the core of the emerging women’s suffrage movement. Women who worked outside the home had perhaps the most to gain from securing more political clout, which they could use to demand access to better jobs and higher pay. In a letter to other activists on how to advertise and promote women’s rights meetings across New York, Anthony advised them to reach out to working women first. “I should like particular effort made to call out the teachers, seamstresses, and wage-earning women generally. It is for them, rather than for the wives and daughters of the rich, that I labor.”
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.”*
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:
It does not matter whether the trade or occupation be printing or telegraphing or book-keeping or teaching; the average skill of the persons engaged in it will be lowered if large numbers of young people enter it for a time, with no fixed purpose of remaining in it for life. No improvement in the implements of education can make up for less skill in the teachers.
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 adole
scence. 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.”
The Teacher Wars Page 5