How Teaching Became Women's Work

How Teaching Became Women’s Work

Dana GoldsteinNew America Foundation

June 20, 2012

“Many of the self-styled teachers…are shown to be low, vulgar, obscene,

intemperate, and utterly incompetent…I simply ask if it would not be better to put the thousands of

men who are keeping school for young children into the mills, and employ the women to train the

children?”

“The first vocation of every school is to train up the young in such a manner as to implant in their minds a knowledge of the relation of man to God, and at

the same time to excite and foster both the will and strength to govern their lives after the spirit and precepts of

Christianity.”

“The French Fallacy”

“I should rather have built up the blind asylum than to have written Hamlet.”

“As a teacher of schools…how divinely does she come, her head encircled with

a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she

treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of

repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue!”

“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?”

“…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. Herein

lies one of the great causes of the inferiority of the American teaching to

the French and German teaching.”

“A nasty, unladylike woman.”

“…Are these men fools or are they knaves? Do they know the facts or are they simply uninformed? Are

they consciously boosting big business? The facts in regard to the inadequacy of revenue for school purposes had been written on my

consciousness so indelibly by the tax fight, which we had just won in the

Illinois Supreme Court…"

"All too often…in the history of the United States, the schoolteacher has been in no

position to serve as a model for an introduction to the intellectual life. Too often he has not only no claims to an intellectual life of his own, but

not even an adequate workmanlike competence in the skills he is supposed to impart. Regardless of his own quality, his low pay and common lack of personal freedom have caused the teacher’s

role to be associated with exploitation and intimidation.”

“Honestly all I can do is laugh. I feel as though instead of spending the time, energy, and money to support those

amazing teachers we already have, we simply try to recruit new ones and the

cycle continues.”