From "Old Miss" to New Professional: A Portrait of Women Educators under the American Occupation of Japan, 1945-52

Abstract

THE UNMARRIED FEMALE schoolteacher may qualify as the most written about, yet least understood, figure in the history of modern education. She emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a literary stereotype defined by the likes of Miss Priscilla Batte, that shapeless yet majestic matron of Dinwiddie Academy in Ellen Glasgow's Virginia, the Cabot sisters in Joseph Lincoln's Mary-Gusta, or the ever vigilant Miss Dorothy Gibbs, head of the Female Institute in Thomas Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy.'1 Stiff, humorless, and punctillious to the end, these grim products of' the literary imagination were construed to typify an entire profession that seemed peculiarly vulnerable to caricature. Until World War I, at least, teaching and spinsterhood were synonymous in the public mind. And the self-denigration that accompanied acceptance of the old maid stereotype presumably blunted the creative urge to write. As several American historians have noted, there is a remarkable paucity of memoirs and autobiographies, through which the subject could speak for herself; thus, we know little about the proverbial lady who stood in front of the chalkboard.2 The historical plight of the female schoolteacher is not unique to the industrializing societies of the Western world. By the early 1900s, women educators in Japan performed classroom duties and assumed social roles that were similar, in many ways, to those of their counterparts in post-bellum America. The concept of the teacher in turn-of-the-century Japan owed much to earlier American theories of domesticity and of the schoolmistress as a mother away from home. Moreover, in the 1920s, as occurred earlier in America, the Japanese schoolteacher emerged as an object of literary and ideological prescription rather than a free-thinking human being. Like her