Seattle's Women Teachers of the Interwar Years: Shapers of a Livable City

Abstract

Much can be learned from this warm and rather intimate examination of teachers during the twenties and thirties in Seattle. Doris Hinson Pieroth describes many aspects of the lives of women in the city's schools, including where and how they lived and their personal associations. Despite some relatively minor problems, this is a careful study of a topic that has received limited attention: women teachers in a northwestern American city during the twentieth century. Pieroth is quite aware of the peculiar qualities of Seattle as a site for this study. Far removed and not a port of entry for many immigrants, it was a city settled from other parts of the United States. This was certainly true of its early teachers, who Pieroth notes hailed largely from the upper Midwest. Unlike their counterparts in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other large cities, Seattle's teachers did not face classes filled with poor immigrant children, except perhaps for those with Japanese students. Also unusual for the time, many of Seattle's teachers appear to have considered teaching their life's work, and they stayed in the profession for decades on end.