Women Who Were More than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen's Teaching

Abstract

HISTORIANS of nineteenth-century common school reform have noted that feminization of teaching meant expanded professional opportunities for women, but within a limited social and economic context. Schoolmen like Horace Mann seized on rhetoric of popularizers of sentimental womanhood and declared that teachers should consider themselves mothers away-from-home. Writers and reformers alike emphasized women's nurturing qualities-gentleness, patience, and kindness with young children - and glorified function of female moral influence in purification of home and nation. But despite this inflated rhetoric, women teachers received less pay than their male counterparts, and they were denied positions of administrative authority in local and state school systems. Based on both morality and financial efficiency, argument for female teachers was a powerful one; by late Nineteenth Century (earlier in New England), women dominated common school teaching force. (1) How did these teachers maintain a belief in intrinsic importance of their work and yet accept their inferior status within educational bureaucracies? Did they deal with situation philosophically (reformers urged them to eschew selfishness) or did they show signs of resistance and protest? If, as one historian has suggested, the pattern of defeat within victory which characterized feminine takeover of America's schools symbolized women's more general position within their culture, then these questions have a larger social significance. For as midnineteenth century teachers sought to accomodate themselves to malecontrolled school systems, they revealed a basic dilemma faced by middleclass women everywhere who took seriously rhetorical ideal of female