My husband, a high-school Social Studies teacher with an interest in
the history of education, tells me that the prohibition against
married women teachers was almost universal in the late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century United States. He offers the following
information:
From "The History of Our Public Schools," Wyandotte County, Kansas,
http://www.kckps.org/DISTHISTORY/dist-history/marriedteachers.htm:
"In the late nineteenth century, proscriptions against married women
working outside the home prevented the most prosperous from engaging
in paid work. Especially in large city schools, married women were
often barred from the classroom, and women with children were denied
a place in schools."
From the American Federation of Teachers, an article by educational
policy expert Diane Ravitch, http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/
american_educator/issues/winter06-07/includes/ravitch.htm:
"First, there was Mary Murphy. She started teaching in the Brooklyn
schools in 1891. Ten years later, in 1901, she got married. That was
a mistake. When she got married, the Board of Education charged her
with gross misconduct and fired her. . . ."
And here is "You've Come a Long Way, Baby . . . ," an article at the
bottom of this page from the National Education Association: http://
www.nea.org/neatoday/0001/rights.html:
"School employees now enjoy a wide array of rights, but that
wasn’t always the case. Not all that long ago, female teachers in
many states could be fired for getting married. Comtemporary courts
upheld the practice on the ‘economic theory’ that ‘married women
should forfeit their positions to single girls who had no husbands to
support them.’
A 1935 study of teacher employment contracts concluded that
school boards were obsessively concerned with the private lives of
their (predominantly female) teachers. Some of the more ‘interesting’
contract provisions:
Virginia teachers were prohibited from ‘keeping company with
sorry young men.’
In North Carolina, teachers had to promise ‘to abstain from
dancing ... not to go out with any young men except insofar as it may
be necessary to stimulate Sunday School work... not to fall in
love... and to sleep at least eight hours each night.’
Mississippi teachers had to promise not to ’play society to the
detriment of the school or unnecessarily frolic on school nights.’
Missouri educators had to agree that they would lose their jobs
‘if [they] should smoke a cigarette, pipe or cigar at any time, in
any place.’
Noted one teacher: ‘I must live in the school district and
remain here three week-ends out of four during the year. I must not
dance, play cards, or be out late on week-nights; in fact, they want
me to be an old maid.’ "
All of this explains why my great-grandmother stopped teaching as
soon as she got married, in rural Iowa, circa 1880. It also explains
why teachers' unions developed in the first place.
And as my husband also points out, as late as the 1960s, female
students who had been married (and were now widowed or divorced) were
forbidden from residing in the (all-female) dormitories in many
colleges. He personally knew a young woman who attended Rosemont
College, a Catholic women's college in Pennsylvania, in the mid-'60s,
who had a brief marriage that was quickly annulled. It didn't
matter: she was barred thereafter from residing in any of the
college's dormitories.
--Jurretta Heckscher
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