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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