Chapter 2: “Repressed Indignation”: The Feminist Challenge to American Education
Over the next ten weeks, I will be walking through Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession chapter-by-chapter. My hope is that this level of engagement with her work will better help me ingrain the history and key themes of American education and perhaps be helpful to you as well.
In Chapter One, Dana Goldstein introduced us to Catharine Beecher and Horace Mann, two pioneers of the common schools movement with a shared vision for an American public education driven by females and focused on moral development. That chapter covered many of the developments between 1820 and 1850, when the “common school” movement began spreading out from its New England epicenter.
In the second chapter, we meet two, new, potentially more familiar individuals, in the pioneering feminists of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Though the duo are well known for their joint efforts in the fight for women’s rights, the former was a proud teacher who aligned herself with the concerns and causes of the profession while the latter barely disguised her contempt for teaching and the women who assented to its “repressive indignation.”
You Get What You Pay For
In 1853, Susan B. Anthony was an unmarried, thirty year old woman attending the Annual New York Teachers’ Association conference. She would make her foray into the public consciousness in mere moments, but her speech would not not be a spur of the moment anomaly or even the result of a couple years worth of resentment. Anthony hailed from a progressive Quaker family that was used to fighting for unpopular causes, such as anti-slavery and pro-temperance movements (34), but much of her adult life had been spent in the classroom. She was a skilled educator who enjoyed the work but eventually left the profession because of two particular affronts: the first was the laughable discrepancy between the pay female teachers received as compared to the males, and the second was the fact that, at age 26, she had been passed over for the role of principal at the school in favor of a nineteen year old male who had hardly proved he could manage a classroom. These incidents had pushed her into the burgeoning women’s rights movement and were what now compelled her to stand in the conference and request the right to speak.
Such an action was unheard of for a woman at that time, and it took some deliberation before it was agreed that she should be given permission to say her word. The association was not prepared for what was coming. In her speech, Anthony detailed and dressed down the gross inequality of teacher pay in the profession. Her argument was not powerful merely because of its appeal to justice, but because Anthony, a shrewd activist, knew how to go beyond mere calls for restitution to shrewd appeals to the ego of her dissenters:
“It seems to me, gentleman, that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect [that is, the general public’s disrespect of the entire profession] of which you complain. Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is not competent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative position, as here men must compete with the cheap labor women?”
Depending on where you sat, the argument was either inspiring or damning but at the very least it was effective. It directly led to the passing of new resolutions for the pursuit of equal pay. The speech also launched Anthony beyond the sphere of fighting for female teacher’s rights to the forefront of the entire Women’s Rights movement. So rapidly were women moving beyond a mere desire for a profession to call their own, in which they would provide their “angelic” services at minimal prices, that when Anthony met a much older Catharine Beecher, she could hardly find a positive word to describe the now “outdated” matriarch of American public education (37).
From Working Woman to “Schoolma’rm”
Goldstein teases out the fascinating ways how the fight for equality within the teaching profession mirrored and differed from the Women’s Rights movement. Both were movements primarily led by women, and both seemed to have similar goals so that it would appear that each movement overlapped perfectly upon the other. But this was not so. While Anthony fought for women to excel in society at large and in schools in particular, Stanton saw women’s prevalence within schools as harmful to the image of women and their potential. Her eyes were set on getting women into the “reputable” professions of law, politics and business, but so long as females were satisfied with teaching, they would inevitably fail to obtain these lofty goals.
While I’m no expert in feminism, this type of argument seems fairly perennial within this ideological camp. Whereas Anthony seemed to care little for what others (be it males or society at large) thought of women so long as they were able to live a fulfilling life on their own terms, Stanton wanted respect and to objectively prove women’s equality, which would require pushing some women out of what they might have actually wanted (teaching or full-time motherhood, for example) and into the pursuit of a more prestigious vocation. Anthony’s first concern was securing equality and freedom for the individual woman; Stanton’s first concern was the Cause.
As a result, those who took after Stanton began to turn their nose up at teachers and the profession in general which led to a rift between what should have been a firmly united coalition. A key point of contest – and this continues a thread Goldstein highlighted in Chapter 1 – was the means of educating women. As before, Stanton and Anthony’s views followed their commitments. Anthony wanted women to have access to male-only educational institutions, but considered female-only schools to be a fine option if a woman preferred it. Stanton, however, saw women-only institutions as impediments to women winning their way into the male-only spaces and wanted them gone. A major consideration in this debate was the fact that most colleges for teachers – called “Normal Schools” at the time – were pretty pathetic when it came to their academic substance, regardless of which gender they served. To this day, schools dedicated solely to the education of educators tend to be regarded with suspicion because there is little consensus on what constitutes a “study of education” and any foray into specific subject areas is bound to be second-hand in nature rather than the direct scholarship you might expect at a traditional university.
Goldstein points out that ideological differences between Anthony and Stanton were no doubt inflamed by their different economic upbringings. Whereas Anthony’s background was on the ground floor of working to middle class American life, Stanton was wealthy and a mom several times over who found little fascination with mothering as a career, whether it be in the home or in the classroom.
Eventually, the debates had to pause when the Civil War took over the national consciousness, but problems continued to fester. The divide within the Women’s Movement between those who championed teaching and those who denigrated it only added to the cracks that had been set at the foundation: the profession’s lack of prestige, the unimpeded feminization of the teaching force, the insultingly low pay (regardless of gender), and the cultural conviction that a truly ambitious man or woman should not confine themselves to the indignity of a classroom.
These cracks in the foundation would not resolve quickly or cleanly, and as Goldstein teases at by chapter’s end, would only be further complicated by the dawning of our nation’s first true reckoning with race.
Questions:
Could the Women’s Rights and the public education movements have succeeded in securing victories more quickly and effectively if they had united from the start?
While no one believes that women entering the teaching force itself was a negative, the rapid feminization of the entire profession seems to have been damaging because of the underlying motivations and the interconnected assumptions about women at the time. That said, how has a teaching force composed almost entirely of women benefited our nation? How has this unique “feature” of our system differentiated us from other nations?
What are the ideological and psychological long-term effects of a highly feminized public education system (as opposed to a masculinized or gender-balanced system)?
How was Anthony’s logic at the New York Teacher’s conference not already fully grasped by the leaders in the profession? It seems obvious.
The Red Book 