The Teacher Wars (6 page)

The gadfly Boston journalist Orestes Brownson proved prescient in his skepticism toward the common schools movement. A convert to Catholicism, Brownson worried about Protestant reformers' attempts to make public school teachers double as missionaries, and thought parents should exercise more control over community schools.
In general, he subscribed to a more pragmatic vision of the role of the school in society, arguing it was unlikely teachers could make much headway in defeating poverty as long as workers lacked vocational training and labor rights. He wrote:

Beecher and Mann believed morality was the end of public education, and female teachers were its means. In fact, there was little public consensus on what American common schooling should look like. Subsequent generations of education reformers—and women's rights leaders—would angrily challenge the status quo Mann and Beecher had wrought: of masses of low-paid, poorly educated “motherteachers,” prioritizing faith over academic learning.

THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN EDUCATION

In 1838, eighteen-year-old Susan B. Anthony was away at Quaker boarding school when she received a letter informing her that a childhood friend had married a middle-aged widower with six children. Letters home had to be edited by a teacher for moral content, so Susan took her true feelings to her diary: “
I should think any female would rather live and die an old maid.”

A few months later, Anthony withdrew from school. Her father's cotton mill had gone bust, and he could no longer afford tuition. She began working as a teacher in village schools near her family's upstate New York home. By the time she moved away, eight years later, she had turned down at least two marriage proposals. She liked working and had secured an exciting new job, as head of girls' education at the Canajoharie Academy in Palatine Bridge, New York, where her uncle served on the school board.
With her $110 annual salary, more money than she had ever had before, Anthony binged on high fashion, including a dress made of purple merino wool at $2 per yard, an $8 gray fox muff, and a $5.50 white silk hat that “makes the villagers stare.” In a letter home she wondered (a little churlishly) if her sisters did not “feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.”

At age twenty-six, Anthony was exhilarated by life on her own, attending balls and the circus for the first time. Always a Quaker—if a somewhat lapsed one—she founded a local women's temperance organization. Yet she took her teaching job seriously and resented
the fact that she earned less than her male colleagues. Anthony wrote to her mother in November 1846 that although her students' parents celebrated her “diligent” teaching, and she had recruited four new pupils to the school, she would not receive a raise. “
That salary business runs in my head, I can tell you,” she complained. She immersed herself in the work, giving special attention to one fifteen-year-old girl who had what Anthony considered an unfair reputation for being “unmanageable. I hope to find her otherwise.” Soon enough, the child regarded her young teacher as “a sort of cousin,” Anthony reported, and began to “carry herself rather strait.”

Over the next two years, Anthony's enthusiasm for teaching waned. She admired the headmaster who had hired her, but when he retired in 1848, she disliked the new boss, a nineteen-year-old fond of corporal punishment. Though Anthony had been teaching for a decade, her gender disqualified her for a larger role at the school—it was unthinkable that a woman would supervise men. Her stagnant salary meant she was still living in a tiny, cold room in a relative's home. In May she wrote to her parents that she now considered teaching a “
penance … A weariness has come over me that the short spring vacation did not in the least dispel. I have a pleasant school of 20 scholars, but I have to manufacture the interest duty compels me to exhibit. I am anxious they should learn, but feel almost to shrink from the task.”

Like many extraordinary nineteenth-century women, Anthony had an unusually supportive father. “
I have only to say,” Daniel Anthony responded, “that when you get tired of teaching, try something else.”

In 1848 Anthony moved back in with her parents and tried to figure out what that something else might be. Through her family's involvement in New York State temperance and antislavery circles, she was becoming aware of the growing women's rights movement, which had held its first national conference that summer in the Finger Lakes town of Seneca Falls.

The conference's chief organizer was a young mother named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the daughter of an affluent and politically
well-connected judge. In 1840 Stanton and her husband had traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. She and another American female activist, Lucretia Mott, hoped to be recognized there as official delegates, but the male abolitionists refused to seat them. It was highly unusual for women to speak in front of large, mixed-gender crowds—especially on controversial topics—and many antislavery activists of both sexes worried that the radicalism of early feminism would hamstring the global abolitionist movement.

So Stanton came to the realization that without a social movement of their own, the cause of women's rights in America would not move forward. In planning the Seneca Falls Convention, she recruited not only female activists, but also important male abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and a number of influential Quakers. The extraordinary manifesto that came out of Seneca Falls was called the Declaration of Sentiments. It borrowed the structure and vocabulary of the Declaration of Independence—“we hold these truths to be self-evident,” “consent of the governed”—to argue in favor of women's suffrage, equal treatment before the law regardless of sex, and equal access to marital property and child custody.

Anthony read about the convention in her local newspaper, and for the cash-strapped young schoolteacher, so long denied raises and promotions, the Declaration's bracing opposition to gender-based pay must have been truly revelatory:

The Declaration of Sentiments was a far cry from the writings of Catharine Beecher, who believed in empowering women to teach, but who never expected—nor even wanted—women to win broad equality with men beyond the schoolroom. By midcentury, the terms of the debate over the so-called “Woman Question” had changed. Women's rights activists were demanding admission to male colleges and access to careers in medicine, the law, journalism, and even the ministry. They hoped to earn equal pay for their efforts. For many of them, like Anthony, teaching had accelerated their sense of outrage, by giving them a taste of independence and a view of workplace discrimination.

In 1850, four-fifths of New York's eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state's $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers. These inequalities became the subject of Anthony's first famous speech, which she made at age thirty-three, at the August 1853 annual meeting of the New York State Teachers' Association. Three hundred of the five hundred teachers present in the Rochester convention hall were women. Yet by the second evening of the conference, not a single woman had risen to speak. When the conversation shifted to why teachers were not accorded more respect by the public,
Anthony could no longer sit silently. She rose from her seat at the back of the room, cleared her throat, and said loudly, “Mr. President.”

The hall fell silent. “What will the lady have?” answered West Point math professor Charles Davies, who was presiding over the meeting in full military regalia, including a blue coat with conspicuous gilt buttons. He was appalled.

“I wish, sir, to speak to the question under discussion,” Anthony responded.

The hall erupted in shouts. For a half hour the male teachers debated Anthony's simple request. The convention leaders eventually offered Anthony the floor, but only begrudgingly.

“It seems to me, gentlemen, that none of you quite comprehend
the cause of the disrespect of which you complain,” Anthony said. “Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent 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 of women?” A few other female teachers, emboldened by Anthony's performance, also rose to speak. One was Clarissa Northrop, a Rochester teacher and principal who reported that she earned $250 per year, while her brother, who held the same job at a different city public school, received $650.

As she left the hall that evening, Anthony was mobbed by well-wishers and horrified traditionalists alike; her speech made the next morning's newspapers. The
Rochester Daily Democrat
editorialized, “
Whatever the schoolmasters might think of Miss Anthony, it was evident that she hit the nail on the head.”
On the conference's last day, Northrop introduced a resolution acknowledging women's low pay and committing the New York State Teachers Association “to remove the existing evil” of gender-based wage inequality among teachers. It narrowly passed.

Anthony became a full-time women's rights activist. When she met Beecher in 1856 at a Manhattan meeting of the American Woman's Educational Association, she found the older woman hopelessly outdated in her advocacy for women-only normal schools. Anthony believed it was critical both for women and for education that prospective teachers, no matter their sex, be trained at prestigious colleges and universities, which were then closed to women.
Anthony wrote to Stanton about the frustrating encounter, calling Beecher's ideology “strange” and her rhetoric on female education “stupid” and “false”—more a play for respectability among conservative men than a serious effort to improve women's lives as teachers or raise the quality of public schools.

The differences between Beecher and the younger feminists were not just generational. Beecher had been raised by a mainstream minister. Anthony grew up among freethinking Quaker radicals. At the Quaker meetinghouse, women were allowed to preach.
She had seen
her father refuse to physically hand over his tax dollars when the tax collector visited, in pacifist protest against funding the U.S. military. So it was unsurprising that Anthony took a confrontational, theatrical approach to her activism.

Female teachers across New York hailed Anthony for taking on the seemingly quixotic causes of equal pay and access to male colleges for training. “
I am glad that you will represent us at the Troy gathering,” one wrote as another teachers conference approached. “You will bear with you the gratitude of very many teachers whose hearts are swelling with repressed indignation at the injustice which you expose.” Anthony's efforts were about more than just rectifying the pay inequality she had endured as a teacher. She had noticed female educators tended to be enthusiastic about a broad array of social reform issues, not only women's rights, but also antislavery work and temperance. Yet because of their low wages, teachers had very little disposable income to donate to philanthropic causes, and local political groups founded by women often floundered. What's more, Anthony was becoming interested in labor politics. At women's rights conferences she had befriended
Ernestine Rose, a Polish-born Jewish socialist whose magnetic oratory attracted attention wherever she traveled. Rose was a follower of
Robert Owen, the Scottish factory owner and philosopher who believed in liberating female workers by providing them with a fair wage and full-time child care and education for their offspring. These social democratic ideas were deeply resonant for Anthony, who had always been fascinated by her father's cotton mill and the poor women who labored in it.

Being middle-class, teachers were just the most visible of a vast landscape of mistreated female workers—a group Anthony hoped would make up the core of the emerging women's suffrage movement. Women who worked outside the home had perhaps the most to gain from securing more political clout, which they could use to demand access to better jobs and higher pay. In a letter to other activists on how to advertise and promote women's rights meetings across New York, Anthony advised them to reach out to working women first. “
I should like particular effort made to call out the teachers, seamstresses, and wage-earning women generally. It is for
them, rather than for the wives and daughters of the rich, that I labor.”