Who Taught the Teachers · Episode 3 of 12 · 19 min
A Woman's True Profession
American teaching did not drift toward women by accident; it was engineered, and the argument was cost. School boards could hire a woman for a fraction of a man's wage, and reformers said so openly. The episode follows Catharine Beecher's campaign, Horace Mann's arithmetic, the Civil War's acceleration, and several hundred women sent west, weighing an open professional door against a discount the nation banked for a century and a half.
Who's who
- Catharine BeecherEducator who campaigned to make teaching a woman's profession
- Horace Mann+4 more episodesMassachusetts education secretary who praised women teachers while rationalizing lower pay
- William SladeFormer Vermont governor who led the Board of National Popular Education
- Calvin StoweOhio education reformer who fronted the western-teachers campaign early on
Where it happens
- Hartford, ConnecticutWhere Beecher co-founded a female seminary and recruits trained
- Nebraska Territory and OregonFrontier destinations for women teachers sent west
- Massachusetts+3 more episodesState where men fell from 60 to 14 percent of teachers
Timeline
- 1823Beecher co-founds the Hartford Female Seminary
- 1838Massachusetts pays men about $23.10 a month and women $6.49
- 1847Board of National Popular Education sends its first company of about seventy teachers west
- 1861-1865Civil War empties schoolhouses of men
- 1899-1900Women are 70.1 percent of public-school teachers
- 1919-20Women reach a peak of 85.9 percent
Still debated
Historians debate whether boards pulled in cheaper women or men were already leaving a low-status seasonal job; both mechanisms are documented. Estimates of teachers sent west run from about 450 to 600, and scholars disagree whether Beecher was strategist or genuine conservative.
