How Did THIS Happen?
Women Dominate U.S. Teaching

Most people were not surprised when the U.S. Department of Education released recent data about the teaching population in the United States. The majority of teachers are women—76% of all teachers, as a matter of fact. Females comprise 89% of the elementary school teachers and then the numbers do tip in the opposite direction for high school (64% women). Then, at more than 97%, women dominate the population of preschool teachers. Many other attributes of people who teach our children can be found in the EdWeek and Atlantic articles linked at the end of this email blast.
 
What often does surprise many people is that the initial history of teaching in America was not a women’s story. Prior to the 1840s, teachers were mainly men; boys formed the majority of students as well. It took the rise of the common school and public education to transform women’s learning from lessons that were church-oriented (scriptures and hymns) and home-bound (domestic skills and arts) to broader topics. Expanding educational horizons prepared females for the many new teaching jobs that required more and more teachers.
 
Many factors influenced the demographic change: the growing population, the gradual change from rural to urban America, and the movement of America’s population to the West. Those trends, along with expanding industrialization, created new jobs and roles for men in the expanding world of business. Therefore, they left classrooms, and a female teaching force emerged in the mid-19th century and grew to characterize the profession in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, relative low pay and lack of respect for teaching accompanied the feminization of the field.

In the midst of many factors, one woman, education advocate Catharine Beecher, stands out. She helped pioneer the transformation, and deserves fame in her own right. Still, her younger sister, author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, is probably better-known for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catharine broke from her prominent family members in that she was not a suffragist; she thought that women should influence life within classrooms and homes, not the public sphere. She had strong ideas about feminine traits and she promoted them in her writings and in the schools and training programs she helped create.
 
Beecher believed that becoming teachers was a moral imperative for women to “get them out of their parents’ parlors” and do something useful for children while preparing them for future roles as mothers. Her words were directed at middle-class white women, not surprising because of the times. A few facts about her life include that she:

• 1800 Was born in New York, the first of nine children in a prominent family that soon settled in Litchfield, CT.
• 1822 Was engaged, but her fiancé, a Yale University professor, died in a shipwreck and she remained single, devoted to education the rest of her life.
• 1823 Helped start the Hartford Female Seminary to prepare teachers and mothers. One novel course expectation was physical education for young women.
• 1829 Wrote and distributed an important essay, “Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education,” that advocated teaching as a profession more important to society than medicine or law.
• 1841 Published A Treatise on Domestic Economy, one of several books extolling the virtues of women and of teaching as women’s work.

• 1852 Founded the American Woman’s Educational Association with the goal of sending female teachers west to create schools across the new frontier.
  

Yes, Beecher promoted teaching as the profession FOR WOMEN, and is to be remembered as a significant advocate for the feminization of teaching.

If all females were not only well educated themselves but were
Prepared to communicate in an easy manner their stores of knowledge
to others; if they not only knew how to regulate their own minds,
tempers, and habits but how to effect improvements in those around
them, the face of society would be speedily changed.
-Catharine Beecher

In the meantime, in these times when women are taking larger and larger steps onto the national and international stage, not everyone may see Beecher’s movement as admirable. Deeper study of gender and ethnicity in schoolteaching is certainly of interest and importance, but will be saved for a MOTAL article at another time. Many modern-day efforts to bring more men into teaching have met with varying degrees of success, but do continue, for students prosper when they have teachers who can understand them and meet their needs. Among the ways for that to happen is to have more teachers who relate through similar gender and/or ethnicity, although other relationship strategies are certainly possible. One article from Australia, linked here, provides an interesting analysis and food for thought about the ways in which models of masculinity are important for all students.
--Article from Australian Education Association--
 
As always, thank you for reading, and please stay tuned,
 
Greta Nagel
MOTAL President and CEO
 
Resources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-explosion-of-women-teachers/582622/
 
https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/w/wgs/prize/eb04.html
 
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/still-mostly-white-and-female-new-federal-data-on-the-teaching-profession/2020/04
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-explosion-of-women-teachers/582622/
 
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Catharine-Beecher#ref237965

Artifact of the Month
We are building a virtual 
exhibition of our
artifact collection. 

The selection for
May is
Alphabet Blocks

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Read Aloud

The Little Adventures
​of Wolf and Red:
​To Grandmother's House
Printable Copy

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Highlighted Artifacts
In Honor of
Teachers Appreciation Week

Apple for the Teacher
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Code of Ethics of the
Teaching Profession
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Story about Mary Murphy, 1917 Schoolteacher
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Handmade Native
Alaskan Moccasins
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