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Losing Patience and Staying Professional: Women Teachers and the Problem of Classroom Discipline in New York City Schools in the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Kate Rousmaniere
Kate Rousmaniere*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Ohio
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Extract

In American urban classrooms in the early twentieth century, women teachers faced two looming and contradictory specters: the idealized image of the gentle, nurturing teacher, and the reality of the cold and confusing working conditions of city schools. Women teachers had entered an occupation that was swathed in romantic images of the honorable lady teacher. In both popular culture and educational dialog, the woman teacher was portrayed as “naturally” maternal, caring, and patient, and as having a greater interest in personal satisfaction than in financial reward. Teaching was perceived less as a job than as a mission or a personal commitment. Like mothering, teaching was not just something one did, but was something that defined who one was; it was not simply an act, but a role. Teaching, like mothering, was a sacred calling for sacred women.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 49 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Sources were drawn from oral histories of twenty-three retired teachers who taught in New York City schools in the 1920s, and are supported by other oral histories of American teachers. See Kate Rousmaniere, “City Teachers: Teaching in New York City Schools in the 1920s” (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992); Rinehart, Alice Duffy Mortals in the Immortal Profession: An Oral History of Teaching (New York, 1983); Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, “Having a Purpose in Life: Western Women Teachers in the Twentieth Century,” Nelson, Margaret K. “The Intersection of Home and Work: Rural Vermont Schoolteachers, 1915–1950,” and Quantz, Richard “The Complex Vision of Female Teachers and the Failure of Unionization in the 1930s,” in The Teacher's Voice: A Social History of Teaching in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Altenbaugh, Richard J. (London, 1992).Google Scholar

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