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The Complex Visions of Female Teachers and the Failure of Unionization in the 1930s: An Oral History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Richard A. Quantz
Richard A. Quantz*
Affiliation:
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
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Extract

Until recently, historians have tended to treat teachers as nonpersons. Female teachers especially have been portrayed as objects rather than subjects, as either the unknowing tools of the social elite or as the exploited minority whose labor is bought cheaply. Rarely have they been treated as subjects in control of their own activities. Seldom has the world of schooling been presented through their eyes. This essay attempts to reverse the traditional angle of vision and explore an educational event from the perspective of the teachers involved. Specifically it explores the failure of unions to organize teachers during the Great Depression.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1985 , pp. 439 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

Research for this study was made possible by grants from the Faculty Research Committee and the School of Education and Allied Professions, Miami University. The author would like to thank all of those who read and commented on early versions of this manuscript, especially Richard Altenbaugh, Barbara Finkelstein, Henry Giroux, and Terry O'Connor. Special appreciation should be given to all of those teachers who were willing to educate me about their lives in Hamilton during the 1930s.

1. For some interesting exceptions, see Clifford, Geraldine Joncich, “Home and School in 19th-century America: Some Person al-History Reports from the United States,” History of Education Quarterly, 18 (Spring 1978):3–34; Finkelstein, Barbara, “Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in American Primary Schools, 1820–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1970); and Hoffman, Nancy, ed., Woman's “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1981). For advocacy of studying the subjective side of history, see Clifford, Geraldine Joncich, “Saints, Sinners, and People: A Position Paper on the Historiography of American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 15 (Fall 1975): 257–272, and Finkelstein, Barbara, ed., Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Spring, Joel H., Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972); Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).Google Scholar

3. Urban, Wayne J., Why Teachers Organized (Detroit, 1982).Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 153.Google Scholar

5. Tyack, David, Lowe, Robert, and Hansot, Elisabeth, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). Even Larry Cuban's fine study of classroom practices reduces the inquiry to the charting of structural features. His study counts the instances of his own predefined categories; and, for all its concentration on, and sympathy with, the classroom teacher, the book is primarily top-down history. See Cuban, Larry, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1980 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

6. Although I use the words anthropology and ethnographic, this is a historical, not an anthropological, work. Development of the theory and methods of ethnohistory as used in this study may be found in Quantz, Richard A., “Ethnohistory in Education” (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Studies Association, Boston, 6 November 1981).Google Scholar

7. Interestingly Cuban refers to the “culture of teachers” as an important, even if partial, explanation of the situationally chosen classroom practices. Of course, Cuban uses culture in the sense of a macrophenomenon structuring the whole teaching community rather than as a local microphenomenon constructed by the teachers themselves. See Cuban, , How Teachers Taught, 10, 243–44.Google Scholar

8. For a discussion of normative controls, see Etzioni, Amitai, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and Their Correlates (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

9. Cuban also acknowledges the importance of metaphor in influencing the form of classroom practices. He writes, “There is also another less direct, more subtle use that I see for this study of classroom instruction. Powerful metaphors dominate the thinking of practitioners, policymakers, and scholars on schooling.” Cuban is referring specifically to the metaphor of “school-as-factory,” which dominated the writing of educational policymakers and scholars. As will be seen, the teachers of Hamilton did not seem to use this metaphor. Cuban, , How Teachers Taught, 7.Google Scholar

10. Interviews were conducted by the author. All quotations from interviews come from the oral history collection “Education in the Thirties,” compiled by the author. The transcriptions are soon to be housed in King Library, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.Google Scholar

11. Scharf, Lois, To Work or to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism and the Great Depression. Contributions in Women's Studies, no. 15 (Westport, Conn., 1980).Google Scholar

12. Collins, Randall, Conflict Sociology (New York, 1975), 73–75.Google Scholar