1 “City Holds Woman Too Fat to Teach,” New York Times, July 16, 1935: 21:8.Google Scholar

2 “Wants Teachers to Be Hygienic Models,” New York Times, November 22, 1935: 25:6.Google Scholar

3 “Big and Strong,” Time, December 9, 1935: 64.Google Scholar

4 “31 Pound Surplus a Weighty Matter in New York.” Newsweek, July 27, 1935: 38–39.Google Scholar

5 See, for example, Callahan, Raymond Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that Have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Tyack, David The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Grant, Gerald and Murray, Christine Teaching In America: The Slow Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). There is also a large collection of writing on the links between professionalism and the need for disciplines. See Haskell, Thomas ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) and Freidson, Eliot Professionalism: The Third Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) for two strong examples.Google Scholar

6 Tyack, David and Hansot, Elizabeth Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 157.Google Scholar

7 Both Ware, Susan and Harris, Alice Kessler make this point. See Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 27 and Kessler-Harris, Alice Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 251.Google Scholar

8 Doherty, Agnes “The Health of the Teacher,” National Education Association Journal 62 (November 1924): 364–370, 365.Google Scholar

9 Schulman, Herman “Does Teaching Night School Shorten the Life of the Day School Teacher?“ High Points in the Work of the High Schools of New York City [hereafter HP] 19 (March 1937): 20–23, 21.Google Scholar

10 “Smoking Teacher Loses,” New York Times, January 26, 1927, 23:3.Google Scholar

11 Beale, Howard K. Are American Teachers Free? An Analysis of Restraints Upon the Freedom of Teaching in American Schools (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1936), 384; The Teacher's Handbook (New York: Board of Education, 1928, 3rd ed), 46.Google Scholar

12 Howell, Blanche “Creative Resting,” HP 14 (Sept. 1932): 42–43, 43.Google Scholar

13 Curtis, Henry S. Recreation for Teachers (New York: Macmillan Company, 1918), 13.Google Scholar

14 LaGuardia, Hector “The Teacher's Role in the Development of Student Personality,” HP 20 (January 1938): 42–47, 48.Google Scholar

15 “One Teacher in 10 is Declared Absent,” New York Times, May 13, 1922: 18:1.Google Scholar

16 Chancellor, W.E. The Health of the Teacher (Chicago: Forbes and Company, 1919), vii.Google Scholar

17 Terman, Lewis The Teacher's Health: A Study in the Hygiene of an Occupation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 26.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 62.Google Scholar

19 The newly differentiated curriculum—one designed to make classes more homogeneous and, therefore, to feel more managable—was meant to prevent teacher fatigue in addition to protect high-performing students from their “unfit classmates.”Google Scholar

20 R.I.P., “On Becoming a Teacher,” HP 18 (May 1936): 51–52. What makes me wonder if R.I.P. is a man is the characterization of the protagonist and her friend “calling each other girls.” Jackie Blount has exposed the fear of same-sex relationships among women teachers, both sexual and not, in this period. See Blount, Jackie “Manly Men and Womanly Women: Deviance, Gender Role Polarization, and the Shift in Women's School Employment, 1900–1976,” Harvard Educational Review 66 (Summer 1996): 318–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Delta Kappa, Phi Teaching as a Man's Job (Homewood, IL: Phi Delta Kappa, 1938), 8. Statistic found in Rousmaniere, Kate City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 35.Google Scholar

22 Susan Ware shows the percentage of working women continued to increase during the Depression. In 1900, 5.6% of American women worked; in 1930 the number had nearly doubled to 11.7%; by 1940, 15.2% of American women worked. See Ware, Holding Their Own, 29.Google Scholar

23 For more on the unmarried working woman, see Ware, Susan For more on the turn of eugenics in the 1930s, see Kline, Wendy Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).Google Scholar

24 Felter, William “Easy Markers, Hard Markers,” HP 4 (September 1923): 3–4, 3.Google Scholar

25 Knopf, Olga The Art of Being a Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1932), 252. Another sign of this anxiety over the feminization of the profession can be found in literature from the period that worked to recruit male teachers. Studies such as Teaching as a Man's Job (1938) and The Young Man and Teaching emphasized strength as a desirable characteristic and encouraged men to remember that “the exercise of power is pleasing to many.” See Wight, Henry Parks The Young Man and Teaching (New York: Macmillan Company, 1920), 6.Google Scholar

26 Donovan, Frances The Schoolma'am (New York: Frederick A. Stokes 1938), 97.Google Scholar

27 Rivlin, Harry Education for Adjustment: The Classroom Applications of Mental Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1936), 401.Google Scholar

28 Patri, Angelo “A Plan for Apprentice Teachers,” HP 10 (March 1928): 18–20, 18.Google Scholar

29 For a much more detailed account of this process, see Lears, Jackson and Fox, Richard The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) and Susman, Warren Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).Google Scholar

30 “What Relationship Should Exist Between Teacher and Pupil?” HP 18 (May 1936): 7–9, 9.Google Scholar

31 Bella, M. Chase, Bator, “Character Training in the Public Schools.” HP 20 (February 1938): 18–22, 22.Google Scholar

32 The Teacher's Handbook (1928); Rosenthal, Benjamin “Pupil-Teacher Relationship” HP 16 (January 1934): 50–54, 52.Google Scholar

33 These kinds of merit exams mirrored what was occurring in the civil service and, to a more limited degree, private industry, at the same time. Merit exams, it has been argued, worked to regulate gender and racial diversity in fields that were less feminized than teaching. For an example of this argument and more on meritocracy exams in the 1930s and 40s see Margaret Rung, Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal Workforce, 1933–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).Google Scholar

34 McAndrew, William “The Baconian Theory of Life,” HP 1 (May 1919): 3.Google Scholar

35 LaGuardia, “The Teacher's Role in the Development of Student Personality,” 48.Google Scholar

36 Gedulig, Abraham “Should We Indoctrinate?“ HP 15 (October 1933): 26–32, 32.Google Scholar

37 Bessy, Mabel A. “Supervision and the Improvement of Teaching,” HP 6 (November 1924): 27–30, 28.Google Scholar

38 “Saving Energy for the Classroom, A Plea for Better Teaching,” Education 54 (November 1933): 173–177, 176.Google Scholar

39 Steiglitz, Sarah Thorwald “My Class Struggle,” HP 20 (March 1938): 46–52, 48.Google Scholar

40 R.I.P., “On Becoming a Teacher,” 51.Google Scholar

41 Curtis, Recreation for Teachers, 7–8.Google Scholar

42 Hyde, Gertrude “Then and Now,” New York State Education 15 (April 1928): 558.Google Scholar

43 For more on working women and beauty culture see Banner, Lois American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar

44 Donovan, The Schoolma'am, 14.Google Scholar

45 Kumler, Katherine “How Shall the Teacher Dress? On What Price ‘Smartness',” New York State Education 15 (April 1928): 549–550, 549.Google Scholar

46 “Schoolroom Glamour,” Newsweek (July 24, 1939): 36.Google Scholar

47 Rivlin, Education for Adjustment, 406.Google Scholar

48 Gray, Lillian “Suitable Dress for Professional Women,” Journal of the National Education Association 21 (January 1932): 3–4.Google Scholar

49 Joselit, Jenna Wiessman A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 200), 39.Google Scholar

50 Hathaway, Hazel Thorp “Costumes and Figgers,” New York State Education 15 (April 1928): 551.Google Scholar

51 Gray, “Suitable Dress for Professional Women,” 4.Google Scholar

52 Walter, Louise M. “The Relation of Dress to Personality,” HP 15 (October 1933): 43–5, 44.Google Scholar

53 Gray, “Suitable Dress for Professional Women,” 3.Google Scholar

54 Blackmore, Beulah “The Clothes We Wear,” New York State Education 15 (April 1928): 552–558, 553.Google Scholar

55 Kumler, “How Shall the Teacher Dress? On What Price ‘Smartness',” 550.Google Scholar

56 “Schoolroom Glamour,” 36.Google Scholar

57 “Be Good-Looking, and Let Who Will Be Clever,” Newsweek (August 3, 1935): 35.Google Scholar

58 “On Being a Teacher,” HP 16 (October 1934): 18–21, 19.Google Scholar

59 Madden, Alma “Lo, the Poor School-Teacher,” Ladies Home Journal 27 (August 1920): 24–5, 162, 165–166, 166.Google Scholar

60 Studies of the growing PTA and the cooperation between teachers and mothers in the interwar period show that parents often tried to come teachers’ rescue in this period. See Cutler, William Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).Google Scholar

61 Donovan, The Schoolma'am 44.Google Scholar

62 “A Review of Our Health, Our Honesty, Our Income, Our Art, and Our Safety,” Educational Review (April 1927): 175–177, 175.Google Scholar

63 Stoker, Mack “It Isn't My Job—But Is It?“ The Journal of the National Education Association 29 (January 1940): 20.Google Scholar

64 Tildsley, John L. “The Crisis in Education,” HP 2 (April 1920): 31–35, 33.Google Scholar

65 HP 9 (September 1927): 134, 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Though records of school budgets certainly exist, it is difficult to know how many teachers received merit raises and what the classrooms of such teachers might have looked like. One thing we definitely do know is that teachers’ salaries were consistently jeopardized throughout the Depression. See Murphy, Marjorie Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Celia Zitron shows that New York City teachers returned over two million dollars to the school board in 1932 in the form of 5% “voluntary” salary contributions for needy children. Zitron also records salary cuts throughout the 1930s and the debate over the Board of Education's use of substitute teachers (like Freistater) to semi-permanently occupy teaching positions for less pay than certified teachers. Zitron, The New York City Teachers Union, 1916–1964 (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 127 and following.Google Scholar

67 “Time and a Half,” The American Teacher 8 (April 1919), 76.Google Scholar

68 Mersand, Joseph “The Teacher and the Pupil's Mental Health,” HP 20 (January 1938): 19–24, 21.Google Scholar

69 Marjorie Murphy shows that the first ten years of the AFT (the time in which Linville wrote), in fact, privileged male leadership, something that may have bearing here. This would change in 1926 with the “revolt” of women in the AFT, but, as Murphy argues, teachers unions in New York, especially, were not nearly as powerful or popular before World War II as they would be after. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 84–5 and 117 and following.Google Scholar

70 Donovan, The Schoolma'am, 44.Google Scholar