¹ Bernard, Richard M. and Vinovskis, Maris A. “The Female School Teacher in Antebellum Massachusetts,“ Journal of Social History 10:3 (Spring 1977): 332–345; Dublin, Thomas “New Hampshire Teachers,” in Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): 205–227.Google Scholar

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³ Data on Providence's teachers was obtained by a page-by-page search in the U.S. manuscript censuses for 1880 and 1900. Individuals who listed “teacher” as their occupation were linked to the 1879, 1880, 1899 and 1900 Manuals of the Public Schools of Providence for verification. The census provides information regarding age, sex, marital status, place of birth, place of parents’ birth, and occupation for all members of a given household. The 1900 census also indicates whether heads of house rented, or owned their homes. Limitations in the use of the census include the absence of information on family members not living at home. Social class categorization was also limited to those teachers whose fathers were living or gainfully employed. The national data was collected for the Harvard Graduate School of Education Project, “Who Were America's Teachers? Towards A Social History,” funded by the Spencer Foundation and National Science Foundation, Perlmann, Joel and Margo, Robert A. Principal Investigators. The author was coordinator of this project from 1987–1989. For a description of the data set and sampling methods see Perlmann and Margo, “Who Were America's Teachers: Toward a Social History and a Data Archive,” Historical Methods 22 (Spring 1989): 68–73.Google Scholar

⁴ The Rhode Island Commissioner of Public Schools, Annual Reports for 1877–81 (Providence) lists teachers by city, with new ones that year italicized. Males, high school and evening schoolteachers were eliminated. Women grade school teachers first working in the system in the year of the report were utilized. Three teachers were eliminated because they had common names (names appearing more than once among the lists of teachers for that year). The rest were traced to the teacher lists for each subsequent year until they no longer appeared in the lists. The lists appeared annually in the Reports, and after 1920 in the Providence School Committee, Manuals (Providence; title varies). Teachers in nearby Boston were also traced for comparison. The Boston School Committee Manuals for 1878 and 1880 (Boston) printed a list of new teachers who started in 1877 and 1879 respectively. The earlier list was incomplete (the Manual may have gone to press before all new teachers could be listed). Others starting in that year were found in The Boston School Committee, Minutes (Boston), by noting all the “confirmation appointments.” These teachers were then traced to Manuals for later years, as in Providence. One Boston teacher was eliminated because of a common name problem. Also, three teachers were found in the Minutes but eliminated because they never appeared in the Manual. Three teachers were eliminated because they most likely had not accepted the appointment. But if they in fact did teach briefly, it may have introduced a slight bias upward in length of service in Boston. Nevertheless, this detail of the design cannot much affect the figures for Boston, or the Boston-Providence difference found in the samples. For example, more of the Boston teachers who stayed at least five years stayed twenty or more.Google Scholar

⁵ Sociologist Etzioni, Amitai argued that women teachers, like social workers and nurses, belonged in a category called the “semi-professions” by virtue of the overwhelmingly female composition of the workforce. See Etzioni, Amitai (ed.), The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers (New York: The Free Press, 1969). Contemporary scholars continue to debate the level of professionalism that teachers hold in society. See, for instance the discussion in Chapter Nine, “Building a Democratic Profession of Teaching,” in Darling-Hammond, Linda The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 293–329.Google Scholar

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⁸ This shift is apparent in the historiography of nursing. See Reverby, Susan M., Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Mottus, Jane E. New York Nightingales: The Emergence of the Nursing Profession at Bellevue and New York Hospital, 1850–1920 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981); Hine, Darlene Clark Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Lewenson, Sandra Beth Taking Charge: Nursing, Suffrage, and Feminism in America, 1873–1920 (New York: Garland Press, 1993); and Roberts, Joan I. and Group, Thetis M. Feminism and Nursing: An Historical Perspective on Power, Status, and Political Activism in the Nursing Profession (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).Google Scholar

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¹² Weiler's, Kathleen chapter, “Women's History and the History of Women Teachers,” provides an excellent recent overview of this historiography. Weiler, , Country Schoolwomen, 8–34.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ Perlmann, Joel, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews & Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

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¹⁹ As cited in Report of the School Committee for the Year 1899–1900, Centennial. (Providence: Snow and Farnham Co., 1901), 23.Google Scholar

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²³ Carroll, Charles, Public Education in Rhode Island (Providence: E.L. Freeman Co., 1918), 400–401 and Superintendent's Quarterly Reports, 1870–1880.Google Scholar

²⁴ Report of the Providence School Committee, 1884.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid, 1896.Google Scholar

²⁶ Superintendent Daniel Leach's Quarterly Report, 18 November 1881.Google Scholar

²⁷ Superintendent Horace Tarbell's Fourth Quarterly Report, 1890.Google Scholar

²⁸ Superintendent Horace Tarbell's Report, 27 March 1885.Google Scholar

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³⁰ Centennial Report, 275 and Carroll, Rhode Island, 401.Google Scholar

³¹ Reid, Robert L. (ed.), Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); and Rousmaniere, Chapter One of City Teachers, 10–27.Google Scholar

³² Triennial Report of Superintendent Leach, 22 December 1882. In his reports of the late 1870s and 1880s Leach makes specific references to the “new fangled” pedagogical theories introduced in educational journals and the “caution” which should be used in implementing these theories in teacher preparation.Google Scholar

³³ Quarterly Report of Superintendent Leach, 18 November 1881.Google Scholar

³⁴ Quarterly Report of Superintendent Leach, 19 November 1880.Google Scholar

³⁵ Information on teacher training requirements culled from the Providence School Committee Reports and Superintendent Reports, 1885–1900. Quotation in Centennial Report, 275.Google Scholar

³⁶ Report of the Providence School Committee, 1897, p.115. A complete list of all the training schools, the 196 teachers who received training, which critic teacher they trained under, and the location of the school, is included in this report.Google Scholar

³⁷ Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 1993); Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, W.W. 1979): 203–214; and Miller, Jean Baker Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), esp. 41–43.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Nonetheless, 16 percent of Providence's public schoolteachers in 1880 did receive some training at the normal school. See Table I, “Educational Background of Providence's Teachers.” Report of the Providence School Committee Sub-Committee on Qualifications and Subject of Normal Training, 30 January 1891, 35.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ Few historians have investigated the length of professional women's careers. Three studies mention length of service for teachers (longer than the 2.6 years which Richard Bernard and Maris Vinovskis found in the mid-nineteenth century,) but do not trace a cohort of new teachers in a system through their entire stay in that system. Richard B. Fishbane, “The Shallow Boast of Cheapness: Public School Teaching as a Profession in Philadelphia, 1865–1890,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103:1 (1979): 66–84; Renner, Marguerite “Who Will Teach? Changing Job Opportunities and Roles for Women in the Evolution of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, 1830–1900,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1981); Strober, Myra and Best, Laura “The Female/Male Salary Differential in the Public Schools: Some Lessons from San Francisco, 1879,” Economic Inquiry 17 (April 1979): 218–36. A study of female librarians during this era found that 38.5 percent of academic librarians in the Midwest served in one position for ten years or more during this period, suggesting that long tenure may also have extended to other female professions. Joanne Passet Bailey, “‘The Rule Rather Than the Exception’: Midwest Women as Academic Librarians, 1875–1900,” Journal of Library History 21:4 (1986): 673–692.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ According to Perlmann and Margo, the median age of women teachers in the urban North was 23 in 1860, 25 in 1880 and 30 in 1910. Large cities (with populations over 100, 000) however, had larger proportions of older women teachers. Thus in 1880, 34 percent of these urban women teachers in the United States were over the age of thirty. Perlmann, Joel and Margo, Robert A., “Towards A Social and Economic History of American Teachers: Some Preliminary Findings, 1860–1910,” Paper presented at the Social Science History Association Meeting, November 17, 1989.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Yearbook of the Sarah E. Doyle Club, 1894–1905. Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.Google Scholar

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⁵¹ Antin, Mary, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912); Yezierska, Anzia Children of Loneliness (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1923); and Hoffman, Nancy Woman's True Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (New York: Feminist Press, 1981), Section Three.Google Scholar

⁵² Markowitz, Ruth Jacknow, My Daughter, The Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.)Google Scholar

⁵³ Lukas, J. Anthony makes several references to these Irish teachers in Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, Alfred A. 1985), 101, 105.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ U.S. Immigration Bureau, The Children of Immigrants in School, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 195.Google Scholar

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⁶³ Providence School Committee, Manual for 1885 (Providence, 1885), 68. The figures are for teachers other than principals or assistant principals.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Only one of the six teachers who became an assistant principal or obtained a higher position was also a teacher who moved from primary to grammar school. Thus these two promotional paths were largely separate. Only two teachers entered the system as grammar school teachers and left as primary school teachers.Google Scholar

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