¹ The argument over the interpretation of the work of rural teachers continues in contemporary historical analysis. The view that rural teachers’ work required and encouraged autonomy and leadership is made most strongly by Geraldine Jonçich Clifford. As she argues, “The rural school, especially, was largely left to the teacher to organize and discipline. Preparing students for the popular public exhibitions which routinely closed the school term called on abilities to plan and execute, as well as perform in public.” Geraldine Clifford, “‘Lady Teachers’ and Politics in the United States, 1850–1930,” in Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work, ed. Lawn, Martin and Grace, Gerald (London, 1987), 15. See also Clifford, Geraldine “Eve: Redeemed by Education and Teaching School,” History of Education Quarterly 21 (Winter 1981): 479–91; idem, “Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse: Educating Women for Work,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education, ed. Kantor, Harvey and Tyack, David B. (Stanford, Calif., 1982), 223–68.Google Scholar

² Freedman, Estelle “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,“ Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512–29.Google Scholar

³ Both women's history and feminist theory are expanding rapidly. Selected works that have influenced this study are: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985); Scott, Joan Wallach Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Gordon, Linda “What's New in Women's History?” in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. de Lauretis, Teresa (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Riley, Denise Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, 1988); Cott, Nancy The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987); Kerber, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39; Nicholson, Linda J. ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York, 1990); Butler, Judith P. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990); Fuss, Diana Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York, 1989); Keller, Evelyn Fox and Hirsch, Marianne eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

⁴ See the excellent discussion of the “woman peril” in Tyack, David B. and Hansot, Elisabeth Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New Haven, Conn., 1990).Google Scholar

⁵ For a discussion of the impact of feminism on California women, see Joan Jensen and Gloria Lothrop, California Women: A History (San Francisco, 1987).Google Scholar

⁶ Cloud, Roy Education in California: Leaders, Organizations, and Accomplishments of the First Hundred Years (Stanford, Calif., 1952), 104; California Superintendent of Public Instruction Report, 1910 (Sacramento, Calif., 1910), 13; California Superintendent of Public Instruction Report, 1912 (Sacramento, Calif., 1912), 24.Google Scholar

⁷ “School Organizations in California,” Sierra Educational News 12 (Nov. 1916): 613–15.Google Scholar

⁸ Ames, Kate “Some Vital School Questions: The Woman Movement and Woman's Position in the School System,“ Overland Monthly 52 (Apr. 1908): 244; Smith, Eleanor et al., “School Women's Clubs: A Statement,” Sierra Educational News 6 (Mar. 1910): 21.Google Scholar

⁹ As early as 1895 the National Education Association appointed the Committee of Twelve to study “the rural school problem as part of a larger concern with country life.” The Country Life Commission, established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, cited the rural school as the most important institution in rural society and the most in need of reform. See National Education Association, “Report of the Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools,” NEA Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the 36th Annual Meeting (Chicago, 1897), 385; Madison, James H. “John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board and the Rural School Problem in the Midwest,” History of Education Quarterly 24 (Summer 1984): 181–99; Gulliford, Andrew America's Country Schools (Washington, D.C., 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago, 1962); Tyack, David B. and Hansot, Elisabeth Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York, 1982); Kliebard, Herbert M. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (Boston, 1986); NEA, “Report of the Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools,” 391. As David Tyack has pointed out, leading schoolmen “wished to enforce in rural schools the same standards of professionalism that had been slowly developing in cities. While they justified their program as public service, educators also sought greater power and status for themselves.” Tyack, David B. “The Tribe and the Common School: Community Control in Rural Education,” American Quarterly 24 (Mar. 1972): 4. For detailed discussions of the movement in favor of school consolidation in the Midwest and the resistance to that movement, see Madison, “Rockefeller's General Education Board”; and Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago, 1982). Cubberley, Ellwood P. Rural Life and Education: A Study of the Rural-School Problem as a Phase of the Rural-Life Problem (Boston, 1914), 283, 320. For a less well known but even more hostile view of rural women teachers, see also Julius Arp, Rural Education and the Consolidated School (Yonkers on Hudson, N.Y., 1918), 146–50. Arp argued that the rural school was suffering from “too much femininity,” and that while exceptional women could be superintendents, it was much to be preferred if principals and superintendents were “men of the highest type.”Google Scholar

¹¹ Cloud, Education in California, 102 111. The Sierra Educational News remained the official journal of the California Teachers Association through the 1960s; after 1928 the Western Journal of Education included a section on rural education which provided a forum for both teachers and state officials. In 1926 and 1927 the California Exchange Bulletin in Rural Education, edited by Heffernan, Helen was an important source of suggestions and advice for rural teachers. “Increasing Interest in the Union of Elementary School Districts,” California Blue Bulletin 3 (June 1917): 16.Google Scholar

¹² “The Need of Supervision,” California Blue Bulletin 1 (Mar. 1915): 2; Margaret Schallenberger to Chester Rowell, 17 June 1915, Chester Rowell Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; “Report of the California Council on Education,” Sierra Educational News 12 (May 1916): 283.Google Scholar

¹³ “A Fair Chance for All,” California Blue Bulletin 7 (Mar. 1921): 2.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Cary, C. P. “Women Supervisors,“ Sierra Educational News 7 (Mar. 1916): 150; Editorial, “Rural School Supervision,” Sierra Educational News 12 (Mar. 1916): 39.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Wood, Will “Rural Supervision Fund,“ California Blue Bulletin 7 (June 1921): 5. It is interesting to compare California with that of areas where rural school supervisors or administrators were men. See, for example, Abbott, John “Accomplishing ‘A Man's Task': Rural Women Teachers, Male Culture, and the School Inspectorate in Turn of the Century Ontario,” Ontario History 78 (Dec. 1986): 36–49. Abbott argues that a “male administrative culture” maintained male authority and control over rural women teachers in Ontario at the turn of the century. An exception to this pattern of male control in Canada is described in Wilson, J. Donald “‘I am Ready to be of Assistance When I Can': Lottie Bowron and Rural Women Teachers in British Columbia,” in Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching, ed. Prentice, Alison and Theobald, Marjorie (Toronto, 1991), 202–29.Google Scholar

¹⁶ “Sympathy and Supervision,” Sierra Educational News 11 (Oct. 1915): 512; (Frederic Burk?), “Excess Supervision,” Sierra Educational News 18 (Mar. 1922): 120.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Footman, Meta Neal “The Rural Supervisor—A Rejoinder,“ Sierra Educational News 18 (June 1922): 339.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Cohn, Sam H. “Why Supervision of Rural Schools?“ Sierra Educational News 20 (May 1924): 306.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Irwin, Eugene Jerel “Improvement of Educational Standards in Rural Schools,“ Sierra Educational News 23 (May 1927): 280; See also Boone, R. G. “The Choice of a Life Work—Teaching as a Career,” Sierra Educational News 15 (Dec. 1919): 660.Google Scholar

²⁰ Almack, John C. “The Supervisory Program,“ California Exchange Bulletin in Rural Education 1 (Mar. 1927): 12–25, quotations on 15.Google Scholar

²¹ The title of this position shifted several times. Margaret Schallenberger was appointed the first commissioner of elementary education in 1914. In 1927, the title was changed to commissioner of rural education; in 1931, it was renamed head of the Division of Elementary and Rural Schools; in 1946, the title changed to head of the Bureau of Elementary Education.Google Scholar

²² The argument that Heffernan and Seeds were the leaders of a more or less coherent group of progressive and “feminist” educators is also made by Robert Treacy in “Progressivism and Corinne Seeds: UCLA and the University Elementary School” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1972).Google Scholar

²³ In 1925–26, the administrative staff of the Kings County Schools was entirely made up of women: Richmond, Miss M. L. superintendent; Whittaker, Mrs. G. F. deputy superintendent; Miss Helen Heffernan, field assistant; Ayers, Mrs. Nella superintendent of attendance; and Mrs. Leone Bradford, music. Kings County Annual School Report, 1925–26. Hanford Morning Journal, 30 June 1926, 7; Sierra Educational News 22 (Nov. 1926): 574; Hartman, Beulah M. “California Rural Supervisors Hold Significant Convention at Lake Tahoe, October 4th to 8th,” California Exchange Bulletin in Rural Education 1 (Nov. 1926): 33.Google Scholar

²⁴ Women dominated the rural supervisors’ conferences. In 1926, for example, the president of the organization was Ethel Ward, and eleven of twelve speakers were women. In 1927 Ward was re-elected president, and seventeen of twenty-four speakers were women. The male speakers were predominantly university professors. The board of directors of the CTA in the same years by comparison was made up of nine men and one woman, and the annual conventions were dominated by male university professors and superintendents. Helen Heffernan, “Division of Rural Education,” California Biennial Report of the State Department of Education, 1927–1928 (Sacramento, Calif., 1928), 56; Boone, Richard A History of Educational Organization in California (San Jose, Calif., 1926), 99. An account of the San Joaquin Valley Rural Supervisors Association meeting in Visalia in April 1928 provides a sense of the working of the organization. The morning was spent on the “usual business” and the reports of committees. In the afternoon, Heffernan and several members of the San Francisco State Teachers College spoke on approaches to individual instruction in rural schools. Western Journal of Education, May 1928, 13.Google Scholar

²⁵ “California Rural Supervisors Association: Annual Meeting,” Sierra Educational News 23 (Jan. 1927): 7; Heffernan, Helen “Rural Education—A Challenge, a Responsibility,” California Exchange Bulletin in Rural Education 1 (Nov. 1926): 8. A sense of Heffernan's involvement can be gained from the 1931–32 Biennial Report, in which she cites her activities as including “visiting teachers with the supervisor, participating in teachers’ meetings held by supervisors, arranging for supervisors to see and evaluate the work in the state demonstration rural schools, conducting quarterly sectional conferences of rural supervisors and annual state-wide conferences, conducting summer session classes in techniques of county supervision and on problems of supervision, preparing bulletins for the use of supervisors and teachers, evaluating for each supervisor the supervisory accomplishment of each year, and offering constructive suggestions for the proposed program for the coming school year based upon the supervisor's annual report.” Helen Heffernan, “Rural School Supervision,” California Biennial Report of the State Department of Education, 1931–1932 (Sacramento, Calif., 1932), 80.Google Scholar

²⁶ Heffernan, Helen “School Supervision in Three California Counties,“ Western Journal of Education, July 1929, 7.Google Scholar

²⁷ Heffernan, “Group versus Grade Organization,“ 8; Dunn, Fannie and Everett, Marcia Four Years in a Country School (New York, 1926). The idea of basing rural schools on the ideals of progressive education had been put forward earlier in a series of presentations to the NEA by Harvey, Marie Turner See, for example, Turner Harvey, Marie, “The Porter School: A New Vision of the Rural School in Country Life,” in NEA, Addresses and Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C., 1924), 674–80; idem, “Transforming School for the Rural Child—Abridged,” in NEA, Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C., 1926), 42–46. Perhaps the most detailed and moving account of progressive education in a one-room school is Weber, Julia My Country School Diary: An Adventure in Creative Teaching (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

²⁸ Heffernan, Helen “Experimental Attempts to Improve Instruction in Rural Schools,“ Western Journal of Education, Jan. 1929, 9. Describing the Woods School and the Escalon School (the other rural demonstration school in San Joaquin County), Heffernan wrote: “These schools have been visited by nearly five hundred superintendents, supervisors, and teachers during the school year, and have provided an opportunity for showing a program of progressive education to many.” One elementary school principal of many years’ experience, when reporting at the state department after a visit to Woods and Escalon, said: “‘They are the nearest approximation of my ideal of what an elementary school should be of anything I have ever seen.’” Heffernan, “Rural School Supervision in Three California Counties,” 7.Google Scholar

²⁹ Heffernan, Helen “To Our Visitors,“ in Information to Visitors Concerning California's State Rural Demonstration School (Woodbridge, Calif., n.d.); Heffernan, “Experimental Attempts,” 9.Google Scholar

³⁰ Rural supervisors frequently took active leadership roles in their communities. For example, Blanche Reynolds, county superintendent of Ventura County, cited the activities of her county's rural supervisors in 1932: one chaired the Junior Red Cross, another was active in the Association of American University Women, and “all address Parent-Teacher Associations whenever requested, one gives lessons in art to anyone who wishes to take them, most of them attend all the meetings of the health groups throughout the county.” Blanche Reynolds, “Insuring Public Support of Rural Supervision,” Proceedings of the 1932 Annual Convention of County, City, and District Superintendents: An Annual Conference of Rural Supervisors (Sacramento, Calif., 1932), 140; Treacy, “Progressivism and Corinne Seeds,” 350; “The Need of Rural School Supervision,” Rural Parent Teacher Activities, California Department of Education, bulletin no. 12 (Sep. 1933), 52–53.Google Scholar

³¹ For a discussion of the broader impact of the depression on education, see Tyack, David Lowe, Robert and Hansot, Elisabeth Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). California State Department of Education Report, 1932, 11; Hendrick, Irving J. “California's Response to the ‘New Education’ in the 1930's,” California Historical Quarterly 53 (Spring 1974): 26; idem, California Education: A Brief History (San Francisco, 1980), 38.Google Scholar

³² Reynolds, “Insuring Public Support of Rural Supervision,” 135; Hendrick, “California's Response,“ 30.Google Scholar

³³ As State Superintendent of Schools Vierling Kersey wrote to the county supervisors in 1934: “We have been advised… that in a number of areas considerable reductions have been effected in the programs of rural supervision despite the fact that adequate funds are available for the performance of this service. In a number of cases considerable portions of the funds granted by the state for rural supervision have remained unexpended and have been transferred to the unapportioned county elementary school funds as unnecessary surpluses. At the same time it is obvious that in these same counties rural school service has been materially reduced and the object of the state apportionment for rural supervision has therefore not been attained.” Vierling Kersey to County Superintendents of Schools, 9 July 1934, Department of Education Files, California State Archives, Sacramento; Kersey to Heffernan, 24 Aug. 1934, Department of Education Files.Google Scholar

³⁴ Seeds, Corinne “UES: The History of the Creative Elementary School,“ 235 UCLA Oral History Project, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles; Heffernan to Kersey, 4 Sep. 1934, Department of Education Files.Google Scholar

³⁵ Heffernan, to Kersey, 4 Sep. 1934, Department of Education Files.Google Scholar

³⁶ “California School Supervisors Association,” California Journal of Elementary Education 5 (Aug. 1936): 4; House, Enid M. Supervisor of Elementary Education, Chula Vista City School District, to Heffernan, 10 Mar. 1959, Department of Education Files, cited by Treacy, “Progressivism and Corinne Seeds,” 345. Heffernan continued to be a controversial figure in California. She was the focus of a number of conservative attacks in the late 1940s and 1950s, as part of the more general attack on progressive education. These attacks culminated in the election of Max Rafferty to the position of state superintendent of schools in 1962. Heffernan later said, “If I'm responsible for Max Rafferty, I'm sorry.” Treacy, “Progressivism and Corinne Seeds,” 353.Google Scholar