ABSTRACT
The woman quoted above went on to become a business entrepreneur-one of the first of a group of women to do so in the 1920s. Her trepidation about leaving teaching, or at least that of her parents, underscored the dilemma faced by women of the early twentieth century when selecting a career-should that decision be based on social status or economic rewards? Throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teaching represented, as noted above, the ‘one true and honorable vocation’ for women, serving as the one exception granted to the rather rigid social belief that paid labor degraded women and corrupted their moral character (Newman, 1985, p. 245). As a result women entered teaching in ever increasing numbers. By 1900, the ranks included women from all social classes and eventually from many races and ethnic groups. Women comprised over 82 per cent of all urban and 70.6 per cent of rural schoolteachers. Social injunctions against women’s paid labor suppressed teachers’ wages, as school boards reasoned that women worked out of community-spiritedness or religious self-denial, but not for monetary reward. Yet, as the twentieth century progressed, increasingly larger percentages of women teachers left for opportunities in other fields, citing economics as a major factor in their decision. In opting for careers outside of teaching, women made conscious efforts to broaden their individual career possibilities, while expanding society’s criteria for acceptable occupations for women, especially for educated women. Two major changes prompted this trend: a reconsideration of women’s economic roles in society that resulted in the development of new career
opportunities for women; and the decline of altruism among educated women as a primary motivation for entering the work force. I will focus on how these two factors increased the concern between 1900-1930 of women about the social status of teaching. Other forces further influenced these changes; most important among them being feminist ideology, the rise of the consumer society, and greater attention to economic factors, prompted by recessions and labor unrest.
