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Courting the Woman Teacher: The National Education Association, 1917–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Wayne J. Urban
Wayne J. Urban*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Policy Studies, and Georgia State University
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Extract

The National Education Association (NEA) has not been a topic of choice for many educational historians. Perhaps a major reason for this it that the NEA as a site for historical work seems fraught with pitfalls. Consider first the problem of the NEA as a setting for an institutional history. The major example of this kind of work yielded a decidedly unsatisfactory result. Edgar B. Wesley's centennial history of the NEA, published in 1957, is an almost completely uncritical description and an unabashed celebration of the organization.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 139 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Wesley, Edgar B. NEA: The First Hundred Years, The Building of a Profession (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957). For a contemporary evaluation of this work as basically uncritical, see William W. Brickman, “Toward an Evaluation of the Publications of the National Education Association,” Progressive Education 34 (July, 1957): 111–15.Google Scholar

2 Selden, David The Teacher Rebellion (Washington: Howard University Press, 1985) and Allan West, The National Education Association: The Power Base for Education (New York: Free Press, 1980).Google Scholar

3 Murphy, Marjorie Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). There is much to be learned form Murphy's analysis. For my generally favorable evaluation of her work see my review in Educational Studies 23 (Summer, 1992): 211–26.Google Scholar

4 I have in mind here the works of Jackie Blount, Christine Ogren, and Kate Rousmaniere which are mentioned in subsequent footnotes.Google Scholar

5 I have developed the argument more fully in Wayne J. Urban, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limits (New York & London: Routledge Falmer, 2000).Google Scholar

6 Ibid., ch. 1.Google Scholar

7 Urban, Wayne J. Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), chs.3, 6. Notable in Chicago in addition to Superintendent Ella Flagg Young, was Margaret Haley, leader of the Chicago Teachers's Federation. Kate Rousmaniere is currently at work on a biography of Haley while Jackie Blount is working on Young's life and career.Google Scholar

8 Ibid.Google Scholar

9 It should be noted that the mass meeting format, while defended vigorously by locally organized women teachers, did not guarantee the election of women to the NEA presidency every other year. Women failed to elect Grace Strachan to the presidency in 1912, two years after the election of Ella Flagg Young. Not until 1915 was the election of women every other year assured.Google Scholar

10 On the Classroom Teachers’ Department, see Wesley, NEA, 122; and on teacher participation in the NEA program, see James W. Crabtree, What Counted Most (Lincoln, NE: University Publishing Company, 1935), 145–46. The teacher participation movement began with the establishment of teachers councils in Chicago under Superintendent Ella Flagg Young in 1909.Google Scholar

11 Wesley, NEA, 397.Google Scholar

12 Urban, Why Teachers Organized, ch. 6.Google Scholar

13 Ogren, Christine “Where Coeds Were Coeducated: Normal Schools in Wisconsin, 1870–1920,“ History of Education Quarterly 35 (Spring, 1995): 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 The appeal is described in Erwin Stevenson Selle, The Organization and Activities of the National Education Association: A Case Study in Educational Sociology (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932): 15–16.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 48.Google Scholar

16 Rousmaniere, Kate City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 25, 26.Google Scholar

17 Fenner, Mildred Sandison NEA History: The National Education Association Its Development and Program (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1945). “Meet the New Editor,” NEA Journal 44 (April, 1955): 193.Google Scholar

18 “Research Division's Silver Anniversary,” NEA Journal 36 (April, 1947): 288–89.Google Scholar

19 Davis, Hazel Interview (June 17, 1988), NEA Archives, box 3117. This interview was undertaken by a consultant hired to conduct a number of interviews with former NEA staff members. It consists of three tapes that have not been transcribed.Google Scholar

20 National Education Association, Committee on Tenure, “Minimum Salary Laws for Teachers,” (January, 1937), NEA Archives, box 764. and “Teacher Personnel Procedures,” NEA Research Bulletin 20 (March and May, 1942).Google Scholar

21 For a look at how the Research Division from its very inception reflected the NEA's twin commitments to teachers and administrators, as well as its commitment to administrators as the superiors of teachers, see Wayne Urban, More Than The Facts: The Research Division of the National Education Association, 1922–1997 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America: 1998), ch. 1.Google Scholar

22 Davis, Hazel Interview (June 17, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Davis, Hazel “Mobile Makes Educational History,“ NEA Journal 33 (September, 1944): 141–42.Google Scholar

24 Davis, Hazel “The American Public School Teacher at the Close of the NEA's First 100 Years,“ NEA Journal 46 (April, 1957): 250–51.Google Scholar

25 Winn, Agnes S. “Education and the Classroom Teacher,“ NEA Journal 11 (April, 1922): 137–39.Google Scholar

26 On the Department of Classroom Teachers and its first two leaders, Winn and Hilda Maehling, see “Spotlight on the Classroom Teacher: Draft of the 50-year History of the NEA Department of Classroom Teachers,” (typescript); and T. M. Stinnett and Alice Cummings, “Sixty Years of Classroom Teacher Advocacy: An Historical Account,” (typescript); both in NEA Archives, box 1824. On Hilda Maehling, see “Hilda Maehling Retires,” NEA Journal 48 (December, 1959): 50;Google Scholar

27 Blount, Jackie shows that the number of women in “intermediate” or county super-intendencies increased from 403 in 1910 to 862 in 1930. In Tennessee, the number of women intermediate superintendents increased from 4 out of 96 in 1910 to 11 out of 94 in 1930. See Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendent (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998): 181, 189.Google Scholar

28 Material related to Williams's career is found in several boxes in the NEA Archives, reached through the association headquarters in Washington, D.C. Biographical details are in an undated (1949?) special issue of the NEA Journal, in Box 462 of the NEA papers.Google Scholar

29 NEA Journal 11 (November, 1922): 371.Google Scholar

30 Williams, Charl O. “The Policy of the National Education Association Towards Federal Legislation,“ Journal of Addresses and Proceedings of the National Education Association 65 (1927): 152–56, quotation, 156; hereafter cited as NEA Proceedings. Google Scholar

31 For example, see Williams, “The Challenge,” Child Welfare (July-August, 1931): 662–63; “A Wise Economy in Education,” Ibid. (May, 1932): 531–32; “Are You Posted on Committees? Department of Education,” Ibid. (October, 1932): 88–89; and “A Message for American Education Week,” Independent Woman 17 (November, 1934): 338.Google Scholar

32 Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 115.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 114. Box 594 of the NEA papers contains substantial correspondence to and from Williams in regard to the creation of a federal department. The signers of these letters constitute a veritable who's who of American educational leadership in this period. The contents of the letters give fascinating insight into the politics of a federal lobbying effort by Williams and the NEA. For a listing of the national organizations supporting a federal department, see Williams, “Report of Legislative Division. National Education Association,” NEA Proceedings 64 (1926): 1139–40.Google Scholar

34 Murphy, Marjorie has noted the depression years as a time of particular difficulty for women teachers in both the NEA and the AFT. Her account of the NEA reads as if Williams had left the association and no comparable advocate remained. This was not true. Williams remained with the association, but her profile was reduced substantially. See Blackboard Unions, 172.Google Scholar

35 Williams, Charl Ormond “How Professional Are Teachers?,“ Peabody Journal of Education 16 (September, 1938): 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Ibid., 119.Google Scholar

37 Williams, Charl Ormond “Professional Institutes,“ NEA Journal 35 (January, 1946): 29.Google Scholar

38 “If the Women of America,” NEA Journal 33 (September, 1944): 149.Google Scholar

39 Number, Special NEA Journal (no date, 1949).Google Scholar

40 Davis, Hazel Interview (June 17, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Ibid. The rest of this discussion of Davis and gender at the NEA is based on this interview.Google Scholar

42 Urban, More Than the Facts, ch. 1.Google Scholar

43 By 1957, when the NEA celebrated its centennial, membership was close to 700,000. See Wesley, NEA, 397.Google Scholar

44 On the equal pay movement in New York City, see Urban, Why Teachers Organized, ch. 4.Google Scholar

45 “The Preparation of Teachers’ Salary Schedules; Part II: Drafting the Schedule,” NEA Research Bulletin 14 (March, 1936): 57–59, 77.Google Scholar

46 NEA Committee on Equal Opportunity, Progress and Problems in Equal Pay for Equal Work (Washington, DC: National Education Association: June, 1939): 4; and NEA Proceedings 74 (1936): 859. Race was a less important concern of the committee.Google Scholar

47 Committee on Equal Opportunity, Progress and Problems in Equal Pay for Equal Work, 24–28, 13–23. It should be noted that a preparation scale still disadvantaged women elementary teachers who typically had less education than secondary teachers. Yet, the preparation scale paved the way for women who obtained equal education to get equal remuneration, regardless of the level at which they taught.Google Scholar

48 Ibid.Google Scholar

49 Courier, Claude V. “Consider the Single Salary Scale,“ NEA Journal 33 (April, 1944): 93; and idem., “Hamilton, Ohio Adopts a Single Salary Scale,” Ibid. 34 (January, 1945): 18.Google Scholar

50 Hubbard, Frank W. “Salaries in 1948–49,“ NEA Journal 38 (May, 1949): 352–53.Google Scholar

51 “Analysis of Single Salary Schedules,” NEA Research Bulletin 25 (October, 1947): 74–111; and Hazel Davis, “Single Salary Schedules Today,” NEA Journal 36 (December, 1947): 638–39.Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 639.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 638.Google Scholar

54 “Salaries LAG in City-School Systems Reports the Biennial Study of the NEA Research Division,” NEA Journal 40 (September, 1951): 398–99.Google Scholar

55 NEA Committee on Equal Opportunity, Status of the Married Woman Teacher (Washington, DC: National Education Association, [June], 1938). The NEA's advocacy of the cause of married women teachers in this publication was a contrast to its stance on the issues ten years earlier. In “Married Women Teachers,” NEA Journal 17 (1928): 297–98, the association settled for a discussion of various points of view on the topic and provision of some statistical data on employment.Google Scholar

56 NEA Committee on Equal Opportunity, Status of the Married Woman Teacher, 29. The NEA's commitment to professionalism and merit as total solutions for all the issues involved in the employment of married women stood in stark contrast to the situation in South Australia in a similar period, when a teachers’ union fragmented into distinct bodies representing married women and single women respectively. See Kay Whitehead, “The Women's Teachers” Guild, 1937–1942’ in Adrian Vickery, In the Interests of Education: A History of Education Unionism in South Australia (St. Leonard's, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1997), ch. 4. For extended discussion of the NEA's efforts on behalf of married women teachers, and the limitations of those efforts, see Lois Scharf, To Work and To Wed: Employment, Feminism and the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 70–71, 76–77, and 80–81.Google Scholar

57 “The Teacher as an Employee,” NEA Journal 31 (May, 1942): 138.Google Scholar

58 Davis, Hazel “The American Public School Teacher at the Close of the NEA's First 100 Years,“ NEA Journal 46 (April, 1957): 250–51.Google Scholar

59 Cole, Stephen The Unionization of Teachers (New York: Praeger, 1969): 31–40, 54–63. New York's single salary scale went beyond the preparation criterion advocated by the NEA and paid all teachers on the same scale, regardless of the amount of their education.Google Scholar

60 Corwin, Ronald G. Education in Crisis: A Sociological Analysis of Schools and Universities in Transition (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 235. Also, see William T. Lowe, “Who Joins Which Teacher Groups,” Teachers College Record (April, 1965): 614–19.Google Scholar

61 Zeigler, Harmon The Political Life of American Teachers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 55–91.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 90.Google Scholar

63 “Local Association” Organizations, Practices, and Programs, 1958–59,” Microfiche Document # 430, S60.1, C1, NEA Archives.Google Scholar

64 Ziegler, Political Life, notes the effectiveness of NEA anti-unionism in Oregon.Google Scholar

65 Gabriel Steven Pellathy, “The National Education Association: A Political System in Change,” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1957), 27.Google Scholar

66 Lambert, Sam “Angry Young Men in Teaching,“ NEA Journal 52 (February, 1963): 17–20; and “Survey of NEA Members and Leaders: Future Association Development,” prepared by NEA Research Division for Committee on Planning and Organizational Development, (February 1972), NEA Archives, box 1465.Google Scholar

67 NEA Proceedings 107 (1969): 14, 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar