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Rhode Island's Last Holdout: Tenure and Married Women Teachers at the Brink of the Women's Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David M. Donahue
David M. Donahue*
Affiliation:
Mills College
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Extract

On 24 April 1946, Rhode Island Governor John O. Pastore signed “An Act to Guarantee and to Improve the Education of Children and Youth in This State by Providing Continuing Teaching Service.” The law stated that “three successive annual contracts shall be considered evidence of satisfactory teaching and shall constitute a probationary period” after which teachers would be granted tenure. Teachers could be dismissed only “for good and just cause” after they received tenure. However, the law contained one big loophole: it did not “prevent the retirement of any teacher under a rule of the school committee affecting marriage,” in effect leaving local school committees with the authority to fire women teachers as soon as they got married.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 50 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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71 Interview of Teacher A and letter from Teacher C.Google Scholar