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The Authority of Women in the Political Development of American Public Education, 1860–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2010

Michael Callaghan Pisapia
Michael Callaghan Pisapia*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
*
pisapia@wisc.edu
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Abstract

Through a comparative historical analysis of the American states, I show how public education was the original policy field through which white American women became empowered as voters and political officials. Women's changing status within the education profession and “school suffrage” rights are an important and overlooked aspect of women's political history, and the rural orientation of state governments and women's increasing administrative authority as county superintendents and rural supervisors of education was pivotal to women's political empowerment. Women's authority, however, varied across regions and across states, with women's authority especially strong in Western states. I find that women in the field of public education were most empowered where there was a history of school suffrage rights, where administrative offices were elective rather than appointed, and where the power of the state superintendent of public instruction was weak. These findings suggest that democratic institutions, more than economic development or state capacity, were fundamental to women's increasing authority in the policy domain that commanded the largest share of state and local resources at the time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 24 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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20. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is often cited as the origin of this idea that government is decentralized in the United States (See de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, translated by Lawrence, G. and edited by Mayer, J. P. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969 [1848])Google Scholar). Actually, he only argued that administration is decentralized. In making this distinction, he uses education as an example. Even in Massachusetts, which he holds up as the epitome of “communal independence” from centralized administration, de Tocqueville notes there are “social duties” that the state obliges townships to perform. For example: “If the government wants to organize education on a uniform plan through the county, the township must establish the schools required by the law,” (ibid., 67). The puzzle for de Tocqueville was not that there was no government in the United States: in fact, there were surprisingly strong central governments. The puzzle was that Americans managed to have both centralized government and decentralized administration. In the United States: “the state rules but does not administer” (ibid., 82). For empirical studies of the role governments have played in expanding public education, see Meyer, John and Rubinson, Richard, “Education and Political Development,” Review of Research in Education 3 (1975)Google Scholar; Timar, Thomas B., “The Institutional Role of State Education Departments: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Education 105, no. 3 (1997)Google Scholar.

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23. The dollar amounts in Figure 2 are aggregates of local and state resources. To look only at revenues from state taxes would be hugely misleading because local funds typically originated in state-legislated mandates and incentives.

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35. Unfortunately, occupational data from the 1930 census is unavailable.

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43. Quoted in ibid., 36. See also Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity.

44. For a fuller account of such discourses that focuses on Massachusetts and the national influence of Horace Mann, see Joseph Bonica, “The Motherly Office of the State”.

45. Quoted in Lyman Draper, Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction, “Tenth Annual Report on the Condition and Improvement of the Common Schools and Educational Interests of the State of Wisconsin,” (Madison, WI: Atwood & Rublee, Printers,1858): 121–22.

46. Ibid., 119.

47. On the role of Whig political ideology, see Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 45–48. On the history of Normal schools, see Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers, chap. 3; Ogren, Christine A., The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although most Normal schools were the creatures of state governments and funded by them, they were not universally state institutions. Many large cities had their own public Normal schools. In the South, private Normal schools were common. Although some Normals were open for women only, most were coeducational, and none were exclusively open for men.

48. Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers, 131.

49. See Kotin, Lawrence and Aikman, William F., Legal Foundations of Compulsory School Attendance (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

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54. There were other sex-integrated civic organizations, and the NEA was not the most egalitarian. That distinction would go the Granges, which specified that key offices would be held by women, in addition to whatever office they might hold also open to men. However, the NEA appears to be the first professional sex-integrated organization. See Underwood, June O., “Civilizing Kansas: Women's Organizations, 1880–1920,” in History of Women in the United States, Volume 16: Women Together: Organizational Life, ed. Cott, Nancy F. (1992 [originally published 1984])Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Ganz, Marshall, and Munson, Ziad, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Volunteerism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (2000): 534Google Scholar.

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60. This position was the predecessor of the position Arne Duncan held before becoming the current Secretary of Education in the administration of Barack Obama.

61. See Bennett, Helen Christine, American Women in Civic Work (New York: Dodd, Mead and company, 1915)Google Scholar, 262, 70. These figures equaled almost 1 billion and over one quarter of a billion in 2009 dollars, respectively.

62. Bradford was the fourth and sixth female state superintendent of public instruction in Colorado, first elected in 1913, and she became NEA president in 1918; Corliss Preston was elected the first female state superintendent of public instruction in Washington in 1912, and she became NEA president in 1920.

63. The minutes are documented in “Comments in Business Meeting” (Annual Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1910).

64. West, The National Education Association, 6.

65. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap, chap. 6.

66. National Education Association, “Administrative Practices Affecting Classroom Teachers, Part I: Selection and Appointment of Teachers,” Research Bulletin X, no. 1 (January 1932)Google Scholar; National Education Association, “Practices Affecting Teacher Personnel,” Research Bulletin VI, no. 4 (September 1928)Google Scholar. The 1928 study was based on a survey sent to the “school systems” of all 2,880 cities and towns with populations of at least 2,500 people. Only 53.2 percent of the cities responded, but the larger the school system, the better was the response rate to the survey. Whereas 98.5 percent of the 67 cities over 100,000 people responded, only 42.1 percent of the 1,383 cities with populations between 2,500 and 5,000 people responded. Response rates to the 1931 report were worse with only 44.7 percent of 3,333 municipalities reporting, including 91.4 percent of cities with a population over 100,000, and only 27.2 percent of towns with a population between 2,500 and 5,000.

67. Though it is beyond the period of this paper, it should be noted that by 1942, these bans reached their peak, with 87 percent of respondent towns reporting marriage bans and 70 percent reporting retain bans. By 1950, they were rapidly disappearing, with 18 percent reporting marriage bans and 10 percent reporting retain bans. See Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, Table 6.1.

68. Claudia Goldin persuasively argues that the Great Depression was not alone responsible for the emergence of marriage bars in teaching (they were also common in clerical work) and that it is “inconceivable that marriage bars could have gained such wide acceptance during the Depression had previous policies not existed and had social consensus not been built around them.” See ibid., 166.

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70. National Education Association, “Practices Affecting Teacher Personnel,” 219–20.

71. Brubacher, “The Judicial Status of Marriage and Maternity as an Obstacle to the Education of Women for Professional Careers in Public School Teaching.”

72. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, 170.

73. Strachan, Grace Charlotte, Equal Pay for Equal Work; the Story of the Struggle for Justice Being Made by the Women Teachers of the City of New York (New York: B.F. Buck & Co., 1910)Google Scholar. An important study of the role of these women activists is Crocco, Margaret, Munro, Petra, and Weiler, Kathleen, Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880–1960, Athene Series (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

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75. Urban, Gender, Race and the National Education Association, 2.

76. Brint, Steven and Levy, Charles S., “Professions and Civic Engagement: Trends in Rhetoric and Practice, 1875–1995,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol, Theda and Fiorina, Morris P. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 166Google Scholar.

77. Ibid., 176–78.

78. Katherine Blake, “Comments in Business Meeting” (Annual Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1910).

79. Anthony, Susan B. and Harper, Ida Husted, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 4: 1883–1900 (Rochester, NY: Privately published, 1902), 551Google Scholar.

80. Laura J. Eisenhuth, “Third Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction,” North Dakota Public Documents No. 21 (Jamestown, N.D.: Alert, State Printers and Binders, 1894): 42.

81. Ibid.

82. Blackwell, Marilyn Schultz, “Meddling in Politics: Clarina Howard Nichols and Antebellum Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Spring 2004): 27–28, 44–46Google Scholar.

83. Ibid., 59–60.

84. This number excludes New Jersey. See endnotes xiv and xv of Table 1.

85. Colorado also granted full suffrage in 1893, but unlike Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, the territory of Colorado had passed a distinct school suffrage law in 1876, prior to a full suffrage law.

86. On marital status as an obstacle to citizenship, see Ritter, Gretchen, “Gender and Citizenship after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Polity 32, no. 3 (2000)Google Scholar; Ritter, Gretchen, “Jury Service and Women's Citizenship before and after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Law and History Review 20, no. 3 (2002)Google Scholar.

87. As discussed above, martial status did matter consequentially in the right of women to teach in the schools because that right would undermine the male breadwinner model of family life. However, such laws limiting the right of women to teach were very rarely the outcome of state legislatures. Rather, locales made such decisions. Where local districts did prohibit single women from teaching, the main reason seems to have been a sanctioned economic affirmative action for men. This was especially true in the 1930s when jobs were fewer. See Keesecker, “The Legal Status of Married Women Teachers,” 346–49.

88. Nichols, Carole, “Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and after in Connecticut,” in History of Women in the United States, Volume 18: Women and Politics, Part 2, ed. Cott, Nancy F. (1992 [originally published 1983]), 414Google Scholar.

89. Quoted in Harper, Ida Husted, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 5: 1900–1920 (Rochester, NY: Privately published, 1922)Google Scholar.

90. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 63.

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93. State politics, for example, are inconspicuous in Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All; Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940.

94. See also Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, Expanded ed., Praeger University Series (New York: Praeger, 1975); Katz, Michael B., “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95. Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, “Report on Rural Schools,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1896–97, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898)Google Scholar, Chapter XVII, 846.

96. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 42.

97. Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, “Report on Rural Schools,” 815.

98. Steffes, Tracy L, “Solving the ‘Rural School Problem’: New State Aid, Standards, and Supervision of Local Schools, 1900–1933,” History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2008): 217–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. The verbal distinction between the rural or county superintendent and the rural supervisor was first made by Katherine Cook in her 1922 report for the U.S. Bureau of Education. Prior to that report, it was common to use these terms interchangeably, as was done by the NEA Committee of Twelve in 1895. See Katherine M. Cook, “Supervision of Rural Schools,” U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 10 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922): 2.

100. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 43.

101. Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, “Report on Rural Schools,” 859–60.

102. Quoted in Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 172.

103. Angenette J. Peavey, “Tenth Biennial Report,” Colorado Superintendent of Public Instruction, (Denver, C.O.: The Smith-Brooks Printing Co., 1896): 7.

104. This exchange of professional expertise for moral purity occurred in other policy fields as well. For example, Elisabeth Clemens argued that once women won the suffrage, they tried to “reinvent the relationship between voting and citizenship through the elevation of a standard of nonpartisanship” that “promised to create is own hierarchy of voting citizens, which distinguished the educated and disinterested voter (many of them elite women) from the obedient, uneducated person (thought to include working class men, racial minorities, and immigrants). See Clemens, Elisabeth Stephanie, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 349Google Scholar.

105. Cook, “Supervision of Rural Schools,” 2.

106. In the North, these offices were usually established by law so the state could guarantee that rural schools met the conditions specified by law before sending them state aid. In the South, state supervisors of rural schools were appointed to assist the General Education Board and the Southern Education Board. See Katherine M. Cook and A.C. Monahan, “Rural School Supervision,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 48 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916): 8–9.

107. Ibid., 40–41.

108. Comments from Burkes are from her report to Katherine M. Cook and A.C. Monahan at the U.S. Bureau of Education. See ibid., 54–56.

109. Julian Butterworth, “The County Superintendent in the United States,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932); Walter H. Gaumnitz, “Status of Teachers and Principals Employed in the Rural Schools of the United States,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932); A.C. Monahan and C.H. Dye, “A Comparison of the Salaries of Rural and Urban Superintendents of Schools,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 33 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917).

110. Monahan and Dye, “A Comparison of the Salaries of Rural and Urban Superintendents of Schools.”

111. On the relation between professional, expertise, and the state, see Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, “Professional Autonomy and the Social Control of Expertise,” in The Sociology of the Professions: Lawyers, Doctors, and Others, ed. Dingwall, Robert and Philip Simon Coleman Lewis, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 1; Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Mills, C. Wright and Gerth, Hans Heinrich (New York: Oxford University press, 1958)Google Scholar, chap. VIII, sections 1, 7, and 13.

112. See Tyack, The One Best System; Urban, Wayne R., “Organized Teachers and Educational Reform During the Progressive Era: 1890–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113. Ibid., 173.

114. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 180–83.

115. In 1910, all states had developed county-level governments in public education administration except for some of the Northeastern states: Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Ohio.

116. I used random effects instead of fixed effects because one of the major factors of interest, the woman suffrage rights regime, does not vary over time.

117. Support for woman's suffrage laws was not found to be related to the passage of mother's pension laws in a study by Skocpol, Abend-Wein, and Goodrich Lehman. They used a dichotomous indicator for the states, depending on women possessing full suffrage in the state prior to the Nineteenth Amendment. The suffrage index here reflects more variation in the context of the woman's suffrage and it is centered on the passage of school suffrage laws. The logic of the typology is similar to that constructed by Skocpol et al. for the timing of mother's pensions laws. See Skocpol et al., “Women's Associations and the Enactment of Mothers' Pensions in the United States,” 687, 90.

118. See Beeton, Beverly, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland Publications, 1986)Google Scholar; Cole, “A Wide Field for Usefulness.” For a specific study on attitudes towards the woman educator in the West, the best study remains Kaufman, Polly Welts, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

119. This classic political culture argument is from Elazar, Daniel Judah, American Federalism: A View from the States, 2nd ed. (New York: Crowell, 1972)Google Scholar. State specific studies remain the best guide to assessing political culture, however. Separate studies of New Jersey and Connecticut for example each found, not surprisingly, that women had considerable in school politics despite the low levels of superintendent office holding. See Crocco, Margaret Smith, “Women of New Jersey: Charting a Path to Full Citizenship, 1870–1920,” New Jersey History 115, no. 3 (1997)Google Scholar; Nichols, “Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and after in Connecticut.” In addition, in the South, there certainly differences in women's roles across the states. Although women in North Carolina held almost no county superintendencies, their influence in matters of public education was still considerable. See Leloudis, James T. II, “School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902–1919,” Journal Of American History 69, no. 4 (1983)Google Scholar.

120. Cnudde, Charles F. and McCrone, David J., “Party Competition and Welfare Policies in the American States,” American Political Science Review 63 (1969)Google Scholar; Ranney, Austin, “Parties in State Politics,” in Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis, ed. Jacob, Herbert and Vines, Kenneth Nelson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976)Google Scholar; Brown, Robert D., “Party Cleavages and Welfare Effort in the American States,” The American Political Science Review 89, no. 1 (1995)Google Scholar.

121. For studies of women's direct involvement with political parties, see Dinkin, Robert J., Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See Berman, David, “Male Support for Woman Suffrage: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in the Mountain West,” Social Science History 11 (1987)Google Scholar. For a more general account that also includes a study of Southern Populists who showed little support for woman suffrage, see Marilley, Suzanne M., Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

122. I also estimated ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models for 1910 and 1930 using more detailed information about club activity and membership in those years. In 1910 the GFWC collected information about the involvement of its affiliates in educational activity. In the 1910 model alone, this activity was insignificant. Reports from the U.S. Bureau of Education on MCPTA compiled membership information by state for those organizations. In OLS models for 1930, the membership strength of the associations was not found to be a significant predictor of women's office holding.

123. Urban, Gender, Race and the National Education Association, 20–27.

124. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 147–49.

125. The best study on women's surprisingly high rates of college attendance during this time period is Gordon, Lynn D., Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

126. I also estimated OLS models for each year that included partisanship. In none of the models was the measure of partisanship found to be statistically significant.

127. On the great controversy on what effects woman suffrage actually had on empowering women, see Harvey, Votes without Leverage, 4074–08; Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage, 101–103; Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920, 49, 218; Nichols, “Votes and More for Women”; Degler, Carl N., At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. However, several studies of particular states, as mentioned above, found that school suffrage rights were associated with meaningful gains in women's office holding, as the present study also indicates.

128. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools.

129. Prior to the Civil War, this was certainly the case. See Bonica, “The Motherly Office of the State.”

130. Reid, “‘A Career to Build, a People to Serve, a Purpose to Accomplish,’” 73.

131. Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties.”

132. This disjuncture faced women in other domains of social policy as well. See McDonagh, “The ‘Welfare Rights State’ and the ‘Civil Rights State.’”

133. See Mettler, Suzanne, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.