Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 107-24.
Abstract
Beginning late in the eighteenth century, social theorists developed an ideology of domesticity, maintaining that women's proper role lay in the care of children, the nurture of the husband, the physical maintenance of the domicile, and the guardianship of both home and social morality.1 Although this ideology helped to propel females into teaching, historians have not agreed on the impact of domestic ideology on women teachers and on the education profession itself. Some scholars conclude that women's easy access to teaching posts turned the classroom into a workshop for motherhood for the average female, perpetuating anti-intellectualism in education to the present day.2 Other research, focusing on women who dedicated themselves to teaching during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portrays them as highly professional.3 A few studies seem to bridge the gap between those contradictory views, highlighting both the professional opportunities and the behavioral restrictions that domestic ideology provided to women teachers and to other women whose careers were and still are defined by the traditional women's role.4
This paper depicts 547 western women teachers, most of whom were born during the first decade of the twentieth century, who developed their own personal and professional variations on the traditional ideology of domesticity, an ideology that seemed to them to give their work meaning and purpose. Although changing social conditions and personal experiences encouraged them to emphasize varying interpretations of the domestic role during their lives, these teachers have remained firmly entrenched within the traditional female sphere, and it is from there that they have observed the world and judged themselves.
DESCRIPTION OF SUBJECTS
Because most published historical studies of female educators do not deal with the twentieth cen tury, I began in 1980 to locate subjects for a study that would test earlier scholars' observations on the importance of domestic ideology for women teachers by evaluating the . significance of domesticity in the lives of a new era of career-oriented women. If the traditional belief had survived as part of their vocational and personal value system, then its potency as a social force would be documented well into the current century. Moreover, I could trace the historical and social reasons for this potence despite the paradoxes inherent in using the idea of domesticity to show women's increased involvement in gainful employment outside the home. Thus my search centered around professional associations and other organizations likely to include women who had taugh t for many years. My end product was a large body of reminiscences, letters, personal interviews, and biographical sketches of 547 women teachers from three western states-Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado.
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln