Author(s): | Perlmann, Joel Margo, Robert A. |
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Reviewer(s): | Carter, Susan B. |
Published by EH.NET (July 2002)
Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers,
1650-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x +188 pp. $32
(hardcover), ISBN: 0-226-66039-7
Reviewed for EH.NET by Susan B. Carter, Department of Economics, University of
California, Riverside.
Women’s Work is an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort by two
well-known scholars. Joel Perlmann, trained as a social historian, is Levy
Institute Research Professor at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard
College. Robert A. Margo, trained as an economic historian, is professor of
economics at Vanderbilt University and a research associate of the National
Bureau of Economic Research. Together they explain women’s integration into the
teaching profession in the United States over more than two centuries. The tale
stops in 1920 because by that point, in their view, the die had been cast.
Teaching, especially at the elementary school level, had become Women’s
Work. Despite the wrenching social, economic, demographic, and political
upheavals of the subsequent eighty years, women’s predominance in the
elementary school teaching field was one feature of American life that remained
unchanged.
This work is an exemplar of excellence in inter-disciplinary social science
research. The authors note in their preface that: “The issues the book
addresses, and the formulations with which it discusses, would have differed
considerably had either of us tried to carry out the research, or write the
book, alone.” Scholars will be grateful for the collaboration.
The approach of Perlmann and Margo makes use of the regional character of the
feminization process. Feminization advanced first in the Northeast and only
much later in the South. The North-South differential was retained as the
population moved West, finally disappearing in the early-twentieth century,
when teaching was established as Women’s Work nationwide.
Following a Preface and Introduction, the book is organized into five separate
chapters. Chapter One is a survey of schools and the teaching profession in New
England as these institutions evolved over the first two hundred years of
European settlement. Perlmann and Margo argue that the early development of the
two-tier public education system was key in creating the first feminine toehold
in the profession. The upper tier was devoted to Latin instruction, reserved
for boys, and taught in winter by men; the lower tier taught reading and later
writing to young children — girls as well as boys. It was taught in the summer
and from a remarkably early date it was often taught by women. Perlmann and
Margo speculate that women may have predominated among teachers in this lower
tier, summer session, as early as 1750. Economic and cultural forces, including
the thinness of the population, the parsimony of local school boards, the young
age of the students, the availability of an educated female population, and the
“ideals of the revolutionary era” which supported “more basic learning for the
people” all played a part in rationalizing the employment of women. In outlying
hamlets with populations that were too small to warrant the two-tier system,
Latin was downplayed and women were hired as teachers for what was in effect a
one-tier system. “Some women were already teaching in the winter sessions in
1830, well before Horace Mann or other reformers of the common school era began
to call for that change” (p. 27).
Chapter Two contrasts developments in the South of the same period. Here public
primary education was much less well supported than in the North. Families with
adequate resources hired private teachers for their children. The state
supplied vouchers for children whose families were too poor to pay. For a
variety of reasons, the two-tier system does not seem to have developed in the
South and, perhaps as a consequence, women teachers were far less common in
Southern as compared with Northern schools. Perlmann and Margo consider a host
of alternatives to this institutional explanation, including social structure,
demography, and gender wage ratios. None of these alternatives appear to offer
as compelling an explanation for the patterns they observe.
Chapter Three examines women’s involvement in teaching as the population moved
westward over the course of the nineteenth century. The authors choose Illinois
for their detailed assessment because it was settled by migrants from both the
North and the South and displayed a wide range of local arrangements for the
education of the young. They find that differences across counties in economic
conditions, population concentration, fertility rates, and women’s education,
explain only a little more than half of the differential in the use of female
teachers in the northern and southern counties of the state. That leaves
settlers’ state of origin to account for over forty percent.
If these regional institutions are so powerful then how does one account for
the eventual feminization of teaching even in the South and in regions settled
by former Southerners by 1920? That is the subject of Chapter Four, “Explaining
Feminization.” Perlmann and Margo cite four factors. The first is the
experience with women teachers during the Civil War. The departure of male
teachers to either fight or to take other jobs to more directly support the war
effort forced school districts to hire women. Perlman and Margo document
increases of ten percentage points and more in women’s share of teaching
between 1860 and 1870. In many areas, the experience of having female teachers
during the Civil War appears to have permanently changed the attitudes of
school board members, because the female share did not return to the pre-war
level. For Perlmann and Margo, this evidence suggests that the women were doing
a good job:
At the same time, the fact that the shift could be so great and that so much of
the effect was sustained rather than erased after 1865 also suggests that there
was a certain fit between the effect of the wartime shock to the system and the
social and cultural conditions on the eve of the war. Large gains for female
machinists during World War II, after all, were not sustained after 1945 (p.
89).
In a section entitled “Dynamics of Diffusion” the authors neatly summarize
other events that operated to bring women into teaching. Over time, they argue,
even the last bastions of male hegemony were removed. These events were
temporary financial strains, women’s “increasing mastery of the advanced rural
school curriculum,” apparent improvements in pupils’ behavior while in school,
and the sex-typing of school teaching as women’s work.
In Chapter Five, “Labor Market Outcomes in Urban Schools — The Role of
Gender,” the authors switch gears to examine gender differences in the
structure and rewards to teachers in bureaucratic urban schools. They make use
of detailed personnel records to document discrimination against women in both
pay and promotion. They suggest that women’s curtailed geographic mobility may
have allowed local school boards to act as monopsonists, while men’s mobility
caused them to be paid a wage closer to that of a competitive market.
Did it matter that women played such a prominent educational role so early in
American history? Absolutely! The use of female teachers reduced the cost of
human capital development.
Because female teachers were cheaper to hire than male teachers were, the
economic cost of producing human capital was cheaper than it otherwise would
have been, providing a boost to its production and hence to long-term economic
growth. Regions that lagged behind in their exploitation of female teachers in
this sense, such as the South, lagged behind in the production of human capital
and, in consequence, in per capita incomes and economic development (p.
129-130).
In addition, the lure of teaching raised girls’ incentive to attend school;
mothers who were former teachers probably instilled the importance of education
in their children; and the teaching style of females may have been the source
of a national character that internalized the need for good behavior. It
doesn’t get any better, as long as you don’t think about the low pay.
Susan B. Carter is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for
Teaching Excellence at the University of California, Riverside. She is author
of numerous articles on American economic history, including “Occupational
Segregation, Teachers’ Wages and American Economic Growth,” Journal of
Economic History 46 (2) (June 1986): 373?83. She is currently
co-editor-in-chief of Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial
Edition, to be published by Cambridge University Press in three volumes and
in an electronic edition in 2003.
Subject(s): | Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |