The Frontier Teaching Gender

Male teachers were especially difficult to find and keep on the frontier.  A man well-educated enough to teach could easily find work at better wages.  The frontier teaching conditions as well as the necessity of maintaining discipline with 17-18 year old farm boys who continually challenged authority, made the frontier teaching profession for a man unacceptable in most cases. 

Women, however, fared a bit better.  They weren't expected to do physical tasks that men were expected to do.  Most women were dedicated to teaching because it was one of the few career choices available to females on the frontier.  The work also gave them a good chance to find a suitable husband in an atmosphere dominated by males. Once a schoolteacher married, she had to resign from the teaching profession.

As early as 1845, Catherine Beecher, daughter of prominent New England educators and clergymen, was recruiting for women into the teaching profession.  Her pamphlet, "The Duty of American Women to their Country" cried out about the shortage of teachers on the frontier and predicted that men would never fill that gap. "It is women who are to come at this emergency and meet this demand", she wrote, "women whose experience and testing have shown to be the best, as well as the cheapest guardians and teachers of childhood."  Women by the hundreds, and later by the thousands, answered Miss Beecher's call, although many were mere teenagers.

A five month school year seemed insufficient for even minimal instruction to the dedicated women who came to the frontier to teach.  These women fought local prejudices against the necessity of formal education, and against frugality - from textbooks to outhouses.  Over time they would change the course of education on the frontier, one school and one pupil at a time.

Next time...The Schoolmarm and the Schoolroom
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Today in Pioneer History: "On September 24, 1789, the Judiciary Act is passed by Congress and signed by President Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. John Jay was nominated to preside as chief justice, along with John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson.