of controlling them physically or frightening them with images of eternal damnation. The personalities and dispositions of women were assumed to be particularly suited to performing this nurturing function.
"...by 1850 a majority of the nation's teachers (particularly in the Northeast and Mid-west) were women. The 'feminization of teaching,' as this trend has become known, continued through the early twentieth century, by which time roughly four out of five teachers were women. Virtually all teachers in elementary schools—where the greatest expansion occurred—were women. The remaining male stronghold—the high school—was still a small rung on the educational ladder; it was not until after the turn of the century, when teaching conditions began to improve and secondary schooling became increasingly universal, that men began to return to teaching. By the 1930s an overall gender ratio of 70% female to 30% male was achieved; it has remained constant since then (Clifford, 1989; Rury, 1989; Sedlak & Schlossman, 1986).
But the women were really no more likely than their male predecessors to remain in teaching. Their careers in education lasted only about 5 years.
"Not only was teaching unable to retain more than a handful of practitioners for more than a few years, but evidence began to suggest that prospective teachers were among the least academically talented students in their communities. Despite the presence of very bright young women who entered teaching because of limited occupational opportunities, the field was haunted by impressions left by a series of surveys and examinations, namely, that teachers were (in Lewis Terman's painful characterization) 'congenital ninth graders.' This problem worsened after 1940 with the emergence of communities of professional-class families, where parents owed their occupational attainments to their advance educational credentials, which they believed entitled them to condemn the abilities of their children's teachers." (Lanier & Little, 1985; Sedlak, 1989; Warren, 1985).
"Independent of its relationship to transiency in the classroom, the feminization of teaching left the occupation with several legacies. The unstaged career structure and typical school calendar, for example, served the interests of women hoping to integrate work, household, and childrearing responsibilities through intermittent or episodic employment, or through employment that did not require traditional forms of professional commitment. Females willingly encouraged these attributes of teaching as work in order to make the best lives they could for themselves as women, wives and mothers." (Sedlak & Schlossman, 1986).
"Teachers endured other consequences of feminization, even though they were not in the best interests of women. Scholars are beginning to raise the possibility that much of the low status of teaching is attributable not only to the relative weakness of children, but also to the diminished stature of women. Like nursing and social work, teaching has been burdened with an image of 'social housekeeping.' Such 'women's work' becomes both identified as an extension of the domestic sphere and vulnerable to loss of discretion, autonomy, and status... And it is not surprising that historians and labor economists have begun to explore connections between feminization and explicit initiatives (like installing 'teacher-proof' curricula and Individually Guided Education) to 'deskill' teaching by limiting occasions for teachers to use their professional judgment and skills. Scholarship focusing on the relationship is admittedly speculative and tentative, but the hypothesis is provocative enough to merit further research. (Apple, 1995; Clifford, 1989).
"If the knowledge that teachers are expected to acquire suffers from low status or is erroneously presumed to be simpleminded, attracting the most talented students into teaching will be difficult... Just as the rapid increase in female teachers during the last third of the nineteenth century caused the occupation to become more susceptible to tighter administrative cont