 their own households and families as young adults. Young men taught while preparing for other careers--as ministers or lawyers, perhaps--or during agriculture's slow season. Teaching was transient work in America. The rewards were too low, the work brief and seasonal, and other economic opportunities were too great to keep healthy young men committed to careers in education.
"...There is reason to believe that many of the masters who built long-term careers in teaching were largely captives of the occupation. That is, in contrast with other fields open to them, teaching was a haven that offered them some degree of social mobility. A powerful colonial tradition bestowed public service jobs, such as teaching, grave digging and bell ringing, on social dependents who had few employment opportunities. (Rury, 1989; Sedlak, 1989; Sedlak and Schlossman, 1986).
"After the mid-nineteenth century the social composition of the teaching force changed fundamentally, but in a way that actually reinforced problems inherent in the Colonial pattern. By the late 1840's, across all regions in the United States, women were beginning to enter teaching in unprecedented numbers... Religious and social theory about child rearing underwent a substantial change during the early nineteenth century, particularly among the moderate, affluent, and liberal Christian sects in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. During the Colonial era, male-dominated pedagogy had assumed that children were sinful and possessed an inherent inclination toward evil that had to be controlled with force and intimidation, at least until they were old enough to experience a genuine conversion. 'Christian nurture,' as the new doctrine came to be called, increasing rejected assumptions about innate sinfulness and encouraged a view of children as capable of moving gradually toward the conversion experience that signified salvation... [Then] new pedagogies surfaced to enable teachers to fashion an educational environment that could nurture and guide children instead 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).
"Indepe