ndent 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 control, the image of teaching as a nonintellectual, custodial, overly managed job currently constrains the aspirations of talented practicing teachers and threatens the recruitment of new educators."
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