¹ 18 February 1875 secretary's report, Volume I, Box 2, [Boston] Lady Teachers’ Association [hereafter LTA] records, Massachusetts Historical Society.Google Scholar

² Minutes of first meeting [undated], Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Study of parliamentary rules was common in early teachers’ organizations, see Marjorie Murphy, “From Artisan to Semi-Professional: White Collar Unionism Among Chicago Public School Teachers, 1870-1930,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Davis, 1981), 161.Google Scholar

³ For one example, see Urban, Wayne J., Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 9.Google Scholar

⁴ “The Teacher's Profession,” Journal of Education, 15 May 1879, 312.Google Scholar

⁵ Colburn, M.P., “Lady Teachers’ Associations,” Journal of Education, 4 December 1875, 254.Google Scholar

⁶ The Lady Teachers’ Association in Boston formed in 1874, the Women Teachers’ Association in Buffalo in 1889; the Chicago Teachers’ Club in 1892, and the St. Paul Grade Teachers’ Association in 1898. Minneapolis teachers organized sometime before 1879; and teachers in Chicago formed the School Mistresses’ Club sometime in the 1880s. See “Teachers’ Organizations in Buffalo,” Education 16 (May 1896), 570; Julia E. Sullivan, “The Boston Teachers Club: 1898-1948,” Boston Teachers’ Newsletter 36:3 (December 1947), 17; Michael J. McDonough, “St. Paul Federation of Teachers, Fifty Years of Service, 1918-1968,” 3 in Folder 1, Box 8, Series V, St. Paul Federation of Teachers Collection, [hereafter StPTF Collection] Walter Reuther Library; Financial Secretary to Mr. Thos. McLachlan, 18 November 1904, Folder: Sept-Dec 1904, Box 38, Chicago Teachers’ Federation Papers, (hereafter CTF) Chicago Historical Society; John T. McManis, Ella Flagg Young and a Half-Century of the Chicago Public Schools (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1916), 94; Ella F. Young, “Women in Education in Illinois,” Journal of Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Illinois State Teachers Association and Sections (Carbondale: ISTA, 1904), 16–17.Google Scholar

⁷ The Lady Teachers’ Association in Boston recorded inquiries from teachers in distant cities like Louisville KY, as did Chicago teachers. See minutes of meetings, March 1877 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; J.E. McKean to Catharine Goggin, 25 December 1899, Folder: 1868-1899, Box 35, CTF. They also made inquiries with other associations, see minutes of meetings, 11 March 1890 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Sullivan, “Boston Teachers Club,” 17.Google Scholar

⁸ Constitutions 1874 and 1879, minutes of meetings 20 February 1874 and 11 March 1875, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. On feelings of isolation, see 11 December 1894, 12 December 1894, 4 January 1895 and 6 February 1895 entries, Louise Bailey Diaries (Microfilm edition, 1976) State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Katherine Reddington Morgan, ed., My Ever Dear Daughter, My Own Dear Mother: The Correspondence of Julia Stone Towne and Mary Julia Towne, 1868-1882 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); and “A Fit of the Blues,” Western Journal of Education, (August 1875): 181–2.Google Scholar

⁹ Ella Flagg Young, Isolation in the Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900); Jackie M. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1813-1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 167; Minutes of meetings 20 February 1874, Volume I, Box 2, LTA.Google Scholar

¹⁰ “A Word from a Country Teacher,” Woman's Journal, 26 November 1870, 370; Edgar B. Wesley, NEA: The First Hundred Years, The Building of the Teaching Profession (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 334, quotation is from 260.Google Scholar

¹¹ “Massachusetts Teachers Convention,” Woman's Journal, 24 January 1874, 26. Annie E. Johnson became the first woman principal of a state normal school in Massachusetts in 1866. She quit in 1875 for a higher paying position. Electa Walton also taught in several Massachusetts state normal schools, serving temporarily as principal in 1849 when Cyrus Pierce became ill. She was passed over for the permanent appointment, which went to a man. See “Gov. Bullock's Remarks,” Thirtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1867), 37–40 “Framingham,” Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education [Massachusetts] (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1876), 27–28; and Historical Sketches of the Framingham State Normal School (Framingham: Alumnae Association, 1914), 42, 51, 96–97.Google Scholar

¹² “The Teachers Meeting Yesterday,” St. Paul Daily Press, 13 October 1872, Roll 81, Frame 242, Annals of Minnesota microfilm, Minnesota Historical Society (hereafter Annals). For another example see Minute Books, Box 1, Folder 1, Atlanta Normal Schools, Georgia Department of Archives and History. Ruth Gillette Hardy, “Historical Setting of the American Federation of Teachers,” Folder 1, Box 2, StPFT; “Massachusetts Teachers Convention,” Woman's Journal, 24 January 1874, 26.Google Scholar

¹³ “Report of the Committee on Education,” Woman's Journal, 13 July 1872, 224; “Women and Public Schools: A Report to N.E. Woman's Club,” Woman's Journal, 17 August 1872, 258; Third Annual Report of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, 1874 (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1875), 8–13; Annual Report of the Woman's Educational Association (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1878), 6; Polly Welts Kaufman, Boston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905 (New York: Garland, 1994), 68–69. On similar developments between club women and teachers in Chicago, see Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 62.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Sprague, Julia A., A History of the New England Women's Club from 1868 to 1893 (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1894), 17; Kaufman, Boston Women; Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts, 33. The Minneapolis Woman's School and Library Organization worked to place women on school and library boards. See Box 2, Volumes 5 and 6, Political Equality Club of Minneapolis Records, Minnesota Historical Society. Atlanta women undertook similar initiatives in the 1890s. See Scrapbook 1 (1895), Atlanta Women's Club Collection, Atlanta History Center.Google Scholar

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¹⁶ Antebellum schools often employed a male teacher in the winter and a female teacher in the summer, when the older boys were likely to be working. Schools replaced male teachers with women to economize on labor costs. Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750-1820,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (Winter 1993): 528–529.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband. Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 29. Quotation is from Mary A. Liverrnore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1883), 59, also 85. See also Caroline H. Dall, “Woman's Right to Labor,” Or, Low Wages and Hard Work (Boston: Walker, Wise & Co., 1860), esp. 5–9; and Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopedia of Woman's Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co, 1863), 37–39; “Too Respectable!” Journal of Education, 16 October 1879, 207–8; Hiram Orcutt, “A Circular Letter to Public School Teachers,” Journal of Education, 13 January 1881, 21.Google Scholar

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²² Before 1900, Boston public schools reportedly employed only one black teacher full-time, as well as one substitute and three evening teachers who were black. Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston 1865-1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 34. Sarah Deutsch found four black women teaching in “greater Boston's public schools” by 1902; they included Miss Maria L. Baldwin, Miss Hattie Smith, and Miss Gertrude Mabel Baker. See Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 368, n232. Baldwin was principal of an interracial Cambridge, Massachusetts public school from 1887 until 1922. See Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Maria Louise Baldwin,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 79–80. Forten attended the State Normal School at Salem. See Brenda Stevenson, ed. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Davidson attended the State Normal School at Framingham. See Olivia A. Davidson to Ednah Cheney, 28 August 1881, Folder #43, Ednah Dow Cheney Papers, Boston Public Library.Google Scholar

²³ Reid, John B. found a few black teachers in nineteenth-century Detroit and Chicago; nearly all taught in segregated schools located in black neighborhoods. See John B. Reid, “A Career to Build, A People to Serve, A Purpose to Accomplish: Race, Class, Gender and Detroit's First Black Women Teachers, 1865-1916,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women's History, Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, Linda Reed, eds. (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995), 310; and “Race, Class, Gender and the Teaching Profession: African American Schoolteachers of the Urban Midwest, 1865-1950,” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1996), 142. On black women's mostly private school teaching, see Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On passing, James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; New York: Vintage, 1989); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Collier, 1971).Google Scholar

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²⁸ Minutes of first meeting [undated], Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Sprague, 3; “Lady Teachers’ Association,” Woman's Journal, 22 November 1873: 348. For another women's club, Sorosis, with similar concerns about their name, see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 20–21. Isabella L. Bissett, “Fifty Years of the L.T.A.,” Boston Teachers’ Newsletter n.d. [1924?], 24, Massachusetts Historical Society. The formation of the Chicago Teachers’ Club in 1892 also incited opposition from male principals. See Financial Secretary to Mr. Thos. McLachlan, 18 November 1904, Folder: Sept-Dec 1904, Box 38, CTF papers.Google Scholar

²⁹ Minutes of meetings, 20 February 1874, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Also quoted in Bissett, “Fifty Years,” 24. On concerns about being labeled as suffragists, see “School-teachers,” Woman's Journal, 4 November 1871: 346. Even the comparatively militant Chicago Teachers’ Federation tried to distance itself from the labor question as late as 1899. See Murphy, “From Artisan to Semi-Professional,” 173. A leader of the Chicago Teachers’ Club wrote that it “was organized on purely professional lines;” see Financial Secretary to Mr. Thos. McLachlan, 18 November 1904, Folder: Sept-Dec 1904, Box 38, CTF papers. St. Paul teachers put a similar premium on mutual improvement and professional development in their founding objectives. Minutes p.2, Volume 1898-1901, Series VI, Box 9, StPTF.Google Scholar

³⁰ Colburn, “Lady Teachers’ Association,” 254; Minutes of meetings, 6 February 1874 and 18 February 1875, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; “Massachusetts Teachers Convention,” Woman's Journal, (24 January 1874): 26. On dime-novel reading, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure : Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Bissett, “Fifty Years,” 25.Google Scholar

³¹ Bissett, “Fifty Years,” 24. See also minutes of meetings, February 1877 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Paul H. Mattingly, The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1975), xiii. H.E. Paine, “Requisites for Practical Success as a Teacher,” Journal of Education, 11 September 1884:163–64.Google Scholar

³² Harris quoted in John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 118; “Teachable Teachers,” Journal of Education, 22 May 1884: 329. Emphasis mine. Colburn, “Lady Teachers’ Associations,” 254; “A Word from a Country Teacher,” Woman's Journal, 26 November 1870: 370; O.S. Newell, Report of the Secretary, February 1876, Folder 1876-1899, Box 1, LTA.Google Scholar

³³ Newell, O.S., Report of the Secretary, February 1876 and 1899 engraved invitation, Folder 1876-1899, Box 1; and minutes of meetings: 10 June 1875, December 1875 and January 1876, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Louise Hotchkiss, “Teachers as Social Beings,” Journal of Education 8 April 1876: 171; Minutes p.2, Volume 1898-1901, Series VI, Box 9, StPFT. Quoted phrases are from Helen A. Emery to Miss Haskell, undated, and Mary E. Perkins to Miss Haskell, 23 November [no year], Folder: undated, both in Box 1, LTA and Colburn, “Lady Teachers’ Associations,” 254. Similar phrasing also appears in minutes of meetings, 11 March 1875, Volume I, Box 2, LTA.Google Scholar

³⁴ Hopkins, Louisa P., “The Primary Teacher: Her Work, and Her Fitness for It,” Journal of Education, 17 June 1880: 388; Rev. Smith Baker, “The Dignity of the Common School Teacher's Mission,” delivered to the Minnesota Educational Association December 1891, Minutes of Annual Meetings, page 384, Minnesota Educational Association Records, Minnesota Historical Society [hereafter MEA].Google Scholar

³⁵ See original constitution, February 1874, and revised constitution, January 1879, in Volume I, Box 2, LTA. The Boston Primary Teachers Association, founded by LTA members in 1895, specified similar requirements for membership. See Bissett, “Fifty Years;” and Boston Primary Teachers Association Records, Massachusetts Historical Society. 11 November 1886 entry, Volume: Nov 1882-Apr 1887, Records of Meetings Box 1, Woman's Education Association records, Massachusetts Historical Society. See also: “St. Paul Federation of Women Teachers,” p. 1, Folder 1, Box 2, Series II, StPFT; Baker, “The Dignity of the Common School Teacher's Mission,” 384, MEA; Margaret J. Evans, “To the Women's Clubs of Minnesota—”, September 1895, Box 1, Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs Records, (hereafter MFWC); Minnesota Historical Society Minutes of meetings, November 1875, Volume I, Box 2, LTA records; “Learning Self-Respect,” Woman's Journal, 20 November 1875: 369.Google Scholar

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³⁷ “Colburn, “Lady Teachers’ Associations,” 254. Among the LTA members active in the South Boston suffrage club's leadership were: Miss Julia M. Baxter, Miss E. Frances Blacker, Miss Mary L. Howard, Miss Isabel M. Kelren, Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Newell, Miss Mary G.A. Toland. The Woman's Journal frequently reported on their meetings. See Woman's Journal, 8 May 1875: 148; 12 June 1875, 189; 18 November 1876, 372; 16 December 1876, 404–405; 13 January 1877, 13; 17 February 1877, 49; 7 April 1877, 112; 21 April 1877, 125; 12 May 1877, 148; 15 March 1879, 84; 19 April 1879, 126.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Minutes of meetings, 10 December 1874, 14 January 1875, and 14 December 1876, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; “More Insults,” Woman's Journal, 11 February 1871: 43.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Even the organization that has become the epitome of teacher militancy, the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, joined the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs the same year that it affiliated with the Chicago Federation of Labor. On the elite membership of the General and State Federations of Women's Clubs and its interest in public schools, see Blair, Clubwoman, 95, 101. Minutes of meetings, 17 September 1895 entry, p.81, Volume II, Box 2, LTA. Minutes of meetings: 4 October 1899, p.20 and 9 March 1900, p.28, Box 9, Series VI; and Typescript, page 2: “St. Paul Federation of Women Teachers,” Folder 1 History, Box 2, Series II, StPFT; “Yearbook, 1900-1901,” Box 3, MFWC.Google Scholar

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⁴³ Minutes of meetings, 8 June 1897, p. 104, Volume II, Box 2, LTA, and minutes of meetings, 11 May 1908, p. 82, 1903-1915 Volume, Box 9, Series VI, StPFT. There is no record in their minutes that St. Paul teachers changed their decision to resign or that they attended any MFWC meetings after 1902, but they continued to be listed in MFWC directories for several years. The Minneapolis Teachers’ Club also resigned in 1908. See Yearbooks, Box 3, MFWC.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ “South Boston Suffrage Club,” Woman's Journal, 21 April 1877: 125. David B. Tyack argues that reverence for character in “A Psalm of Life” correlated with the self-image of nineteenth-century male school superintendents in “Pilgrim's Progress: Toward a Social History of the School Superintendency, 1860-1960,” History of Education Quarterly 16 (Autumn 1976): 259. For useful critical discussions of “A Psalm of Life,” see Matthew Gartner, “Becoming Longfellow: Work, Manhood, and Poetry,” American Literature 72 (March 2000): 59–86; and David R. Peck, “Let us then be up and doing,” ANQ 16 (Summer 2003): 30–35.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Bissett, “Fifty Years,” 24, 25; Minutes of meetings: 20 March 1874 and 16 April 1874, Volume 1, Box 2, LTA. Martha H. Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 101–2, 114, 120-23, 126; Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1874). For a similar argument about women's employment from a medical perspective, see Azel Ames, Jr., Sex in Industry: A Plea for the Working Girl (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1875).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Bissett, “Fifty Years,” 25; Constitution, article 1, and minutes of meetings, 16 April 1874 entry, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. Over time the LTA adjusted the amount contributed and the benefit paid, but the concept remained essentially the same throughout the nineteenth century. On the St. Paul Teachers’ relief efforts, see Yearbook: St. Paul Teachers’ Federation, 1905-1906, p. 7, Folder 7, Box 1, Series I, and Minutes of Meetings, 4 December 1899, p.26, 7 May 1900, p.34, 2 December 1901, p. 54, 3 March 1902, p.59, 5 May 1902, p.65, 29 September 1902, p.68, Box 9, Series VI, StPFT. On the Minneapolis Teachers’ Club and hospitalization fund, see “Educational Work,” undated newsclipping, Folder: Beginnings of MFWC, 1894-1901, Box 1, MFWC.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ As early as 1868, the Odd Fellows established female auxiliaries called Rebekah lodges. The Ladies of the Maccabees were founded in 1892. See George Neil Emery and John Charles Herbert Emery, A Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd fellow and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860-1929 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 21–22. Emery and Emery date the Foresters’ inclusion of women to 1899, but Robert L. Reid indicates that the Women's Catholic Order of the Foresters operated in Chicago from 1891. Reid's evidence suggests that, like the Ladies of the Maccabees, the Women's Catholic Order of the Foresters provided insurance for women, and may have included more unmarried women. See Haley, Margaret A., Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley, Robert L. Reid, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 29 n11, 31.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Beito, David T., “To Advance the ‘Practice of Thrift and Economy': Fraternal Societies and Social Capital, 1890-1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (Spring 1999): 599.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ “Not An Uncommon Case,” Woman's Journal, 1 November 1873, 348.Google Scholar

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⁵¹ Minutes of meetings, 18 February 1875. On teachers’ use of the word “sister,” see minutes of meetings, 18 February 1875, 11 March 1875, 10 June 1884; Report of Executive Committee Meeting for 1879 & 1880, and M. Bragdon to Sisters Howard and Danforth, undated and loose in Volume I, Box 2, LTA records; Colburn, “Lady Teachers’ Associations,” 254; Beito, “To Advance the Practice,” 589.Google Scholar

⁵² Minutes of meeting, 19 June 1883, Volume I, Box 2, LTA; Minutes 4 Dec 1899, p.26, Volume 1898-1901, Series VI, Box 9, StPFT. On friendly visiting as social control, see Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Clarke A. Chambers, “Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 418.Google Scholar

⁵³ Minutes of meetings, February and March 1878 and 14 December 1880, Volume I, Box 2, LTA. McDonough, p.3, Folder 1, Series V, Box 8, and Minutes 18 May 1898, p.1, 20 March 1899, p.11, 4 December 1899, p. 26, 7 May 1900, p. 34, 2 December 1901, p. 54, 3 March 1902, p. 59, 5 May 1902, p. 65, 29 September 1902, 68, Series VI, Box 9, StPFT.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Entries dated 6 November 1899, p. 26; 3 March 1902, p. 59; 5 May 1902, p. 65, 2 March 1902, p.72, Minutes 1898-1901 volume, Series VI, Box 9, and “Yearbook, 1905-1906,” Folder 7, Box 1, Series 1, StPFT. See also entry dated 14 October 1907, p.69, Minutes, 1903-1915 volume, Series VI, Box 9, StPFT.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Minutes of meetings, 15 September 1896, p. 96, Volume 2, Box 2, LTA Beito describes how fraternal orders’ reverence for mutuality also included “constant reminders of the sad fate suffered by those outside the reciprocal fraternal family.” Beito, “To Advance the Practice,” 589. In contrast, teachers repeatedly took up the cause of nonmembers. Murphy, “From Artisan to Semi-Professional,” 161; Minutes of meetings, 9 June 1885, 15 December 1885, and 27 September 1886, Volume I, Box 2, LTA.Google Scholar

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