Women's Work?
Subtitle: American Schoolteachers, 1650-1920
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press
Published: April 15, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780226660394
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; American history: c 1800 to c 1900; History of specific subjects; Organization & management of education; Women's studies; Modern period, c 1500 onwards; Education; Education / Teaching; USA; Gender Studies; History; Social Science / Gender Studies; Women's Studies - General; Elementary school teachers; Social conditions; United States; Women teachers
First sentence: On the whole, the standard histories of colonial schooling are limited in scope and out of date; and given the changing interests of historians over the generations, because they are out of date they also contain relatively little material on women pupils or even women teachers.
Description: "American schoolteaching is one of few occupations to have undergone a thorough gender shift from men to women, yet previous explanations have neglected a key feature of the transition: its regional character. By the early 1800s, far higher proportions of women were teaching in the Northeast than in the South, and this regional difference was reproduced as settlers moved West before the Civil War.

What explains the creation of these divergent regional arrangements in the East, their recreation in the West, and their eventual disappearance by the next century?".

"In Women's Work? the authors blend newly available quantitative evidence with historical narrative to show that distinctive regional school structures and related cultural patterns account for the initial regional difference, while a growing recognition that women could handle the work after they temporarily replaced men during the Civil War helps explain this widespread shift to female teachers later in the century. Yet despite this shift, a significant gender gap in pay and positions remained.

This book offers an original and thought-provoking account of a remarkable historical transition."--BOOK JACKET.