Today’s Akron Beacon Journal includes a very interesting look back at local history.  Staff writer, Mark Price, reminds us that not very long ago—during the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents—there was a raging debate about whether or not allowing women to continue to teach in our public schools after they got married did harm to our families and classrooms. 

I admit that these glimpses back at local history appearing in the ABJ periodically are among the top reasons I still subscribe to the paper (along with sports coverage, the editorial page, and local coverage).  This one, however, interests me as a snapshot of turn-of-the-century life in the place that I live and as a reminder:  often the conflicts we argue about so passionately…when we look back on them from the future…turn out to be silly distractions, not worth the energy and passion. 

And that makes me wonder: which of the conflicts we are fighting about in 2014 will emerge as mere quaint illustrations of how backward or silly or misinformed or prejudiced we are today?  This article about Akron at the turn of the century might help us get a better grip on this set of questions.  Here is the full text, with the link to the ABJ version at the bottom and my comment inserted in italics. 

A woman’s place was in the home — unless she became a teacher. A teacher’s place was in the school — unless she became a wife.

Female educators walked a narrow path through Akron Public Schools in the early 20th century. They were expected to devote their lives to other people’s children, but heaven forbid if they wanted kids of their own.

Women put their jobs at risk if they got married.

Here the author starts his analysis by, correctly in my view, zeroing in on the most pressing human cost, the players in this story most harmed by this drama of social control:  women.  Women as a group, because they are women, sometimes with other women participating in the harm-doing.  It is important to see and be able to stand in the shoes of the players, on all sides of conflict and sometimes making explicit that there is on particular group singled-out for scrutiny here, or personalizing our description of players in a conflict, can help us do that.

At the dawn of the century, it was generally understood that female teachers would resign their posts upon holy matrimony. They left their classrooms to become homemakers and start families. Other schoolmarms stayed behind, remained single and retained their posts.

Here the author uses language likely common at the time to bring us back to that time, so we might understand the concerns and interests of all sides as they would have understood these themselves at the time.  This is important.  Even though you will see that I have a rather unambiguous read of the ‘right thing to do’ in this case, it is critically important—today—that we engage with those who see the world differently, understand their concerns as they articulate them (not as summarized by those who agree with us).

Every summer, the school district lost dozens of educators to marriage. Submitting their resignations were newlywed teachers with such names as Pearl, Gertrude, Esther, Gladys, Cora, Evelyn, Lydia, Flora, Ethel and Lillian.

During teaching shortages, such as when Akron’s population swelled from a breezy 69,067 in 1910 to a torrid 208,435 in 1920, the unwritten rules were relaxed. Some married teachers stayed in school. Then troubles began.

Again, these names sounds like names our grandparents had and then the author reminds us that larger macro-economic changes are often catalyze changes that upset political or cultural power structures, expectations or norms…sparking interest and passion in a conflict that makes that conflict a candidate to be put on the agenda by local elites trying to mobilize constituencies to support this or that larger reform (or opposition to reform).

Critics accused married teachers of ignoring wifely duties, being too busy for pupils and stealing the work of single women. No one complained about married men, though, because they were considered the breadwinners. The job paid at least $1,200 a year (about $14,000 today).

A series of superintendents and school board members grappled with “the marriage problem” for decades.

Here the author notes the very, very low salary, the fact that similarly situated men were not similarly singled-out, and that the conflict came to have a name, suggesting it was widely discussed (perhaps helping to frame discussion of other conflicts of the day like women entering the labor force, voting, or seeking a remedy for domestic abuse).

In 1919, the Akron Board of Education voted to prohibit the rehiring of married teachers because of their “divided interest” between home and school. When teachers and parents objected, the board softened its measure to allow the retention of married instructors whose husbands were unable to support them.

Does this argument make sense to you today?  Is there a divided interest?  If not, how does an argument like this come to be accepted, perhaps even taken as ‘common sense’ by many?  Is there any overlap between elites who are advertising concerns about a divided interest and their own economic or political or cultural power (and threats to that power)?

A year later, the board reversed itself, voting unanimously that the district’s policy would be to show no discrimination between married and single women.

“For the Akron Board of Education to adopt the principle that the place of the married woman is in the home and that she should be allowed to teach only when her economic situation makes it necessary would put us on record as way behind the times,” said board member Sara M. Read, the wife of Akron Postmaster A. Ross Read. “The point of the whole matter is whether or not those who are fitted for service shall be allowed to serve.”

As it turned out, the policy was “way ahead of the times,” too, because the board flipped, flopped and flapped several times during the Roaring ’20s. The buzzword was “efficiency.” Which teachers — married or single — would be more efficient?

Here we see that, in the 1920’s this debate was framed (by some at least) as a conflict between out-of-date ideas about the limited capacities of women and efficiency.  What we do not hear here is a conflict between subordination and liberty.  I wonder why?

In a January 1924 review, Akron Superintendent Carroll R. Reed found that married women took fewer days off than single women.

“The difference in their attendance records is very slight, but what difference there is shows in favor of the married women,” he said.

In a series of letters to the Beacon Journal, a Barberton woman identified only as “Mrs. E” condemned married teachers for failing to fulfill “the purposes of matrimony.”

“In their mad desire for the inordinate things of the world, combined with shiftlessness, they hire servants to run the place they call home, and openly defy the laws of nature in refusing to rear a family,” she wrote. “Where does so much delinquency and depravity among school children originate?”

A teacher who refused to raise children of her own “naturally cannot love and forebear and tenderly administer to the children placed in her charge,” Mrs. E insisted.

Does this argument make sense to you today?  Is a woman who chooses to have her own family and to work (as a teacher, in this case) failing to fulfill the purposes of marriage?  Is she ‘mad with desire, shiftless, and defying the laws of nature?’  Is this woman—and the class of women like her choosing to join the workforce—the cause of juvenile delinquency and childhood depravity?  Are the women in our classroom, who are more likely than not planning to both have families and careers, a threat to our children?  Are the men with similar aspirations also a threat?

Another letter writer, known only as “Interested,” countered that the district had an obligation to hire the best teachers regardless of their marital status.

“In all other professions, efficiency is the standard, not state of celibacy,” the writer noted. “Persons engaging a trained nurse never ask is she married; rather is she a good nurse?”

Others wondered if “flapper teachers” might engage in questionable practices such as — gasp — auto riding and dancing. If they spent too much time dating, they might neglect their schoolwork.

In August 1924, the board voted to nullify the contracts of any women teachers who got married. Introducing the measure was member Joseph B. Hanan, an assistant office manager at B.F. Goodrich and exalted cyclops of the Summit County Ku Klux Klan.

Here, as a reader, I want to know more (and may consult the library or a colleague in the History Department).  But based only on what the author provided, the story makes me wonder if those who have seriously analyzed the KKK have observed that this Christian group was motivated largely by their own fear of change? 

Usually the KKK is discussed today as an anti-black group, which is accurate.  We know it was also anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant.  This story suggests, at a time when the KKK was extremely powerful in Akron, it was also afraid of other changes we now take for granted as good things:  women as full participants in society.

Before anyone seeks solace in that fact that this is not the case today…imagine what it would have been like to grow up in 1925 and aspire to teach or heal or preach or be an entrepreneur?  And remember that today women still make 70 cents on the dollar compared with men doing the same work.

The contract was voided 30 days after a wedding. Furthermore, the board resolved that “as a general policy,” it regarded “with disfavor the employment of married women whose husbands are living and able to work.”

The ruling did not apply to the 200 teachers married before the rule was adopted. In 1925, however, the board announced it would reduce that group by 20 percent, too.

“Something should be done to start eliminating the married women now on the staff and to let them know we favor single girls,” said board member Catherine Garrett, the wife of Akron stockbroker Charles W. Garrett.

In 1927, the board proposed saving $50,000 a year by replacing all married teachers with single women and placing them on a list of substitutes earning $5 a day.

Like today, we see elites in 1927 combining the need to address a budgetary problem (almost certainly caused more by their own mis-management than by women seeking to teach) with cultural pressures to ‘enforce’ norms against women seeking to teach by trying to build on the ‘common sense’ status of these norms among some (many?) elites, voters, and parents.  Or, as the next paragraph suggests—norms held by a decreasing number of teachers and parents.

School board member J. Grant Hyde couldn’t take it. “Forget all this talk about married women and hire and pay all teachers on their merits,” he told his colleagues. Teachers and parents in the audience erupted in applause.

The board suspended the marriage ban again.

Superintendent Thomas W. Gosling did add another wrinkle in 1928, though.

“I am very careful about employing divorced teachers and do not like to retain them after they have obtained a divorce,” he said.

This turn suggests that the conflict is less about protecting women or families and more about using access to employment opportunities to punish legal (and often necessary for the safety of women and children) behavior by woman (but not men) that threaten existing power balances.

The board briefly reconsidered “the marriage problem” in 1930, but tossed it away like a hot potato.

“I know that some unmarried teachers have their minds more on a date for the evening than on their teaching,” board member Ed Conner said. “And some married women I know would do good work teaching even if they had five husbands.”

In 1938, the district had 1,600 teachers, including 400 married women. In an effort to open up jobs for single teachers, Superintendent Ralph H. Waterhouse proposed one-year voluntary furloughs for married teachers.

The Akron Federation of Teachers called it “school wrecking.” Waterhouse scuttled the plan after receiving only a dozen volunteers.

In 1941, the board tried one last time to ban the hiring of married women as new teachers. That plan fell apart after the United States entered World War II.

Following the war, the baby boom began. By the mid-1950s, more than 49,000 pupils were enrolled in Akron Public Schools and the district had to hire hundreds of additional teachers.

“The marriage problem” no longer was a problem.

It was the answer.

Here we see macro forces again driving change.  And we see that we choose the biases (sometimes captured as common sense or conventional wisdom) that become the topic of passionate debates, at least in part, on the basis of how well these help us address the questions we consider important at any given time. 

Once school age population exploded the question changed from how to keep married women out of the workplace to how to meet the exploding need for qualified teachers…and that transformed the marriage problem from a problem to a solution. 

This illustrates another insight about politics and conflict management through this case.  The ‘marriage problem’ was not a problem for elites in Akron in the 1920s.  It was an opportunity. 

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.  Find this article here.