Abstract
In a series of articles on teachers’ “inferiority complex” in 1926, a Los Angeles teacher confessed that she often hid her job from acquaintances. “Yesterday the teacher was considered snobbish and uninteresting because of her backward, retiring nature,” she wrote: “Today the teacher, in order to be up to date and practical, must meet people in their own sphere and on an equal basis.” Times were changing, and teachers needed to keep up with them. Bobbed hair, fashionable dress, and lively social interaction were necessary in a modern world. But “at the present time this idea of a teacher’s dress and social life is still fast in the minds of some people,” the author lamented. A teacher could not “participate in any social activities without being severely criticized for her dress and many of her actions by the people who still cling to their old ideas. The teacher is considered by some people as inferior and by others as superior,” she concluded. “As a matter of fact,” she argued, “most teachers want to be neither inferior nor superior, but just one of the ‘bunch.’”1
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Notes
Michelle Morgan, “A Field of Great Promise: Teachers’ Migration to the Urban Far West,” History of Education Quarterly 54 (February 2014): 70–97.
Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 171–182.
Jackie Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 18–24.
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, “Man/Woman/Teacher: Gender, Family and Career in American Educational History,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 293–343.
E. G. Welch, “The Teachers of Today as Compared with the Teachers of Other Days,” Los Angeles School Journal 7 (February 11, 1924): 32.
Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 117.
Karen Leroux, “Veterans of the Schools: Women’s Work in U.S. Public Education, 1865–1902” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2005).
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); chap. 16;
William Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform, Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), chap. 6;
Judith Rosenberg Raftery, Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles Schools, 1885–1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 27–32. “Worthy use of leisure time” was one of the seven aims in the National Education Association’s report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (the Cardinal Principles report), which outlined the idea of the comprehensive high school designed to serve a diverse student body through differentiated curricula.
Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 95–99.
Industry, too, constructed a vision of workers’ leisure based on how activities affected job performance. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986);
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Minutes of Portland School Board, December 21, 1925, Deputy Clerk’s Office, Blanchard Education Building, Portland, Oregon; Doris Pieroth, Seattle’s Women Teachers of the Interwar Years: Shapers of a Livable City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 166; Minutes of the Seattle School Board, February 17, 1928 (Microfilm), Seattle Public School Archives.
Viola Ortschild, “Our Survey,” Bulletin of the Portland Grade Teachers’ Association 3 (January 1917): 4.
H. P. Webb, “Is the Single Salary Schedule Fair?” Los Angeles School Journal 7 (January 28, 1924): 10.
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Martin Trieb, “The Need of Outdoor Activity for Teachers,” Los Angeles School Journal 10 (October 11, 1926): 9.
Henry S. Curtis, Recreation for Teachers; or, The Teacher’s Leisure Time (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 70, 75; “My Hobbies,” Los Angeles School Journal 10 (October 1928): 38.
Morgan, “A Field of Great Promise,” 82–83; Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 168–169.
“About the October Walk,” San Francisco Teachers’ Bulletin 12 (November 1928): 26; Agnes Winn, “Club Life for Teachers,” Los Angeles School Journal 11 (January 9, 1928): 24;
Advertisement, Bulletin of the Portland Grade Teachers’ Association 2 (May 1916): 14.
Jean Lane, “Seattle Business and Professional Women’s Club Announces 1921 Annual Summer Trip,” Seattle Grade Club Magazine 2 (June 1921): 18–19.
Blance Lindesmith, “What for Vacation?” Seattle Grade Club Magazine 11 (June 1930): 22.
Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977);
William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
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), 6.
Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 191–204; Enstad, Ladies of Labor;
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986): 139–140 and 236–238.
Jonna Perillo, “Beyond ‘Progressive’ Reform: Bodies, Discipline and the Construction of the Professional Teacher in Interwar America,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (September 2004): 337–363.
Advertisement, Seattle Grade Club Magazine 4 (March 1923): 35.
Advertisement, Seattle Grade Club Magazine 4 (December 1922): 43.
Olive Grade, “Teachers’ Clothes,” Los Angeles School Journal 10 (October 10, 1927): 13.
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
Mrs. Leo Gamble, “Face Value,” Los Angeles School Journal 3 (February 18, 1930): 20.
Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco: 1890–1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Curtis, Recreation for Teachers, 44–49. For discussion of women’s attendance at nickelodeons and theaters, see Sewell, Women and the Everyday City, 95–115 and Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121–172.
Linda Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 25.
Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 83–94, 155; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 100–104; Tomko, Dancing Class, 23–25.
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© 2015 Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan
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Morgan, M. (2015). “A Touch of Risquity”: Teachers, Perception, and Popular Culture in the Progressive Era. In: Terzian, S.G., Ryan, P.A. (eds) American Education in Popular Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410153_3
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