The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

In a large system like New York’s there is always here and there an old teacher, who though getting the maximum salary, is well known to be doing the feeblest work. The logic of equal pay for equal work would require that the salary of such a veteran be pared down to the bone as is done in manual industries, where, under the piece-work system, no account is taken of the age of the worker, but relentlessly the older man or woman is challenged to keep the pace of colleagues in their prime. When sorrow, sickness or old age weakens the powers nobody proposes to increase the rates to make up for lessening speed, but the worn-out worker is thrown aside.

More humanely and with higher logic the worn-out teacher in New York is retired upon a pension. It is known that old age gradually brings weariness and ossification, and the veteran, whose strength has been sucked by successive generations of youngsters, must yield the leadership, for the good of the service, to the younger generation that, in Ibsen’s phrase, is “knocking at the door”. One year the veteran is assumed to be worth the highest salary; the next year she is pensioned off, as if from one week to the next her efficiency had dropped from maximum near to minimum. Actually the powers may have been declining for some years before the teacher’s withdrawal and the strict logician would object, therefore, to the size of the salary received. But abstract logic is no guide. Teachers must be paid and pensioned on pragmatic principles; whatever system works out best for the schools is most desirable.

2. The agitation of the Interborough Association has forced part of the public to admit the need for a general increase of teachers’ salaries, an increase which shall be so distributed as to minimize the inequalities. After the legislature in 1907 had passed a law embodying the women teachers’ demands and repassed it over the veto of Mayor McClellan, Governor Hughes in turn vetoed it, but showed that he thought the schedules should be revised. In 1907 and again in 1908 a special committee of the board of education, after careful deliberation, recommended tentative new schedules, which were approved by the board. In 1908 and in 1909 the board included in the budget as presented to the board of estimate and apportionment requests for appropriations which would enable it to put the amended schedules into effect. Its request was denied.

Altogether the proposed schedules would entail salary increases for 1910 aggregating $2,639,762 to 14,751 women and aggregating $206,215 to 582 men, a total increment, for the first year of operation, of $2,845,977. Of all the men educators the salaries of 28 per cent would be raised. Of all the women educators the salaries of 98 per cent would be raised. The mass of the women teachers would have their salaries raised about twenty per cent.

This schedule, like all others, is vulnerable at points. Kindergarten teachers will complain because they are treated less generously than grade teachers, for hitherto they have been under the same schedule. But kindergartners have recently glutted the market and one way to persuade them to prepare for other work, where they are more needed, is to make their increases smaller.

The Interborough Association of Women Teachers criticizes the proposed schedules. The salaries of male teachers should not be raised, says the Association, “because these men are already receiving higher salaries than women occupying the same position.”

Since no men are employed in the lower five grades, the so-called principle does not affect the majority of the women teachers, those who teach these grades. The board, recognizing that their salaries are inadequate, proposes to enlarge the salaries generously. But the Interborough Association says in effect: “We will not approve an addition of $2,639,762 to the salaries of women, because at the same time you add $206,215 to the salaries of men. We demand that the women who, being in the majority and now receiving the smallest salaries, will receive under the board’s schedules all the increases which they expect, shall forego these increases until the board approves further increases exclusively for the better-paid women teachers, aggregating another three or four million dollars.”

So long as the majority of the women teachers, those in the lower grades, by their silence approve the assumption that they desire to sacrifice some two million dollars a year for the sake of the abstract doctrine which their richer sisters propound, so long the board of estimate, always vigilantly watched by the organized tax payers, will have a good excuse for keeping things as they are. Why should any guardians of the public purse incur the dislike of tax payers for the sake of teachers who show no eagerness for the attainable and promise neither gratitude nor contentment? The policy of all or nothing is heroic, but unbusinesslike.

Should the teachers, men and women in harmony, unite with the board of education in a campaign of enlightenment in favor of the tentative schedules, perhaps amended in spots, they might convince the tax payers that the proposed increases are necessary for the following reasons:

1. The cost of living has notoriously increased since the present schedules were established, increased by at least the fifteen to twenty per cent by which the new schedules would increase most salaries. Therefore, in reality, the teachers who secure increases would be getting no higher “purchasing power” than the old schedules were meant to give them. The 1500 men whose salaries would be unaltered, are peacefully accepting a reduced purchasing power.