We seldom find any recognition of girls as pupils in the early public schools. Sometimes it is evident that they were admitted at times not devoted to the teaching of boys. For instance, in May, 1767, a school was advertised in Providence for teaching writing and arithmetic to "young ladies." But the girls had to go from six to half-past seven in the morning, and half-past four to six in the afternoon. The price for this most inconvenient and ill-timed schooling was two dollars a quarter. It is pathetic to read of a learning-hungry little maid in Hatfield, Massachusetts, who would slip away from her spinning and knitting and sit on the schoolhouse steps to listen with eager envy to the boys as they recited within. When it became popular to have girls attend public schools, an old farmer on a country school committee gave these matter-of-fact objections to the innovation. "In winter it's too far for girls to walk; in summer they ought to stay at home to help in the kitchen."
The first school for girls only, where they were taught in branches not learned in the lower schools, was started in 1780 in Middletown, Connecticut, by a graduate of Yale College named William Woodbridge. Boston girls owed much to a famous teacher, Caleb Bingham, who came to that city in 1784 and advertised to open a school where girls could be taught writing, arithmetic, reading, spelling, and English grammar. His school was eagerly welcomed, and it prospered. He wrote for his girl pupils the famous Young Lady's Accidence, referred to in another chapter, and under his teaching "newspapers were to be introduced in the school at the discretion of the master." This is the first instance—I believe in any country—of the reading of newspapers being ordered by a school committee.
There were always dame-schools, which were attended by small boys and girls. Rev. John Barnard, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, was born in 1681 and was educated in Boston. He wrote in his old age a sketch of his school life. He says:—
"By that time I had a little passed my sixth year I had left my reading school, in the latter part of which my mistress had made me a sort of usher appointing me to teach some children that were older than myself as well as some smaller ones. And in which time I had read my Bible through thrice. My parents thought me to be weakly because of my thin habit and pale countenance."
The penultimate sentence of this account evidently accounts for the ultimate. It also appears that this unnamed school dame practised the monitorial system a century or more before Bell and Lancaster made their claims of inventing it.
The pay of women teachers who taught the dame-schools was meagre in the extreme. The town of Woburn, Massachusetts, reached the lowest ebb of salary. In 1641 a highly respected widow, one Mrs. Walker, kept a school in a room of her own house. The town agreed to pay her ten shillings for the first year; but after deducting seven shillings for taxes, and various small amounts for produce, etc., she received finally from the town one shilling and three pence for her pedagogical work.
Elizabeth Wright was the first teacher in the town of Northfield, Massachusetts. She taught a class of young children at her own house for twenty-two weeks each summer; for this she received fourpence a week for each child. At this time she had four young children of her own. She took all the care of them and did all the work of her household, made shirts for the Indians for eight-pence each, and breeches for Englishmen for one shilling sixpence a pair, and wove much fine linen to order. For the summer school at Franklin, Connecticut, in 1798, "a qualified woman teacher" had but sixty-seven cents a week pay. Men teachers who taught both girls and boys usually had better pay; but Samuel Appleton, in later life the well-known Boston merchant and philanthropist, was my great-grandfather's teacher in the year 1786. His pay was his board, lodging, and washing, and sixty-seven cents per week, and it was deemed liberal and ample.
Elizabeth Storer, Twelve Years Old, 1738