Madame Montessori’s way of spreading her gospel during her visit has been by public lectures in large cities. At these she has talked through an interpreter and has illustrated her work with children by motion-picture films. Her visit has been under the auspices of the newly formed American Montessori Association, in whose leadership are Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Wilson, Frederick Knowles Cooper, Anne George (Dr. Montessori’s first American pupil), William Morrow, S. S. McClure and others.
Although we talk of equal educational opportunities for men and women, as a matter of fact in many states, particularly in the East and South, there is nothing approaching equal facilities. There are many “opportunities” for education in most states, it is true, but until the best opportunities are open to women, there is nothing like equality. In states where adequate facilities are not open, we find women awaking to the obligation to see that they are soon provided through public or private funds.
New Jersey club women have been pushing the work for the establishment of a state college for women “to fit our girls to render the best service to New Jersey in many lines as well as to fill teaching positions better, 80 per cent. of which are now filled by women.” The population of New Jersey is over 2,537,167, of whom 1,250,704 are women, yet no provision is made for their higher education. Only in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, besides New Jersey, is that now true. A state college with free tuition is demanded. New Jersey has Princeton, Rutgers, Stevens, for men, but only normal schools for women.
School Administration
Moreover, when the charge of inefficiency is brought against women teachers, it must be remembered that the administration of the schools very largely has been in the hands of men, and the women have been merely routine agents of the authorities. The type of person always content to carry out some other person’s orders is not likely to have either force or initiative. Women seem to have both. Women are no longer content to be mere agents of school authorities. They are seeking and obtaining high administrative positions, and demonstrating by their efficiency and capacity for sustained and unselfish labors their fitness for such work.
For example, “four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent. The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women ‘district superintendents,’ as against twelve ‘school commissioners’ in 1900.”
The most conspicuous battle waged by women for a share in the administration of schools took place in Chicago. It was thus described in The Survey:
The struggle over the superintendency and the policy of Chicago public schools acutely emphasizes the crises which popular local government must meet and turn for better or worse. Coming to the superintendency four years ago in the most troublous times the Chicago public schools had ever experienced, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young brought the badly divided teachers into harmonious relations with each other and with her management and secured an equally remarkable unanimity in the public support of her administration, after a long period of bitterly divisive discussion in the press and among the people.
Within the Board of Education, however, whose twenty-one members have never been able to agree very well with each other, disagreements with Mrs. Young and her policies have come to the surface, especially among the members of the board appointed by Mayor Harrison. He protests his preference for her administration and once before came to the support of her policies when she tendered her resignation rather than surrender the superintendent’s prerogative in the selection of textbooks. The mayor’s opposition to the acceptance of her resignation then kept enough members of the Board in line with her to warrant its withdrawal.
But the divisiveness of that controversy both widened and deepened at many points of personal and administrative difference. Except the two outspoken opponents, the other disaffected members of the board combined their opposition in silence and secrecy. To the surprise of the public, which the mayor, many members of the school board, and even the opposition itself, claimed to share, Mrs. Young failed to receive the eleven votes necessary for her reëlection. Ten members voted for her, six against her, and four were recorded as “not voting” in the secret ballot.