All through Connecticut in the autumn of 1914 an effort was made to get women out to vote on school matters and in many towns the results were unprecedented. Women not only voted in greater numbers but placed their representatives on school boards in some of the towns. In Norwalk they agitated for thorough reorganization, improvement and central control for schools and secured a certain measure of reform.[[1]]
This contest of women for places of power and for more attention to educational administration is now gaining momentum. Women serve on school boards at present in at least thirty cities.
While an analysis of the school vote in Massachusetts as exercised by women does not indicate any remarkable enthusiasm on the part of women for that slight franchise, in numerous other places and in certain special towns even in that state, school elections have been participated in by women with zest and effect.
Discriminations between the sexes in the teaching profession still extend in many directions. Politics plays an all too important part in advancements; remuneration is in general unequal; and celibacy is sometimes enforced upon women alone. Where women are allowed to retain their positions upon marriage, the birth of a child is occasionally made the excuse for dismissal. Such an explanation is not often frankly made, but in New York, at least, it has been a very thinly veiled excuse, the issue has been fought out on the real grounds and the women have won.
Of course it will not be claimed that women all agree as to the best policy in these and kindred administration matters. Women members of school boards do not always stand as a unit in their attitude toward equal pay for equal work or toward the question of mother-teachers. Women are not like-minded any more than men are like-minded, but they are acquiring positive views very rapidly on all these matters. They are not only holding decided opinions on questions of school administration, but they are seeking more and more a voice in that administration on the inside.
Without going further into the many phased history of the contest of women for a voice in educational administration as well as mute service under it, we may now consider the various lines of women’s interest in school improvement and try to illustrate, by example at least, a portion of the plans which they are supporting in various parts of the country, and their methods of approach to the educational problem.
Educational Experiments
The kindergarten idea appealed from the beginning to women and private experimentation along that line was one of their most successful endeavors. Boards of education have in instance after instance been persuaded to incorporate into the public school system the plan of kindergartens demonstrated to be practical and of social utility by women in their private capacities. Annie Laws, in the Kindergarten Review, states that she “can trace the social spirit of the kindergartner as an important factor in stimulating, and in some cases, even initiating, many of the social movements of today, among them playgrounds, social centers, vacation schools, public libraries, mothers’ clubs and school and home gardens.” The New York Kindergarten Association of today, like many others, is composed of men and women but largely supported by the latter, financially, as well as by active service.
Household Arts—cooking and sewing—were first made subjects of instruction in the public schools about 1876, in Massachusetts, through the work of Miss Emily Huntington.
From cooking and sewing have developed the whole domestic science education of today. Women have been supporters of this movement from the beginning and the Federation of Clubs early took an aggressive position in favor of such addition to the school curricula.