In spite of this absurd limitation, women teachers have increased in numbers and in power; and are pressing steadily up into the higher positions reserved for men. An enormous majority of our teaching force is now composed of women; and, in our public schools, they naturally teach boys. Upon this point has arisen, and is still rising, an angry protest among men. Women teachers are, they say, unmarried; to be unmarried is an unnatural state, productive of various mental and physical morbidities; and as such does not form a suitable atmosphere for growing boys.
Recently President Hamilton of Tufts College goes even further than this, and objects to the influence of unmarried teachers upon girls!
To the "male mind," viewing the woman as first, last and always a female, and marriage and motherhood as her only normal relations, these crowding thousands of calm, respectable, independent, unmarried women are in a condition of unrest, of acrimonious rebellion against fate, of a contemptuous dislike for their unattainable "sour grapes." They are assumed to have been queer in the first place, or some gracious protector would have married them; and to grow queerer as life drags away, leaving them eternally unsatisfied, bitter and perverse. This deadly influence is supposed to have some poisonous effect on the pupils; just what is not defined. The unselfish, tireless service of the "maiden aunt" in the home we all know; but set her to teaching school, and some strange evil follows from the contact.
President Hamilton says college girls need to have their outlook on life broadened, not narrowed; and thinks these limited ladies, the teachers, are fitted only for work in the lower preparatory schools, or in "homes" and "settlements."
Just how the average male teacher in a college is to broaden the outlook of his pupils is not explained. It does not need explanation. It is broader because he is a man!
Most of our men teachers are still young men, by the way, and unmarried. Is the influence of the unmarried male on classes of girls an unmixed good? Is a man by nature a better teacher? More subtly sympathetic, more capable of understanding the difficulties of each pupil and meeting them, more patient and tender?
No—but he is "more methodical," and "a better disciplinarian." In other words, he is more male—and therefore a better teacher! All this is absurd enough, and injurious enough; false, unjust, pitifully ignorant.
But the crowning feat of the "logical male mind" is in its exclusion of married women from schools. This is what the living children of living men will laugh at and blush for—that their fathers should have made themselves thus lamentably conspicuous in present-day history. Here in this city of New York, where a system of competitive examination ensures the required degree of learning and promotion follows on proved efficiency (or is supposed to); some women teachers, following "that inexorable law of nature" which so many others successfully evade, have presumed to marry. Surely now the stock objection to women teachers is removed.
All that "narrowness," that "bitterness," that "morbidity" is transformed by this magic alchemy into breadth and sweetness and all health. Now we have for our children the influence of "normal womanhood"—of "the wife and mother."
No. Married women are not desired in our schools; not allowed; they are specifically discriminated against.