Boys had the right to attend these all the year round; girls from the twentieth of April to the twentieth of October. This was the first admission of girls to the “free schools.”
Provision was made this year that “arithmetic, orthography, and the English language shall be taught, in addition to reading and writing.” It is to be hoped that this applied to the summer sessions, open to girls, as well as to the all-the-year-round sessions for boys.
When, however, early in the nineteenth century, arithmetic and geography were generally added to the courses of studies in schools, it was only for the winter months, such knowledge being thought quite unnecessary for girls. “All a girl needs to know is enough to reckon how much she will have to spin to buy a peck of potatoes, in case she becomes a widow,” was the repulse of a too ambitious girl in the early part of this century.
An old lady, sitting beside the present writer, well remembers that in her youth, having outreached the prescribed limits of the girl’s class in arithmetic, she grappled alone with the mysteries of “interest.” Meeting some difficulty she appealed to her older brother, who had been duly instructed. His scornful reply was, “I am ashamed of a girl who wants to study ‘interest’!”
The need of more teachers led gradually to the employment of women in “those schools where, besides morals, the only requirements were reading, sewing, and writing if contracted for.”
In the law of 1789 the expression “master and mistress” makes recognition of women as teachers for the first time. Hitherto women so employed could not legally collect their wages; the receipt of their dues depended upon the honor of their employers.
This act of justice may have been the more appreciated as the wages of female teachers were evidently on a rising scale. Something less than a half century after Mistresses Wright and Converse had shared their year’s income of ten shillings, the following vote, passed in the town meeting of Lexington, shows an increased estimate of women’s services:
“At a meeting of the inhabitants, July 21, 1717, they agreed that Clerk Lawrence’s wife and Ephraim Winship’s wife keep school from ye day of ye date hereof until ye last day of October next following; and if they have not scholars sufficient as to numbers to amount to five shillings a week, at three pence a scholar a week, then ye towne to make up what is wanted of ye five shillings out of the treasury thereof; provided ye selectmen do not see cause to demolish sd schole before sd term be expired.”
Probably no deductions from the above specified wages were necessary for living expenses, which these mistresses of households may be supposed to have earned in their duties at home. When, in the course of the succeeding century, wages increased to seventy-five cents or even to a dollar a week, the teacher was expected to “board around,” though sometimes her board in one place was paid for from public funds. In the latter case, in many New England towns, the privilege of boarding the teacher, like that of boarding town paupers, was put up for public competition, and was struck off to the lowest bidder.
Up to 1828 girls did not go to the public schools in Rhode Island.