Hist 3510
Tracy Penny Light
Reading Analysis #4
The article “Women Teachers in Canada. 1881-1901” by Sager, it talks a lot about how teaching became a feminized job and how it changed over the years. It is really a lot to take in as it is based on a study and there is a lot of facts to take in. But it main shows why women started teaching and why mostly women do it. This is because when school first became more of a demand for children it opened up a lot of opportunities for women to get jobs and help out with paying for their family as being a stay at home mum wasn’t going to keep the family surviving. But as time went on it was changed so that women were still the majority of teachers but they only taught the younger kids, it was as the males wanted to teach so they took the higher education jobs for they had more rights over the other teachers. The study also says that not only did gender depend on who taught but many other factors did too. Like married females did not teach as they had families to look after at home. So mostly the single or widowed women taught, they felt this was better as they had a closer connection to the students. There were many other factors that played into who taught and who didn’t. But this just goes to show how the historical causes of teaching relate gendered expectations for girls and boys. With this because those female teachers are showed that this is their fate and that this will only be the job they get that pays good it is engrained into their heads that they can’t do any better so therefore they teach their students that the females will teach or look after a family because that’s all they can do where the boys will do the hard work as they are more skilled and can do more.
In the article “I Am Here to Help If You Need Me” it also shows how the female teachers were treated differently than the male teachers. For instance, the people assessing the schools only took complaints of the school if the male teachers said they were bad. They didn’t feel that the female teachers were worthy to listen to as they felt they should just deal with it. although this led to a bad thing as these problems built up with the teachers and many of them killed themselves or got killed by someone, this was because they weren’t listened to. But with this it showed the children the lack of respect towards females, which in a way taught them that it’s ok to treat women in a less of a way.
Although there are many beliefs that women only did the little jobs and did not further their education to compete with the men for jobs, there were some that did. In the article “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College 1895-1920” it proves that there were women that went to college to raise their social status. And although they were often frowned on for going against the beliefs these women who proved they could be just as good as the men started something. They slowly showed that all women can be like men, there shouldn’t be a gender gap between them. They are part of the reason why women have the status they do today. it may have been hard and it may have taken a while but there were women that decided they could be better than the views that society put women in.
All of these do show that there was a big gender divide with all jobs but particularly teaching and that was because women didn’t feel they could stand up and say different. So they continued to teach generation after generation that that was how life was going to be. But thankfully some women felt different about those views and changed how men and women are treated today.
Bibliography
Sager, Eric W. “Women Teachers in Canada, 1881-1901 in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 140- 165.
Palmieri, Patricia A. “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895-1920.” Women Who Taught, 1991. doi:10.3138/9781442683570-012.
Wilson, J. Donald. “‘I Am Here to Help If You Need Me’: British Columbia’s Rural Teachers’ Welfare Officer, 1928-1934,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 201-22