Historical Tidbits: 19th Century Teachers, part three

Daily Diary, Tuesday, September 5, 2023, Day 1100

This is the final part of my 3-part series on San Francisco teachers in 1880, and in this post I want to examine what we know about the women who secured jobs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland Oregon, the three cities I studied for my dissertation. Again, I will be quoting from that dissertation in some detail.

“Over eighty percent of the female teachers in these three cities in 1880 were single, and over two thirds of them were single and under the age of thirty. In Portland and Los Angeles, over two thirds of the female teachers had native-born parents. Nearly three quarters of the young single women teaching in (San Francisco) were either foreign-born or of foreign parentage, and a least a third of those who lived at home came from working class families.

“For young single women from immigrant or working-class backgrounds, the possession of a teaching job, with its high pay and middle-class surroundings, may have represented a worthwhile improvement in status. Yet cultural strictures against higher education for women could create tensions for some of the young immigrant women who chose this occupation. Rebecca Kohut, who lived in San Francisco in this period, came under sharp criticism from her father’s Jewish congregation when she decided to go to the University of California to prepare to become a teacher. Moreover, the pressure to appear sufficiently ‘Americanized’ or middle class in dress, demeanor, and social behavior could prove a severe strain on a young woman from a working-class or immigrant background.

“Some of the young single women teaching in the Far West who came from middle-class and upper-class families probably saw their work as at least an enjoyable method of filling their time until marriage, or as a way to gain a little money of their own, or perhaps even as a vocation; for others, joining the work force was a matter of necessity. The economy went through periodic downturns in the Far West as elsewhere, and in a time when speculation was rampant, it was not unusual for prosperous merchant of professional to find himself in severe economic difficulties. As a result, daughters might suddenly find themselves expected to go to work to help their families survive the temporary, if not permanent reversals in fortunes, Moreover, when a young woman’s father died, her whole family often faced severe economic trials. It is quite possible, therefore, that a number of the young women teaching in the schools of San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles in 1880, particularly among those living with unemployed, widowed mothers, were doing so not out of choice but out of necessity. The young women might have seen their jobs as teachers a loss in status, a loss that the ‘genteel’ nature of the job could only partly assuage.

“Along with higher pay and shorter working days, teaching offered advantages over most other forms of female employment because it provided some chance of advancement, even within the smaller cities, Not only could women qualify for higher salaries by getting higher grade teaching certificates or teaching at the high school level, but some women held positions as special school assistants, vice-principals, principals, or even school superintendents, each of these jobs bringing with it an increase in salary and prestige.

“If high wages, shorter hours, and possibilities of advancement constituted some of the major advantages of teaching as an occupation for women, there were difficulties with the job as well. In San Francisco, teachers also faced such problems as outmoded examination systems and meddling bureaucrats, but they faced over-crowded classrooms. Throughout the San Francisco city schools in 1879, the teacher to student ratio for the grammar and primary grades was 1 to 46, and some schools had as many as 54 students per classroom. In the large urban environment of San Francisco, with substantial numbers of working-class and immigrant children attending school, classrooms of this size could severely restrict a teachers’ ability to teach.” --Locke, “‘Like Machine or an Animal:’ Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century.”

As I developed the characters in my third novel, Bloody Lessons, I didn’t consciously make them mirror the demographics of San Francisco teachers. However, the historical facts probably influenced me. As were most teachers in the nation in 1880, my key characters–Nate Dawson’s sister, Laura, and her friend Hattie Wilks–are under the age of thirty, single, and native born of native heritage. At the same time, two of the main male teachers that show up in Bloody Lessons taught in the higher grades and also had administrative roles as vice-principals, which was the common pattern (then as well as now!). This is why the average salary for men who taught in San Francisco was $50 a month more than the average salary for women.

And while a third of the female teachers in the city were either married or had been married, which was true for Barbara Hewitt and Dorthea Anderson, two other characters in Bloody Lessons, the attitude that was expressed in the book that somehow a woman with children shouldn’t be teaching reflected real historical attitudes. Teaching was supposed to be the job held by young single woman who were waiting to marry, or reserved for the poor women who never caught a husband and lived the rest of their lives as “old maids.”

When I created Kitty Blaine (who was studying to become a teacher) and decided to make her the daughter of Irish immigrants, I was doing so primarily for plot reasons, but this was another case where my fictional creation was grounded in historical reality. While the national pattern (and the pattern found in both Los Angeles and Portland Oregon in 1880) was for teachers to be of native-born parentage, in San Francisco in 1880, 72% of the young single teachers (like Kitty) were born of foreign-born parents.

I remembered being quite surprised as I analyzed the data for my dissertation to discover how many of the teachers were of Irish heritage. I speculated that since one of the reasons a significant number of young Irish men got police jobs in the city was the dominant role the Irish played in city politics, it shouldn’t be surprising that a good number of young Irish women ended up as teachers, since a number of the school board members were of immigrant heritage, or at the very least interested in getting that immigrant vote.

I would never suggest that an author create a book “by the numbers,” making sure that a certain percentage of the characters fit a particular demographic pattern. But I do think that when you write historical fiction it is useful to be aware of those demographic patterns. Probably only a hand-full of people in the nation would know that Kitty Blaine’s Irish heritage and her desire to become a teacher was historically accurate, but as I created her, knowing she was grounded in reality, helped her seem more real to me. And that is always the key. We need to believe in our characters if we are going to make them live in the imaginations of others.

In case you aren’t sure how you got here, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. This is my newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. If you aren’t already subscribed but are interested in doing so, you can subscribe for free by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the little heart and/or share with your friends.