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Page 19
If we examine the teaching force, we find this monopoly already
established. In 1870, when our government records begin, 59% of the
teachers were women; in 1880, 57.2% were women; in 1890, 65.5%; in 1900,
70.1%; in 1910, 78.6%. The more settled and intelligent the community
the more rapid this advance has been. Thus Arkansas has 52.4% women
teachers; but Massachusetts has 91.1% and Connecticut has 93%.
In cities, too, the women fill nearly all teaching positions. New York
City has 89% women in its force; Boston, 89%; Philadelphia, 91.4%;
Chicago, 93.3%. In many cities the proportion is even greater than this:
Omaha has 97%; Wheeling, W. Va., 97.5%; Charleston, S.C., 99.3%; and in
forty-six American towns of 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants there is no man
teaching. When we remember that many of the men indicated above are in
high schools or in supervising posts, we are prepared for the statement
in a report recently laid before the Board of Education of New York City
that in half the cities of the United States there are virtually no men
teaching.
In our high schools, 54% of the teachers are women; in public normal
schools, 65%; and in institutions of higher learning 17.6% are women.
Even in supervising positions, there are more women than men in the
large centers of population. Certainly these figures justify us in
saying that women have established a monopoly of education in the United
States, except in the higher institutions.
In order to discuss the effects which this monopoly of education by
women is having on the curriculum of the schools we must first agree on
what constitutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's
minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was asserted that women are more
interested in the concrete, human, personal, conserving and emotional
aspects of life; while men more easily turn to the abstract, material,
impersonal, creative and rational aspects. To put it broadly, women are
more interested in the humanities; men more readily pursue the sciences.
Let us admit at once that there are many individual exceptions to this
statement. Some women have reached great excellence in abstract studies;
and some men are notoriously concrete and emotional; but nevertheless
the general statement seems borne out by a wealth of common observations
and detailed comparisons.
[29] See _The Americans_, by HUGO M�NSTERBERG, pp. 558-589. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
Personal observation must always be colored by prejudices and
prepossessions, but my own have been so wide, and so uniformly in one
direction, that it seems justifiable to report them.
* * * * *
For a quarter of a century I have been working in schools or with
teachers, and my personal observations all agree with the above
characterization. I have spent five years in Cornell University, New
York; one year in Zurich University in Switzerland; two years in the
State University of Indiana and seven years in Stanford University in
California. These institutions are widely distributed; they were all
fully co-educational; and they each had a wide range of elective
studies. In all of them, class-rooms devoted to literature and modern
languages had a large attendance of women, while lecture-rooms and
laboratories devoted to abstract science were almost deserted by them.
This could not have been due to commercial considerations, for many of
these women were facing teaching; and during all this time the demand
for women who could teach science has been much greater than for women
who could teach literature.
In my work with teachers, both in the classroom and in the field, I have
carried out many inductive, quantitative studies, based on measurements
or returns from large numbers of children. I have never found women
teachers taking up and carrying out this kind of work with any such
enthusiasm as men apply to it, though it lies at the base of their
professional life.
Institutional generalizations seem all to point in this same direction.
For instance, the Girls' Evening High School in Philadelphia is managed
by one of the best known scientific women in the country, Dr. L.L.W.
Wilson, head of the biological department of the Philadelphia Normal
School. With a thousand girls of high school grade, under the leadership
of a scientific woman, the only science courses given in the school are
those in domestic science. The reason is that the girls, most of them
not being candidates for a degree, will not take up science work, though
they form strong classes in literature and languages.
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