Teaching School on the Western Frontier: Nineteenth Century Women PDF

Teaching School on the Western Frontier: Acceptable Occupation for Nineteenth Century Women Author(s): Suzanne H. Schrems Source: Montana The Magazine of Western History , Summer, 1987, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 54-63 Published by: Montana Historical Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.or...

Teaching School on the Western Frontier: Acceptable Occupation for Nineteenth Century Women Author(s): Suzanne H. Schrems Source: Montana The Magazine of Western History , Summer, 1987, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 54-63 Published by: Montana Historical Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4519070 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms D Montana Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Montana The Magazine of Western History JSTOR This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Teaching School on by Suzanne H. Schrems In 1838, Mary Walker and her husband traveled to the Oregon country as missionaries under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Walker believed that as a missionary teacher she could help Christianize and civilize the Indians by setting up a school for Indian children. But more important to Walker, her choice of a career as a missionary would fulfill her intellectual ambitions and her need to make a contribution to society. 1 Harriet Bishop left her home in Vermont in 1847 to take a teaching position in St. Paul, Minnesota, a community of five stores and a dozen families. As her only preparation for the position, Bishop had completed high school and had taken a short preparatory course from Catharine Beecher at New York Normal School. Harriet Bishop left Vermont for the wilds of the Northwest because of the adventure and a belief that it was an escape from the stern religious tradition and set form of her life in Vermont. 2 In 1887, Carrie Blakeslee left Westfield, Massachusetts, heading west to Colorado in the hope of acquiring government land. She intended to support herself by teaching school until she obtained enough capital to improve her land and start her own ranch. For Blakeslee, schoolteaching was a respectable means of support until she could obtain her goal. 3 Mary Walker, Harriet Bishop, and Carrie Blakeslee are representative of women who found teaching in the schoolhouses or mission fields in the West to be an acceptable alternative to the prescribed domestic sphere that society reserved for them. In this way, women were able to make a contribution to society, to seek adventure, and to gain financial independence and self-realization. New Hope School in Skullyville, Oklahoma, an academy for Choctaw girls, ca. 1885 Acceptable Occupation for 54 MONTANA THE MAGAZINE OF WESTERN HISTORY This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the Western Frontier \- :E f. i l 1! f b' ~ iii ij. Nineteenth Century Women SUMMER1987 55 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms T: he domestic sphere that confined many women to the home during the nineteenth century was the result of a rapid shift from an economy based on agriculture and home industry to one based on industry and business. In an economy dominated by agriculture, both men and women contributed to the economic structure of the family, but the growth of industry created a division between the home and the workplace. The man's sphere was outside the home in the workplace of pecuniary reward, while the woman's sphere was in the home, where she created an atmosphere of peace and upheld the moral virtues of society. 4 As the moral guardians of the home, women were not expected to seek financial success. Traditionally, wage-earning women in the nineteenth century were employed as domestic servants, laundresses, and seamstresses-work that society found acceptable because it was usually performed in the home. 5 In the East, this kind of work was low paying and had very little status; but in the trans-Mississippi West, women were needed to fulfill these domestic functions. The West was primarily dominated by men, especially in the gold regions of California and Colorado. The ratio of men to women in California in 1850 stood at 23 to 1; in Colorado in 1860, the ratio was 34 to 1; and by the 1870s, an aggregate census for the West indicated a ratio of two men for every woman. 6 Because men made up a majority of the western population, employment opportunities were opened to women who would perform domestic duties, and it became acceptable for women to leave their homes and seek employment in frontier communities. Because of the demand for domestic help, the work paid handsomely and attracted many women. In Wyoming in 1870, for example, cooks received $125 per month, and in Montana housekeepers could earn from $75 to $100 a month. Female schoolteachers received only an average of $38 a month. 7 Despite the low wages, women sought employment as schoolteachers in the West over higher-paying domestic employment because it offered more respectability. It also enabled educated women, who were usually barred from professional opportunities, to use their skills. 8 The attitude that schoolteaching was an acceptable occupation for nineteenth century women was partly a legacy of the republican ideology that emerged after the American Revolution. The contention was that in order to build a successful republic citizens should be virtuous and of good moral character. The revolu1. Patricia V. Homer, "Mary Richardson Walker: The Shattered Dreams of a Missionary Woman, " Montana the Magazine of Western History 32 (Summer 1982): 20-31. The author wishes to thank professors Shalhope, Savage, and Griswold at the University of Oklahoma for their academic guidance on this manuscript. 2. Zylpha S. Morton, " Harriet Bishop, Frontier Teacher, " Minnesota History 28 Oune 1948): 132-141. 3. Mrs. C. P. Hill, "The Be~gs of Rangely and How the First School Teacher Came to Town," Colorada Magazine 11 Oanuary 1934): 112-116. tionary fathers delegated the building of Americans' moral character to the churches, schools, and families, but particularly to mothers. 9 This post-revolutionary belief opened the educational doors to women. In order for women to successfully instruct their children, especially the boys, to be moral, virtuous citizens of the republic, women needed to be equipped with a proper education. The idea of women as the proper teachers of republican virtues encouraged the growth of schoolteaching as a non-domestic occupation, and it became socially acceptable for women to leave their homes and teach in the community. The acceptability of this new occupation for women rested on the increasing need to educate the young and on the vacancies left in the schoolrooms by men who sought higher-paying jobs. At first, women gradually entered the work force as teachers. During the 1760s, school districts hired women instead of men for the summer sessions of primary schools to teach young children and older girls who were excluded from the winter terms. Women also found teaching positions in the growing number of academies for girls. Because of the growing number of pupils and the low salaries that women would accept, women teachers began to find positions in the regular winter term instruction. 10 As early as the 1820s, the first women teachers to travel to the frontier were missionaries who went west to educate American Indians in the beliefs of Christianity. Women sought the opportunity to become missionaries and migrate west through the home missionary movement in the United States. Supported by the American Home Missionary Society, the movement was an organized effort to carry religious and educational institutions to the inhabitants of the frontier. The main support for the missionary effort came from New England towns whose inhabitants were "honest, thrifty and God-fearing Christians" who regarded themselves as "God's chosen people in the New World-and the exponents of the purest form of Protestantism.'' They saw it as their duty to spread their beliefs and way of life to developing frontier communities, which they perceived as "moral wastes, spiritual destitutions, and seas of iniquity." 11 4. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman 's Sphere " in New England (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1977), 24. 25. 5. Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: Knopf, 1984), 136. 6. T. A. Larson, "Women's Role in the American West," Montana the Magazine of Western History 24 (Summer 1974): 5. 7. Ibid., 5-6. 8. Keith E. Melder, " Women's High Calling: The Teaching Professions in America, 1830-1860," American Studies 13 (Fall 1972): 19-32. 9. Linda K. Kerber, Women of/he Republic: lnte/Jedand Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 200. 10. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 30-34. 11. Colin Brummitt Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1939), 15, 16, 25. 56 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms &' ! f f' J f 11- J.i g, l f Mary Walker in about 1855 while a missionary to the Spokane Indians M issionary organizations used education as a tool to develop religious institutions in the West. Eastern missionary societies believed that sending schoolteachers to the West would reinforce religion through education: ''... teachers and schools stand alongside preachers and churches as agencies of control." 12 Originally the men who controlled mission boards in the East did not allow women to work in western missions-the frontier outposts were too dangerous and uncivilized for delicate females-but the men were not able to perform all of the duties required to run a mission and school. Mission boards first allowed women to enter the missionary field in the West if they were married to a fellow missionary, and women who married missionaries sometimes did so because it was a way to obtain their own goals. Olivia D. Hills's opportunity to work in the Indian missions in Indian Territory came when Dr. R. M. Loughridge, superintendent of the Wealaka Mission, asked her to marry him. Loughridge recognized his need for a helpmate in 1841 when the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions appointed him to find out 12. Ibid., 326. 13. Indian Pioneer Papers, vol. 54, Western HistOI)' Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman [WHC). if the Creek Indians were willing to have a mission and school in their nation. The Creek council indicated that it wanted a school but was opposed to preaching because it "broke up their customs, their busks, ball plays, and dances.'' The council finally allowed Loughridge to establish a school if he agreed to preach at the schoolhouse and nowhere else. It was at this point that Loughridge decided he needed a partner, someone to take on the responsibilities of a mission school. He traveled to Alabama to ask a previous acquaintance, schoolteacher Olivia D. Hills, if she would be his wife. Loughridge explained to Hills the sacrifice entailed in being his wife on the frontier and gave her a few days to think it over. Hills considered the proposal and told Loughridge: "I have decided to share your missionary work and life with you. I have consecrated my life to this most needy field and am happy in this decision.'' Olivia Hills' s decision to marry enabled her to obtain her goals as a missionary teacher and gave her an opportunity to make a contribution to society by educating Indian children. 13 The union of two missionaries in marriage, however, did not always allow women to work in the missionary field. Twenty-two-year-old Mary Walker lived with her parents and taught school in East Baldwin, Maine. She was not content with her life and struggled with plans that would enable her to lead what she believed was a useful and pious life. She wrote in her diary: "But I have been thinking to day that the ties that bind me to earth can never be weaker than they seem now. It seems to me that I do no good in the world.... My life does not seem dear to me.... " After three years of soul-searching, Walker made the decision to dedicate her life to missionary teaching. She based her decision on "her own religious conversion as well as her feeling that she was meant for 'nobler work' than teaching school and working at traditional domestic tasks.'' After being denied a missionary position in the West by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Walker accepted the marriage proposal of Elkanah Walker, a fellow missionary who was looking for a wife to accompany him to Oregon. She hesitated to marry someone she barely knew, but her missionary duty took precedence over everything else. 14 Mary Walker's life changed even before her missionary work began, when her first child was born at the Whitman mission in Oregon. Walker's marriage and subsequent domestic responsibilities left her little time for missionary work or religious devotion: ''... can't keep my house as nice as I wish to, neither can do nor get done half as much sewing as I wish to... I regret exceedingly that I find not little time to teach my children & as to doing for the Indians, when can I expect to? When can I find time for private devotion?'' By the time Walker was forty-two years old, she had eight children and her diary entries no longer mentioned her higher ambitions or her nobler work. 14. Homer, "Mary Richardson Walker," 24. 57 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Instead, she recorded her feelings of depression and despair: ''Feel so dejected and discouraged I know not what to do. Suppose my nerves must be out of tune to make the world look so dark. I shrink from the duties and responsibilities that devolve me and almost wish for death to release me from care & perplexities. " 15 M any women who entered the religious field, either as wives of evangelists or as fellow missionaries, were able to handle their duties as mothers, wives, and missionaries. The strength of those women and their endurance is evident in the women who helped establish missions in Indian Territory and among the Five Civilized Tribes. The Union Mission, established among the Osage Indians in 1819, was the first mission in Indian Territory, and by 1821 missionaries had completed the first school. The men and women who helped build the missions had been ''carefully chosen for their intelligence, cultural background, spiritual attainment, promise of physical stamina, skills, and strength of character." With such attributes, the women were fully qualified to see to the preparation of food, clothing, and the comforts of home-not to mention caring for the sick and educating the Indian children. The women... were responsible for the well being of the young people of the mission not only in their knowledge of the fundamentals of an education in English, in their practice of moral and religious principles, and in the refinements of living well together, but for the preparation of food and its serving, for dishwashing and laundry, for making of clothing, the nursing of the sick, and for teaching the skills of housekeeping. 16 Many of the women teachers at mission and agency schools in Indian Territory were unmarried. They came from the East with "their standards of housekeeping and dress, and family and social decorum" to bring ''frontiersmen and Indians to their way of living." Women in the remote Indian Territory were denied the comforts and essentials of eastern society, and fell back on their own resources to deal with dayto-day living. They made their own candles from fats saved from butchering and cooking, and in times of epidemics and childbirth they advanced home nursing to a level that was almost professional. But these women teachers never forgot or intended to abandon their eastern culture. When they could get copies of the Youth's Companion and the Boston Recorder, the women circulated the publications until they were more than worn out. The women also kept up with 15. Ibid., 28, 30. 16. Ethel McMillan, "Women Teachers in Oklahoma, 1820-1860," Cl,nmi cles of Oldalunna 27 (l!M7): 6, 10. eastern fashion: ''a dress or coat design, copied by means of a wrapping-paper pattern from that of some visitor to the West or from a photograph, was never far behind the fashions of the place where it originated." 17 In the education of Indian girls, women missionary teachers emphasized the same ''quality'' education that girls received in the East. Even though the women had been educated to teach academic subjects to their students and were not following the domestic dictates of home and family, they believed that the first step toward civilizing the Indian girls was to teach them their proper female sphere. The 1843 report from the Choctaw reservation station at Wheelock approved of its school's domestic curriculum: "I think there is much sensible, practical, and decidedly useful knowledge acquired in that school. The girls are taught the plain lessons of life, graciously direct in all their attainments... knitting, netting, needlework in woolen, cotton, fancy needlework and embroidery, are executed with skill and taste, which is designed to prepare them for the useful spheres of ladies, wives, and mothers. " 1s Bringing Christian civilization to American Indians was an important goal for many missionary teachers. Sue McBeth, a Presbyterian missionary, worked with the Choctaw Indians in Indian Territory until the Civil War interrupted her work. In 1873, she continued as a missionary to the Nez Perce in the Pacific Northwest at Lapwai, Kamiah, and Mt. ldalto until her death in 1893. In her relentless drive to advance the Nez Perce Indians from their "heathenish" Indian culture to the "civilized" Christian culture, McBeth's main goal was to train the men to be Christian leaders in order to advance a Christian civilization. She worked diligently not only in instructing Indians in the Christian faith but also in teaching them the manners, dress, habits, and occupations that were prescribed in white society. McBeth believed in transforming the Indians into yeoman farmers who knew the proper roles of husbands and wives in the family unit. She strongly believed that ''men must be taught their place and duties and the wives women's.... In the building up of that home after God's plan... the wives and mothers, as well as husbands and fathers need to be taught the duties of their several places and relations God had revealed them." 19 Even though McBeth advocated that Indian men and women embrace white, middle-class roles, she did not believe that she should be a wife and mother. Dedicated to the Christianizing of the Indians, McBeth responded to her conversion experience and her own inner religious belief. Raised in a Scottish family by 17. Althea Bass, "The Inheritance of Alice Robertson," Althea Bass Col- lection, WHC. 18. Ibid. 19. Michael C. Coleman, "Christianizing and Americanizing the Nez Perce: Sue McBeth and Her Attitudes to the Indians, Joumal ofPresbytnian History 211 (1975): 347. 58 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Frontier school at Kenneth, Idaho Territory parents with no ''unquestioning Calvinistic trust that they were following God's will," McBeth's faith that she was following God's plan took precedence over any societal expectations that she become wife and mother. 20 S ome women missionary teachers were specifically educated to teach in frontier communities. Catharine Beecher, who established a female institute at Hartford and the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati in the early nineteenth century, believed that schoolteaching was an ideal profession for women; it was equal to the exaltation of motherhood and comparable to male professions, such as law, medicine, and ministry. In Beecher's view, teaching was acceptable because it was an extension of women's sphere; it allowed women to extend their benevolent moral influence into the whole of society. Beecher also believed that the profession of teaching allowed women a respectable way to support themselves. 2 1 The educational curriculum at female seminaries emphasized exceptional academic standards. Women 20. Ibid. 21. Woloch, Women and the American Ezperience, 130. were educated in the domestic arts and in academic disciplines that compared or were superior to the education of males during the same period. Mary Lyon, who founded Mount Holyoke in 1837, contended that the high quality of women's education and serving the purpose of God released women from their singular role in the home to a higher calling in. society. One of the functions of women, according to Lyon, was to serve society through education and religion. In doing so, women uplifted themselves and challenged their own ability and capacity in the name of doing good. Lyon advised women: ''When the desire to do the greatest possible good becomes firm and unshaken, I know not what may not be attempted.... To such I would say, go forward, attempt great things, accomplish great things.' 22 Catharine Beecher taught women that they should advocate virtue, utility, and piety as well as high academic standards in their teaching. She encouraged women to seek missionary jobs in the western frontier communities where their influence as ''women of culture, good sense and piety" would "secure the proper education of women and children of the nation and the chief ground of hope for its prosperity and 22. Elizabeth Alden Green, Ma,y Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1979), 90. 59 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms safety.'' Responding to the demand for teachers in the West, Beecher helped form the Board of National Popu]ar Education in 1847. The Board's objective was to prepare schoolteachers and send them west. Choosing its teachers from various Protestant denominations, the Board's constitution emphasized a strong religious motive: "... all teachers to be received under the patronage of the Board, shall be unexceptional moral and religious in character. " 23 The Board's second annual report outlined the need for teachers in the West and also singled out female teachers as the perfect agents of education: The teachers must be persons of good Christian character, who can give proper religious instruction, and exert a good religious influence in their schools... who are evidently designed by nature to be the companions and instructors of children, and are better fitted than men by the gentleness of their spirit. 2' According to the report, in 1848 female teachers were in a definite majority in the eastern states and also made the best teachers. Women worked for lower wages than men did: To sustain our assertion that the kind of teaching which the Board has chosen is the cheapest, it is only necessary to state, that the average role of salaries paid to female teachers in Massachusetts, is less than half of the salaries of the male teachers-the plan falls in with the great law of political economy... and is in accordance with a high but much neglected rule of religious economy. 25 Women, the Board concluded, were the perfect agents of Christian civilization to be sent to the western frontier and they cost the least to employ. The Board also speculated why women teachers applied for teaching positions in the West. Referring to women who had applied for such positions, the Board reported: ''It is believed there were many, who, from motives of benevolence and interest, and some who, from motives of benevolence only, will gladly engage in such an enterprise.' ' 26 The women who applied for teaching positions, however, often did not do so out offeelings of benevolence. The records of the Board of National Popular Education reveal that nearly half of the women who chose to go west to teach did so for economic reasons. Augusta Moore of Bangor, Maine, wrote in her application: ''I am in debt, and I wish to go where I can earn money.... Life has lost its fanciful, and put its real look to me. " 27 Some women who applied had both a spirit of adventure and the need to be useful. Mary Hitchcock's family had moved several times when she was a child, and she had no permanent ties to the East. At age twenty-two, when she applied to the Board of National Popular Education for a teaching position in the West, she gave as her reason her desire ''to see more of the country." Thirty-two-year-old Sarah Ballard, after teaching for seven years in Vermont, applied for a teaching position in the West because there was "a wider field for usefulness there, than here" and also to dedicate her life "to the service of God. " 28 Harriet Bishop decided to go to St. Paul, Minnesota, for the adventure but also because more teaching positions were available in the Northwest. Bishop was one of twenty-six women from New England who enrolled in Catharine Beecher's first preparatory course for teachers at New York State Normal School at Albany. After completing the course, Bishop responded to a letter Beecher had received from Dr. Thomas S. Williamson requesting a teacher for the wilderness village of St. Paul. Against the advice of her classmates who "described the hazards of the journey, the savageness of the Indians, and her ignorance of the world," Bishop left for Minnesota in the summer of 1847. She started her first school in St. Paul, the earliest program of organized education in Minnesota, in a "mud and walled hovel" that was once used as a blacksmith shop. By 1850, a district school had been organized, and Bishop and a female friend from Ohio established the St. Paul Seminary and boarding school, a female seminary to prepare teachers for work in the Northwest. 29 Harriet Bishop lived her life in Minnesota contributing to the educational advancement of the community. She loved Minnesota and the Northwest and wrote in her book on Minnesota experiences, Floral Home: "I have never so felt my soul glow with enthusiasm, with the fact that I am an American woman, as in scanning the West presents for the exercise of our best faculties, for effort and expansion. " 30 23. Catharine E. Beecher, Educatiimal Reminiscences and Suggestions (New York: J.B. Ford and Company, 1874), 116, 117, 119; Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Fronlier, 369. 24. "Popular Education in the West by Female Teachers from the East," S«mul Annual R,;o,t of the Genmll Age,,t of the Board of National Pop,,lar EdtM:alion, with the amstitlftion of the Boanl (Cleveland: Steampress of M. C. Yoonglove and Company, 1840). As found in New England atUl Yale Review 7 (1849): 593. 26. Ibid., 603. M any women sought teaching positions in the West independent of missionary societies and eastern seminaries. Women schoolteachers, or schoolmarms, viewed teaching as a socially acceptable occupation that would allow them to take advantage of the opportunities the West offered. Elizabeth Powell was typical of many women who left their eastern homes 25. Ibid., 601. 27. Polly Welts Kaufman, W0111111 Teadlm on the Frontier (New Haven, Co1111ecticut: Yale University Press, 1984), 14. 28. Ibid., 195. 29. Morton, "Haniet Bishop, Frontier Teacher," 134. 30. Ibid., 140-141. 60 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms t n 0 i '< 2. '< 2. i' i' f f~ "' ,.Er f- f.s [ [ r. r ~:. :. Susan L. McBeth, missionary to the Nez Perce, in about 1885 to teach in the West, looking for adventure and the promise of more money. Powell sailed from New York City to California in 1868 in order to start a new life. She recorded her hopes as she began the adventure: ''I thank God that at last he is letting some of my cherished longings be gratified. Perhaps he will bless my efforts to make money in California and I may get hope to wander through France and Germany and Italy.'' Powell was quite straightforward about her desire to make money. Referring to her fellow ship passengers, she wrote: "... there are very few on the boat whose society I enjoy; although there are 800 passengers most of them are from a low class of Irish, Germans and French going to California like myself to make MONEY.' 31 Powell found her first teaching position in Pike City, California, a mining town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. She was struck by the difference between western teachers and teachers in the East: ''The California teachers are not such a forlorn looking, poverty-stricken self as the Albany and Brooklyn teachers. Those I have seen look as though they might have plenty of money for dress and books. " 32 For many women, the profession of schoolteaching was an acceptable alternative to the financial security of marriage. Lucinda Dalton found financial security as a teacher, but she also valued her education because it lifted her out of domestic drudgery. The edu31. Elizabeth Powell, Diary, vol. 2, 1865-1915, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [Bancroft]. 32. Ibid. Harriett Bishop, a teacher on the Minnesota frontier during the 1850s cated woman who did not submit to the dominance of men, Dalton believed, kept her self-worth and selfesteem. Lucinda Dalton was born in 1847 on a plantation in Alabama. In 1860, she traveled to Utah with her parents, converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to make a new home. Although Dalton's parents were so poor "that sometimes we wanted for bread,'' they valued education for their children. Dalton remembered: "My father, determined that his children should not be ignorant as well as poor, at the close of his work day, patiently taught us." Her mother also contributed to the children's education: "By her candle far into the night, while I slept, to keep up with woman's everlasting work so that she could spare me, her eldest daughter (the mother's right hand) to attend school.'' Dalton received her education from her parents, an occasional tutor, and eventually a new school in her district. By the age of sixteen, Dalton became a teacher in a new school of her own. 33 Dalton noted the inequality between men and women in her society, especially in regard to education: "I longed to be a boy because boys were so highly privileged and so free.... education was offered to them accompanied with bribes, promises and persuasions, while doled out to girls grudgingly as something utterly wasted, and expected to be of no future use." She wrote to a friend about. an ind33. Lucinda Dalton to Mrs. E. B. Wells, December 27, 1875, "Lucinda Dalton Letter," Bancroft. 61 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Students in front of a school in Silver City, Idaho Territory, 1884 dent with a '' gentleman teacher'' that exemplified her point: I remember my disgust when I asked a gentleman teacher if, in his opinion, I was sufficiently advanced in mathematics to study algebra.... he replied that it would be wasted time for me to ever study it, because I already had more learning than was necessary for a good housekeeper, wife and mother which was a woman's only proper place on earth. Dalton's teacher did not object to her receiving enough education to become a teacher but to her quest to be more knowledgeable in advanced subjects. But education was important to Dalton because it opened up new horizons and lifted her self-esteem. She was often bitter toward those who wasted opportunities that she had been denied: I always felt a sort of guilt in accepting for my personality what I knew was tendered merely to abstract youth and beauty, and much disgust at the thought that my quick intellect, Godgiven talents rusting away for want of polishing; and I do believe there is no sin in coveting that which is my neighbors when I see others slight their privileges and trifle away those in- estimable opportunities for which I have been almost consumed with longing. a4 Lucinda Dalton believed that education was important in her life and that as a teacher she could obtain selfworth. Some women, however, also found teaching school to be a financial blessing. W omen who traveled with their amilies to the frontier in order to establish new homesteads sometimes found that teaching school was an economic necessity. Carrie Cable and her family homesteaded in Oklahoma in 1894. Her family cut wood and sold it in the nearest town for $1.50 a rick so they could buy needed staples of ftour, sugar, coffee, and baking powder. Cable described her search for a teaching position that would allow her to help out her financially strapped family: "... times began to look so hard to me that I got out to look for a school to teach. I drove one horse to a two wheeled cart... I first went to Watonga and then east. I succeeded in getting a school near 35. Indian Pioneer Papers, vol. 33, WHC. 39. James Smallwood, ed., Alld Gladl1 TeacJi: R,,,,;,ascmcu o/Ttadwn fro,,, Fnmtin- ~ w Mod.ml Modt,k (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 50; Wayne E. Fuller, " Country Schoolteaching on the Sod-House Frontier," Atvo,,aaNI 11N Wat17 (Summer 1975): 126. 36. Clara E. Downes, Diary 1860. Bancroft. 40. Ruth Miler Elson, G1Mmlialls of Traditio,,: AMnican Sdloolboolu of IN 34. Ibid. 37. Hill, " The Beginnings of Rangely ," 112. 38. Indian Pioneer Papers, vol. 33, WHC. Nuvtm,tJ, Cnuury (Lincoln: University of Nebraslca Press, 1964), 9; David B. Tyack, "The Tri>e and the Common School: Commmity Control in Rural Education," AMmcan Qtiarlerl1 l (March 1972): 3-19. 62 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Omega.... I received $25.00 per month." For Carrie Cable, teaching school meant being able to buy cows: with some of my school money I bought our first cow.... I bought a cow every term of school that I taught and with the increase we soon had a nice bunch of milch cows. Then we milked the cows and I made butter, to sell which sold for ten cents a pound in El Reno. When the market became over supplied with butter. I made cheese. 35 Some women who needed financial support created their own teaching positions. After arriving in a city in California that was ''10-11,000 feet above the Sea,'' Clara Downes decided to start her own school by soliciting the community for students: "This morning a lady told me she knew I could get a school; so this afternoon I started out to see what I could do. I have had the promise of eight.... I have six more scholars, this will do. The people seem delighted that there is to be a school started. " 36 Carrie Blakeslee traveled from Iowa to the West on her own to acquire government land and found schoolteaching to be an acceptable means of support until her land could be improved. Blakeslee had contacted C. P. Hill, representative of the school board in Rangely, Colorado, inquiring about a teaching position. She knew that she would have to support herself by teaching and had the foresight to secure a position before she arrived in the West in the fall of 1888. Rangely had no schools, but the community agreed to build and furnish a house where Blakeslee could conduct classes. In the spring of 1889, Blakeslee moved to a pre-emption claim, where she lived alone for the necessary six months. 37 On a day in September 1888, she made final proof on her land and married C. P. Hill. Harriet Patrick Gilstrap also used schoolteaching as an acceptable way to support herself until she could acquire government land and commence homesteading. Arriving in Oklahoma from Kansas with her parents in 1888, Gilstrap first taught at the Shawnee Government Boarding School and then at the Sac and Fox Agency headed by her father. When President Harrison opened territorial lands for settlement in 1891, Gilstrap located the land that she wanted to claim and joined the land run on horseback, outdistancing those around her to stake her land. Her father helped build her house and fence the property with barbed wire. When Gilstrap finally sold her claim, she received $3,000. She resumed her teaching career until she married in 1897.38 Women fOlllld a certain independence through their occupation as schoolteachers, but society had cast a mold for teachers that was hard to break. The perception that women were virtuous and moral was incorporated into the rules and regulations under which a schoolteacher taught. In order to secure their jobs, many teachers had to sign contracts that prohibited smoking, dancing, playing cards, leaving the com- munity for more than one weekend a month, or getting married. Women were to be moral guardians and set an example of morality for their students. One way that a woman could demonstrate her good moral character was to attend church every Sunday. The Nebraska school superintendent's report in the 1880s boasted that "a large share of our teachers, perhaps three-forths, are members of some Christian church, and many of them are regularly engaged in Sunday school work. " 39 A woman teacher's character was important in communities with established educational systems. The eastern ideal of educating moral and virtuous citizens with the proper principles was incorporated into the western communities. The textbooks used in the schools emphasized a child's moral development, and they were not subtle in their approach. Lessons in the books had a definite moral message: never drink or smoke, work hard, and obey authority. 40 S choolteaching was a respectable and socially acceptable way for women to work outside the home while continuing to fill their role in the domestic sphere. Nineteenth century society perceived that women were naturally suited to be teachers because of their nurturing instincts and exceptional moral character. Women schoolteachers capitalized on these virtues of womanhood by using their acceptable occupation to not only bring their moral influence to the whole of society but also to seek adventure, financial independence, and often an alternative to marriage and motherhood. Missionary women, believing that God had chosen them for a special task, taught in the Indian missions and accepted their role as teachers of morality and civilization. In many instances, their higher calling took precedence over their roles as wives and mothers. Women educated in eastern female seminaries also believed that it was their moral duty to help educate and civilize people living in frontier communities. Schoolteaching was also an acceptable way for them to leave their eastern homes. Schoolmarms who were not sponsored by missionary societies or organizations sought positions in the West to find adventure, financial independence, an outlet for their skills, an alternative to marriage, or self-realization. Whatever the reason, teaching offered women the opportunity to be independent and financially capable of making their own way in life. cA. SUZANNE H. SCHREMS, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma, has published articles on New Deal cultural projects and on the connection between radicalism and song. She has worked as a historical consultant for the Oklahoma Historical Society and as a museum consultant for the Norman-Cleveland County Historical Museum. 63 This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:51:46 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms