A woman’s place was in the home — unless she became a teacher. A teacher’s place was in the school — unless she became a wife.
Female educators walked a narrow path through Akron Public Schools in the early 20th century. They were expected to devote their lives to other people’s children, but heaven forbid if they wanted kids of their own.
Women put their jobs at risk if they got married.
At the dawn of the century, it was generally understood that female teachers would resign their posts upon holy matrimony. They left their classrooms to become homemakers and start families. Other schoolmarms stayed behind, remained single and retained their posts.
Every summer, the school district lost dozens of educators to marriage. Submitting their resignations were newlywed teachers with such names as Pearl, Gertrude, Esther, Gladys, Cora, Evelyn, Lydia, Flora, Ethel and Lillian.
During teaching shortages, such as when Akron’s population swelled from a breezy 69,067 in 1910 to a torrid 208,435 in 1920, the unwritten rules were relaxed. Some married teachers stayed in school. Then troubles began.
Critics accused married teachers of ignoring wifely duties, being too busy for pupils and stealing the work of single women. No one complained about married men, though, because they were considered the breadwinners. The job paid at least $1,200 a year (about $14,000 today).
A series of superintendents and school board members grappled with “the marriage problem” for decades.
In 1919, the Akron Board of Education voted to prohibit the rehiring of married teachers because of their “divided interest” between home and school. When teachers and parents objected, the board softened its measure to allow the retention of married instructors whose husbands were unable to support them.
A year later, the board reversed itself, voting unanimously that the district’s policy would be to show no discrimination between married and single women.
“For the Akron Board of Education to adopt the principle that the place of the married woman is in the home and that she should be allowed to teach only when her economic situation makes it necessary would put us on record as way behind the times,” said board member Sara M. Read, the wife of Akron Postmaster A. Ross Read. “The point of the whole matter is whether or not those who are fitted for service shall be allowed to serve.”
As it turned out, the policy was “way ahead of the times,” too, because the board flipped, flopped and flapped several times during the Roaring ’20s. The buzzword was “efficiency.” Which teachers — married or single — would be more efficient?
In a January 1924 review, Akron Superintendent Carroll R. Reed found that married women took fewer days off than single women.
“The difference in their attendance records is very slight, but what difference there is shows in favor of the married women,” he said.
In a series of letters to the Beacon Journal, a Barberton woman identified only as “Mrs. E” condemned married teachers for failing to fulfill “the purposes of matrimony.”
“In their mad desire for the inordinate things of the world, combined with shiftlessness, they hire servants to run the place they call home, and openly defy the laws of nature in refusing to rear a family,” she wrote. “Where does so much delinquency and depravity among school children originate?”
A teacher who refused to raise children of her own “naturally cannot love and forebear and tenderly administer to the children placed in her charge,” Mrs. E insisted.
Another letter writer, known only as “Interested,” countered that the district had an obligation to hire the best teachers regardless of their marital status.
“In all other professions, efficiency is the standard, not state of celibacy,” the writer noted. “Persons engaging a trained nurse never ask is she married; rather is she a good nurse?”
Others wondered if “flapper teachers” might engage in questionable practices such as — gasp — auto riding and dancing. If they spent too much time dating, they might neglect their schoolwork.
In August 1924, the board voted to nullify the contracts of any women teachers who got married. Introducing the measure was member Joseph B. Hanan, an assistant office manager at B.F. Goodrich and exalted cyclops of the Summit County Ku Klux Klan.
The contract was voided 30 days after a wedding. Furthermore, the board resolved that “as a general policy,” it regarded “with disfavor the employment of married women whose husbands are living and able to work.”
The ruling did not apply to the 200 teachers married before the rule was adopted. In 1925, however, the board announced it would reduce that group by 20 percent, too.
“Something should be done to start eliminating the married women now on the staff and to let them know we favor single girls,” said board member Catherine Garrett, the wife of Akron stockbroker Charles W. Garrett.
In 1927, the board proposed saving $50,000 a year by replacing all married teachers with single women and placing them on a list of substitutes earning $5 a day.
School board member J. Grant Hyde couldn’t take it. “Forget all this talk about married women and hire and pay all teachers on their merits,” he told his colleagues. Teachers and parents in the audience erupted in applause.
The board suspended the marriage ban again.
Superintendent Thomas W. Gosling did add another wrinkle in 1928, though.
“I am very careful about employing divorced teachers and do not like to retain them after they have obtained a divorce,” he said.
The board briefly reconsidered “the marriage problem” in 1930, but tossed it away like a hot potato.
“I know that some unmarried teachers have their minds more on a date for the evening than on their teaching,” board member Ed Conner said. “And some married women I know would do good work teaching even if they had five husbands.”
In 1938, the district had 1,600 teachers, including 400 married women. In an effort to open up jobs for single teachers, Superintendent Ralph H. Waterhouse proposed one-year voluntary furloughs for married teachers.
The Akron Federation of Teachers called it “school wrecking.” Waterhouse scuttled the plan after receiving only a dozen volunteers.
In 1941, the board tried one last time to ban the hiring of married women as new teachers. That plan fell apart after the United States entered World War II.
Following the war, the baby boom began. By the mid-1950s, more than 49,000 pupils were enrolled in Akron Public Schools and the district had to hire hundreds of additional teachers.
“The marriage problem” no longer was a problem.
It was the answer.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.