Writing in the desert heat of San Juan, Argentina, in January 1883, migrant teacher Florence Atkinson lamented that she and her sister Sarah were not likely to return home to New Jersey soon. “We have been away about six months now, though it seems longer,” she wrote. To save as much money as they hoped, Florence predicted they would need to stay and work about four years. The prospect held little appeal: “This climate is too hot for me, though S[arah] doesn't seem to mind it much and is dreading the winter without fires.” The weather and lack of domestic comforts were only two of the sources of Florence's discontent in the small provincial city where the sisters were posted. Florence and Sarah yearned for amusements. They battled homesickness and a frightening case of typhoid fever that left Florence temporarily bald. Despite all these hardships, the reason Florence and her sister remained in Argentina was unmistakably clear: “[T]he money is the only advantage,” she declared.Footnote 2
Florence and Sarah Atkinson belonged to the large, unorganized group of white women who taught in US schools in the nineteenth century. Lacking the power to improve the terms and conditions of school teaching at home, these sisters joined a group of teachers who took their labor overseas. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, more than seventy women teachers migrated from the United States to work for the Argentine government. By selling their labor power to a higher bidder rather than fighting their subordination head-on, these women sought to do what historian Eric Hobsbawm called “working the system … to their minimum disadvantage.” Only a few studies have explored this episode in the history of US teachers, framing it as an uplifting, civilizing mission and describing the teachers as valiant, benevolent, and occasionally misguided reformers.Footnote 3 While beliefs in the personal, social, and political value of education certainly factored in their decision, these teachers' diaries, correspondence, and unpublished papers show that migration is better understood as a response to low pay and a narrow range of employment opportunities for single women at home. Historians have tended to interpret overseas teachers primarily as reformers, but this evidence reveals teachers identifying strongly as self-supporting workers seeking broader opportunities and, especially, higher pay.
Historians of the United States have demonstrated far greater interest in studying nineteenth-century teachers as contributors to social and political movements than as subjects of historical inquiry in their own right. Seldom do accounts of nineteenth-century teachers explore their struggles to earn their living and the conditions under which they had to do it. In much of this literature, the history of teaching appears more closely aligned with middle-class reformers and their civilizing mission than with the history of workers. The conceptualization of teaching as an extension of women's work in the home, as work in social reproduction, tends to highlight similarities between teaching and what historian Jeanne Boydston characterized as the “pastoralized” work of housewives and mothers. Social reformer and school founder Catharine Beecher looms large over this history, which begins with the antebellum common school movement and urban anxieties about incorporating immigrants into the new nation.Footnote 4 The arc of this nineteenth-century narrative continues with the frontier schools of westward expansion, the freedmen's school movement during Reconstruction, and the imperialist thrust of both the domestic and foreign missionary movements.Footnote 5 This literature does the important work of situating US teachers' labor within broad social and political movements. Yet this literature tends to cast teachers' work as altruistic and self-denying, but seldom self-reliant or acquisitive. It explores how women teachers' labor served social change and nation-building objectives, without investigating as deeply their own social and economic needs.Footnote 6
In contrast, historical accounts of teaching in the twentieth century are far more likely to explore teachers' struggles as workers. Questions about equity, discrimination, and unionization are central to the history of teaching in the twentieth century. These studies explore who became teachers, why they organized, how those organizations developed, and how addressing the priorities of different racial, ethnic, and gendered constituencies among teachers challenged those organizations.Footnote 7 While this literature affirms that twentieth-century organized teachers have secured a place in US labor history, whether earlier teachers have a place in labor history remains a thornier question.
Labor historians' uneven attention to teaching is curious given the centrality of teaching to nineteenth-century women's lives. More than three decades ago, Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis demonstrated that teaching was one of the most common occupational pursuits among women in Massachusetts between 1834 and 1880. They estimated that one in five white women taught at some point in their lives during that period. Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley have argued that the rate of white women's entry into teaching in North Carolina may have been even higher than in the Northeast. Moreover, Thomas Dublin and Victoria-María MacDonald have shown that teachers in New Hampshire and Rhode Island sustained markedly longer careers than other wage-earning women, raising doubts about the notion that teaching filled a brief interlude between a father's protection in youth and a husband's protection in marriage.Footnote 8 These studies show that teaching was central to nineteenth-century white working women's lives. Teaching also became an esteemed occupation among African American women, though racism limited their employment in public schools. And even though the number of non-native-born teachers was small, the daughters of Irish and Jewish immigrants comprised a growing proportion of urban teachers near the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 9 Clearly, school teaching was a common occupational thread in many nineteenth-century women's lives, but it remains to be woven into the fabric of women's labor history.
This tendency to associate twentieth-century teachers with wage-earning workers and nineteenth-century teachers with middle-class reformers calls for closer scrutiny. Besides obscuring the complexity of teachers' identities, especially those of nineteenth-century teachers, these divergent emphases have contributed to a disjointed historical memory of teaching, which supports the construction of a fictional “golden-age” in American schools when devoted teachers put others' needs ahead of their own. Yet that romanticized narrative of bygone teacher selflessness overlooks how schools relied upon a dependent class of workers with severely restricted rights. By necessity, nineteenth-century teachers participated in a system of labor that disguised gendered injustices as sacrifices expected of women. As a contribution toward unmasking this fiction of teacher selflessness and reconsidering teachers' labor and class identities, this essay asks the following: Were nineteenth-century school teachers workers? Is their history a labor history? Did teaching count as “work” in the nineteenth century?Footnote 10
To engage these large questions, this case study of migrant teachers juxtaposes the categories of worker and reformer, while remaining grounded in the everyday aspects of teachers' lives. Relatively few nineteenth-century teachers left written narratives of their working lives. The novelty of traveling to Argentina, however, persuaded some of these teachers to record their experiences and convinced some of their families to preserve those documents. Their diaries and correspondence offer rich evidence of how teachers described the actions they took and the choices they made, giving us a window into how they understood themselves, their relationships to work and to others, and their social location. Most of these teachers also left behind sufficient clues to trace their family origins and economic circumstances through the manuscript census and other public records. The range of evidence permits a critical reading of the decision to migrate in the context of these teachers' lives and work. Accordingly, this essay attempts to reconsider what teaching abroad represented to the women who performed this labor and how it may have shaped their identities, without assuming that teaching meant the same things to the reformers who marshaled teachers' labor in the service of their nation-building projects.
By troubling the categories of analysis which have associated nineteenth-century teachers with women's voluntary reform while separating them from other women workers, this essay also pursues important questions about how gender influenced processes of class identification. Feminist scholars have expanded our understanding of how class identity takes shape beyond the shop floor, demonstrating how class consciousness is shaped in family and community life, in leisure and consumption, as well as in the workplace. Fewer historians have explored the instability of class identities, especially among self-supporting women whose employment often depended on the acquisition of status markers such as education and attire which could blur class distinctions.Footnote 11 Historians generally agree that nineteenth-century teachers tended to be the daughters of lower-middle-class, white, native-born families. Because teaching required education and “at least the appearance of respectability,” most historians have arrived at their conclusions about teachers' class status by tracing their fathers' occupations. Historian John Rury identifies teachers' fathers as the “middling farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, and low-level managers who occupied the rough edge between manual and intellectual labor.”Footnote 12 His description of teachers' social origins is apt, but historians cannot infer teachers' class solely from their fathers' occupations without discounting those women's life experiences in the construction of their identities.
To understand women teachers' class as a product of their parentage promotes a static conception of the category that does not account for the gendered dimensions of class experience or the formation of particular solidarities and distinctions. Such an approach does not consider how teaching typically precluded women from marrying, and thus reduced women's chances of achieving a middle-class existence, dependent as they were on a mere “woman's wage.”Footnote 13 Nor does it take into account the impact of family breakdown or parental death on daughters, who were less likely than sons to inherit property or find self-supporting work. In cultural terms, choosing not to marry in the nineteenth century meant pursuing a life that did not conform to middle-class ideals. For a woman to choose singlehood entailed rejecting, or at least relinquishing, some of the signifying markers of being middle class in the United States, such as cultivating domesticity and devoting herself to voluntary reform. Women teachers may have been born into families with some claims or aspirations to middle-class status, but the extent to which their work as teachers sustained middle-class identities and lifestyles warrants investigation. Herein lies the significance of studying this small group of emigrant teachers: Their letters and diaries reveal the precariousness of women teachers' class identities and the gendered problem of self-support. For even among this group of comparatively high-status teachers engaged in a reform initiative, we find nineteenth-century women expressing themselves as wage-dependent workers. Their narratives call attention to the need to reconsider teachers as subjects of labor history.
Nation-Building and Reform: The Context for Teacher Migration
This opportunity for North American teachers to migrate stemmed from an Argentine nation-building initiative. Migrant teachers shared the organizers' enthusiasm for public education, believing in the self-strengthening power of education and appreciating the prestige that nation-building conferred on their work. However, migrant teachers did not embrace self-sacrifice, nor did they express the desire to convert souls. This secular educational project offered US women the unusual prospect of earning significant material rewards as well as recognition for the important political work of teaching others to teach.
Among the originators of this project was the Argentine President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, known for his struggles against dictatorship, advocacy of republican government, and admiration for US institutions. On his 1868 election to the presidency, he announced his intention to recruit North American teachers to establish a national system of public education. Until then, schooling in Argentina had followed Spanish colonial practices. Administered mostly by church and charity, schools generally served the sons of the elite and the urban destitute of both sexes. Some provincial governments administered a few schools, but they enrolled only a tiny fraction of the school-aged population. Illiteracy persisted at 80 percent, posing an obstacle to the liberal republic Sarmiento sought to build.Footnote 14 While posted as minister to the United States from 1865 to 1868, Sarmiento studied US public education and published a book, the title of which translated as Schools: The Basis of Prosperity and Republicanism in the United States. The volume attempted to show how investing in public education would strengthen political and economic development in the Americas.Footnote 15 In his travels, Sarmiento had seen how many states in the US had expanded public education by employing lower-paid women as teachers and establishing normal, or teacher-training, schools. He also became aware of the role of women teachers in the post-Civil War South and along the Western frontier, perceiving in them a “natural” female patriotism, a willingness to sacrifice the comforts of home and risk their safety to nurture a political ideal. They inspired him to dream of how “six hundred North American school mistresses in the Argentine Republic … would repair in ten years the ravages of three centuries [of Spanish colonial rule].”Footnote 16
With these ideas about gender, public education, and nation-building in mind, Sarmiento enlisted the help of educator Horace Mann's widow, Mary Peabody Mann, to recruit North American teachers. Mann interviewed several of the earliest recruits, finding them primarily through personal networks, though the Woman's Journal and the New England Journal of Education published items that made readers aware of these opportunities. Sarmiento also received applications from aspiring migrant teachers, but he does not appear to have acted upon them, preferring to use his US contacts to identify candidates. He and his successors relied on several normal-school presidents, including William F. Phelps of Winona, Minnesota, and A.C. Shortridge of Indianapolis, to recommend graduates of their institutions. On occasion, long-serving teachers were charged with recruiting while home on vacation in the United States. For example, Clara Armstrong, a veteran of six years of teaching in Argentina, returned from her first visit home with fourteen newly contracted teachers for Argentina. Networks stemming from schools, as well as family, social circles, and in one case, a parent's business connection, lay at the base of the recruitment effort.Footnote 17
Sarmiento and his advisors planned to install North Americans as directors and vice directors of normal schools. Mann convinced Sarmiento to offer generous three-year contracts, with six months of language study, ocean passage, and, in some cases, accommodation provided. She warned that North Americans would not go to Argentina without financial encouragement, writing “no one would leave home for an indefinite period of time without good salaries,” except perhaps those who possessed the “missionary spirit” but lacked experience and qualifications. Male educators proved less interested and more expensive to recruit than women.Footnote 18 Initially, salaries ranged from $1,500 to $2,500 annually, which was at least double what these experienced women teachers could aspire to earn in a very desirable position at home. The salaries paid to North Americans by the Argentine government declined by the 1880s, but they never dropped as low as the salaries paid to women teachers in small- to medium-sized US cities.Footnote 19
Mirroring the expansion of US education, Sarmiento envisioned a network of educational centers that would support his plans for the political and economic incorporation of Argentina's provinces. Even though he assured Mann that teachers would enjoy a distinguished social status, Sarmiento did not intend for recruits to remain in the capital city. Instead he planned to send them to the provinces of Argentina's interior, which he described as “backward in conveniences, architecture, and comfort.” Installing normal schools in the provinces was the backbone of Sarmiento's plan to “introduce the spirit and practice of republican institutions, as they are understood and practiced” in the United States.Footnote 20 Sarmiento hoped to attract the daughters of the provincial middling classes; those intentions were later codified in Argentina's 1884 Education Law, which stipulated that only women would be hired to teach the primary grades.Footnote 21 In the first half of the nineteenth century, many families in the Argentine interior had depended on women's needlework, weaving, and other skilled domestic production for cash income. The interior, “traditionally active with female artisans prior to industrialization,” according to historian Donna Guy, became the area with the highest rates of female unemployment in the late nineteenth century. Locating teacher-training schools in the interior promised to address some of Argentina's economic problems, as well as supporting its political goals. Indeed, North American teachers understood that their assignments were intended to be temporary. The object was to train Argentines in pedagogical methods, so that, as one of them wrote, “they can conduct the schools without aid from imported teachers.”Footnote 22
Political violence in 1869 and 1870 threatened to derail Sarmiento's plans. Along Argentina's inland frontier, indigenous peoples struggled to maintain control over their ancestral lands and, in retaliation for white settlers' incursions, sometimes took white women as captives. Sarmiento acknowledged the frequency of “throat cuttings” in his personal correspondence, and newspapers carried reports of violent native “invasions” of Mendoza, Santa Fe, and Cordoba.Footnote 23 When the first four US teachers arrived in Buenos Aires, learned of the hostilities, and declined to risk the ten-day stagecoach trip to the interior, Sarmiento declared their decision as an act of “desertion.” Considering teachers to be female equivalents of soldiers, he did not concede the legitimacy of their concerns about safety. Later, hoping that teacher Mary Gorman would reconsider, he mused that “perhaps in a couple of weeks she will have recovered her sense of duty.” Sarmiento appears to have believed that North American teachers would risk their well-being for the greater good of spreading republicanism in the Americas. He may have also believed, as Mann did, that feminine benevolence and respectability would shield teachers from violence. Mann tried to reassure Sarmiento: “If they can only be made to realize … that women who know how to conduct aright and to command respect can be safe anywhere in your Republic, they will go at last.”Footnote 24 She imagined that gender and morality would shield teachers from violence and considered the women's refusal a moral failing rather than a legitimate objection.
By insisting that dutiful, respectable women had nothing to fear, Sarmiento and Mann's criticism of the teachers obscured the potentially dangerous, exploitative work relations they faced. The teachers who arrived amidst this violence had not refused to work. In lieu of traveling to the interior, they offered to teach in Buenos Aires. Anna and Isabel Dudley and Fanny Wood wrote that they were “willing and glad to make sacrifices of personal comforts [and] society,” but not to risk their safety.Footnote 25 Several years later Mann acknowledged that these teachers “were not made of the stuff martyrs are made of, and therefore not capable of taking their lives in their hands,” as she had once thought they should.Footnote 26 This violence culminated in Argentina's Conquest of the Desert Wars, a military campaign often described as a genocide of native peoples that expanded territorial control while whitening the nation. Though some challenges to government authority persisted, most native resistance had been extinguished by the end of the 1870s. Meanwhile, the government persevered in opening six normal schools during that decade and twelve more in the 1880s, with most located in the interior. Their faculties comprised teachers from North America and Europe, as well as Argentina, but the proportion of North Americans and the positions of authority they held influenced many to refer to the normal schools as the North American schools.Footnote 27
Ideologies of gender, class, and nation building downplayed these teachers' identities as workers and mystified teaching as a gendered, benevolent, and patriotic calling. Sarmiento and Mann envisioned an army of selfless women arriving from the “sister republic” of the North to establish the republican institutions that Argentina lacked.Footnote 28 The Argentine government offered these teachers good pay, but it sought more than teachers' time and labor power in exchange. Expecting self-sacrifice and subordination to the family of American republics, the originators imagined US teachers would be spurred to duty by relations of familial obligation, not merely by a market-based exchange. As educational ambassadors of republicanism, these women teachers' presence in the provinces would help cultivate the same social and political progress Sarmiento celebrated from Massachusetts across the heartland of the United States.
Importing foreign women as normal-school teachers deepened the fissures in the Argentine gender system already set off by changes in the young nation and economy. Because they lived and worked outside traditional family structures, these unmarried teachers represented social anomalies and potential threats to the patriarchal gender order. Yet serving in new roles that strengthened connections between family and nation, they also represented potential agents in the economic and political consolidation of the provinces. The development of teaching as paid labor for Argentine women was consistent with changing ideas about patriarchy, religious authority, and state power in the nineteenth century. As Donna Guy has argued, the Argentine state had begun to limit men's rights to govern their families while expanding state authority to reform families and reshape gender relations, even before independence. After independence, strengthening secular authority and extending economic opportunity to the provinces became increasingly urgent state priorities. For “daughters of good families” to train for work as teachers challenged the older cultural characterization of paid labor outside of patriarchal authority as degrading and unfeminine, yet the state's construction of women's work in schools as a part of economic modernization and nation formation softened the challenge that teaching represented to the Argentine gender system. This was especially true because teaching could be construed as a form of reproductive labor essential to a republic and performed within the virtue-protecting environment of the school.Footnote 29 Moreover, the occupational training that North American women delivered met the need for cash wages, even among “good families” in the provinces, which would have quelled some concerns about the social implications of teaching for Argentine gender relations.
Argentine support for republicanism helped to legitimize these changes and the women associated with them. Historians of Argentine education have described how politicians' speeches and “school songs hailed … the role of teachers as lay priests and soldiers [bringing] knowledge-based liberty and progress.” At times, US teachers responded in kind, aspiring to associate themselves with the achievement of republican government. In her published memoir, Jennie Howard claimed to have “answer[ed] the call for help [to] implant … in the Argentine Republic the educational ideals of Horace Mann through the patriotism of Sarmiento.” An acquaintance recalled that Howard “made the normal students [in Argentina] believe that teaching was the most patriotic thing they could do.” Likewise, Ruth Wales expressed a sense of political duty as she departed the US, writing to her father with the gravity of a soldier leaving for war: “There is no turning back now. Those children in the Argentine Republic must be educated and I am willing to do my share.” Seeking to imbue their efforts with broad significance, these teachers sometimes aligned the meaning of their work with the objectives expressed by the originators of the project. Describing teaching as a republican obligation conferred honor and respect on women who taught.Footnote 30
The US teachers who secured these positions pledged their service in nation building, but their service to others was not given freely. As normal-school graduates, they believed public education was integral to the maintenance of a republic and the training of self-reliant citizens. As mostly older, unmarried women, they also knew they needed to protect their interests, because no one else likely would. Gendered discourses of duty and self-sacrifice conferred some honor and respect, but seldom offered material rewards. While proud to serve republican government through their work in schools, these women were not sufficiently privileged to ignore market relations of exchange.
Greater Independence: The Object of Teacher Migration
Generous employment contracts and positions in normal schools in Argentina held out the elusive prospect of economic independence for these women. They unabashedly pursued the self-sufficiency that supporters of US public education revered for students and citizens generally but seldom made possible for women teachers. Teaching and directing normal schools also tempted women teachers with the possibility of more autonomy than most could expect at home. By working in Argentina, these migrant teachers sought to escape some of the gender inequities of their lives in the United States, support themselves, and perhaps lay away some savings for their futures. They were hardly as self-denying as Sarmiento had hoped.
At the time these women agreed to leave home and travel to the other end of the Americas to teach, they resided in Northern states stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Upper Mississippi River Valley. These were the states where US public education had its deepest roots. Nearly all the migrant teachers possessed a normal-school diploma and teaching experience; none were college graduates.Footnote 31
Normal schools have been called the “people's colleges” of the nineteenth century, said to enroll “the masses and not the classes.” State-supported normal schools charged very modest tuition fees and often waived them in exchange for a pledge to teach in the public schools for a year or two. Women who possessed a few years of teaching experience comprised the majority of normal-school students. The principal of the Wisconsin State Normal School at Whitewater, the school from which Ruth Wales graduated, described his students as “people who have missed early advantages but have finally rallied by their own force, to make a final effort at personal development.” While not as prestigious as a college diploma, a normal-school diploma represented a mark of distinction. Attending normal school remained relatively rare among teachers before the twentieth century. One study of Massachusetts teachers in 1859 estimates that only one in six teachers attended a normal school, yet Massachusetts had more normal schools in the 1850s than any other state. Normal-school attendance expanded in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, but normal-school training still did not reach the majority of teachers. City school systems proved willing to invest in normal-school graduates, but most district school boards did not require normal-school qualifications, nor were they generally willing to pay a premium for them.Footnote 32
Normal-school graduates often found their ambitions frustrated by gender inequities in school employment. Elizabeth Coolidge, a graduate of the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham, had been earning $600 annually as a public school teacher in Lockport, New York, but in 1874 she protested this meager salary, pointing out that the male principal earned three times what she did. Her conflict with the school board likely influenced her to accept the Argentine government's offer of $1,200 annually. Coolidge was hardly unique. Across the country in Winona, Minnesota, where at least sixteen of these teachers migrated from, salaries in the mid-1870s were small and static. In 1875 the city employed thirteen primary teachers and three grammar teachers, paying them $500 and $600, respectively. Two years later when Franc Allyn resigned to go to Argentina at much higher pay, Winona school women's salaries remained the same. The Argentine government offered women teachers nearly as much as their male counterparts earned in the United States. As late as 1884, Sarah Atkinson reminded her family that teaching in Argentina represented a once-in-a-lifetime earnings opportunity, writing that she and her sister “never can earn so much again.”Footnote 33
Positions of authority also attracted women to Argentina. In the United States, increases in women normal-school graduates coincided with the emergence of a male-dominated class of educational administrators. At the 1873 annual meeting of the National Education Association, Delia Lathrop, one of the few women on the program, decried how positions of school authority were frequently filled by male college graduates without any teaching experience, while “keen-sighted, professionally educated” women were “thwarted” in their attempts to rise in the field by these men who “scorned the normal schools and their mostly female graduates.”Footnote 34 Lathrop identified a developing trend in US schools, which frustrated ambitious women and likely made the Argentine government's offers so appealing. As normal-school directors and vice directors, these US women would be well paid and free from close male supervision. Reporting to the Ministry of Education in Buenos Aires, hundreds of miles away from most normal schools, migrant teachers anticipated greater autonomy than they generally enjoyed at home. Mann made clear to Sarmiento that her recommended candidates were “not willing to work under any director, man or woman.” In some cases, they even resented the authority of one North American teacher over another. Sarah Eccleston's diary recorded a row with Sarah Strong over who was in charge. Eccleston was the first kindergarten teacher recruited to Argentina, and the ministry located her kindergarten normal course at the flagship normal school at Paraná. Strong was the directora at Paraná when Eccleston arrived, and she assumed Eccleston's “position was subordinate to hers.” The two women felt so strongly about defining the lines of authority, they raised the question to the Minister of Education, who decided in Eccleston's favor: “Mr. Torres says I am supreme in my dept., which is entirely separate from all others and responsible to no one but him.”Footnote 35 Not all US teachers would enjoy such independence, but Eccleston clearly valued the autonomy conferred on her.
Like most normal-school graduates, most of the migrant teachers were not born into economically privileged families. Daughters of farmers comprised 34 percent, and 25 percent were the daughters of coopers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and other working artisans. Another 34 percent were the daughters of merchants and manufacturers, and 7 percent were the daughters of Protestant clergymen.Footnote 36 While none appear to have been the daughters of laborers (unless they were among those for whom census records did not yield occupational information), their fathers' occupations do not mark them as a particularly economically advantaged group. For example, in 1870 Rachel King's father was a tailor in Indianapolis with $100 of personal property. Rachel had at least seven siblings, six born in England. At age sixteen, she was employed making hoop skirts; she and one of her sisters later became teachers in the city public schools. Fourteen-year-old Myra Kimball's father was a Maine farmer in 1860 with $400 in real estate and $200 in personal property; ten years later he remained in Maine while she attended normal school and lived in a boarding house in Winona, Minnesota, where the other residents included schoolteachers, a milliner, and a locomotive engineer. Caroline Ober's father had a small shoe factory in Beverly, Massachusetts; in 1870, it had two sewing machines and an annual payroll of $3,500. By 1880, when Caroline was fourteen and attending school, her two older brothers, Arthur, twenty-nine, and Frank, twenty, worked in their father's factory, while her sister, Sadie, twenty-six, worked as a dressmaker. Arthur, the eldest son, appears to have continued in the family business, while Caroline would soon leave home, finding work as a teacher first in Nevada, then Montana, each for one year, before enrolling in the State Normal School at Salem, Massachusetts. While no single teacher offers a typical example, these three cases suggest the range of the women's natal family circumstances.Footnote 37
Many of these teachers struggled with financial obligations. Widow Sarah Eccleston sought to provide for herself and her daughter, writing in her diary, “I wanted to be independent, to no longer be supported by [relatives].” Anna and Isabel Dudley's deceased father left them with debts, which they hoped to clear by earning higher wages than they could in Boston. After one of her parents died, Mary Gorman felt compelled to earn money to help educate the younger members of her large family. Perhaps the most privileged of these teachers, Florence and Sarah Atkinson had grown up with middle-class comforts, but when their father's business failed, their lives changed drastically. They had no desire to separate from family in New Jersey, but they also had mounting debts to repay. Money, more than anything else, persuaded these women to migrate. Many shared Elizabeth Coolidge's frustrations with being paid a fraction of what their male counterparts earned in the United States, where schools assumed male educators had dependents and women did not. In the post-Civil War era, that assumption was frequently wrong. During these years, women's rights advocate Caroline Dall tried to expose the myth that “all men support all women” for the fiction it was.Footnote 38 With dependents of their own and debts to pay, these migrating women teachers could have testified to Dall's claims.
Most of these migrant women had worked for wages in US public schools; only a few appear to have previously taught in religious or reform contexts. Fanny Wood and Sarah Lobb worked as freed people's teachers in Virginia, but both quit before two years had passed and returned north to teach in public schools. Mary McMillan taught for a year or two in a Quebec convent, and Margaret Collord apparently taught two years at a Methodist school in Uruguay before accepting an offer to teach at the Mendoza normal school. While these teachers employed by the Argentine government were mostly Protestants, only Collord appears to have briefly identified as a missionary, and none appear to have attempted to convert their students to Protestantism.Footnote 39 Finances and personal ambitions, more than evangelical faith or reform, appear to have motivated most of these teachers to migrate.
Most of these migrants were not in their youth. Their average age on departure was thirty, and at least seven teachers were age forty or older when they left the United States. Yet very few had been married before going to Argentina. Only ten had been married, and of those, one was divorced and four widowed. Of the remaining five, only two appear to have migrated to Argentina with their husbands. Contrary to the trend among missionary teachers who were often recruited as married couples,Footnote 40 the Argentine government attracted mostly unmarried, self-supporting women.
Unprotected by men, a significant proportion of these women relied on female networks. Several traveled with or followed female relations. More than one-third of the migrants had a sister, mother, daughter, niece, or aunt who had also come to teach in Argentina. If appointed to the same school, they likely pooled resources to stretch their income as Florence and Sarah Atkinson did. Social networks from home also provided migrant teachers with other forms of support. Before her departure, Caroline Ober received calls from friends and families of three teachers—Arvilla Cross, Kate Grant Hope, and Emily Nott—already in Argentina. They shared letters and stories from Argentina and brought gifts for Ober to deliver to their loved ones.Footnote 41 For single women, such networks helped ease their fears about migration.
Previous experience with migration likely influenced some of these women to consider teaching in Argentina. About half had made at least one long-distance—international or interregional—migration prior to going to Argentina. Many left the Northeast for new states like Minnesota. Some migrated with family, but some, like Ober and Kimball, appear to have moved west for work on their own. Of the 50 percent who did not experience a long-distance migration prior to going to Argentina, more than half had one or two parents who had. Consequently, more than 75 percent of the migrant teachers either made a long-distance migration themselves or had at least one parent who had done so.Footnote 42 School boards were often happy to appoint new teachers at cheaper wages, so multiple, short-distance moves, as Ruth Wales made, from her home in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, across the state to LaCrosse, and then to LaPorte, Indiana, were also common. For teachers like Wales, whose parents had migrated from upstate New York just before she was born, a family history of migration combined with her own moves may have fostered the confidence to accept a position abroad.
A lack of stability in their natal families also likely pushed many of these women to self-dependence. A majority of them had lost a parent prior to their migration; only one in four left behind birth parents living together in the United States. Thirty-four percent had lost their mothers, 25 percent had lost their fathers, and another 15 percent were orphaned before migrating to Argentina.Footnote 43 While two-parent households were not a guarantee of stability in the nineteenth century, daughters without a father or mother were more likely to be expected to grow up quickly, earn wages, and be responsible for rearing siblings. Franc Allyn recalled her gratitude for the opportunity to leave her unsettled childhood years behind:
I am always so thankful for my experience in going to the Argentine … When I look back to my childhood days, my mother dying when I was ten, and never having any regular home, boarding one place and then another; then trying to keep house and look after your Aunt Clara; teaching in country schools, boarding around as it was called, then coming to the normal and after the first half year Mr. Wing insisting on helping me so that I would not have to [drop out].Footnote 44
Allyn remembered a childhood of instability and a normal-school education threatened by lack of funds. Nevertheless, she and her sister Clara managed to graduate from the Minnesota State Normal School at Winona. Those qualifications enabled them to establish more stable lives in Argentina than they had known as children in New York and Minnesota. The Allyn sisters, like many of these teachers, strove to become self-sufficient and financially secure in their adult lives.
Teachers' decisions to migrate attracted local, and in a few cases national, attention. Announcements about these women and their lucrative teaching contracts appeared in educators' journals, women's rights journals, and local newspapers. The Woman's Journal ran a story criticizing the Boston public schools for paying men far more than women and followed it with a notice of the generous salaries being offered by the Argentine government to women teachers. The juxtaposition implied that women's work in teaching was not valued in Boston but was valued abroad. The New England Journal of Education conveyed the same message more explicitly. When Mary O. Graham, a graduate of the Minnesota State Normal School at Winona and a long-time public school teacher in St. Louis, announced her resignation to accept a contract as a normal-school director in Argentina, the journal praised her achievements and issued a stern warning to school administrators: “We should not lose our best teachers by educating them for foreign service, and the lesson is most suggestive that we should pay better salaries and keep them at home.” The editors clearly believed that low pay was driving Graham and others overseas. Teachers also wrote letters to the editors of these journals, as a group of six Iowa teachers did, asking for instructions on how to apply for these well-paid positions in Argentina. Such news items suggest that high pay for women teachers was considered newsworthy and that opportunities for women teachers to better their conditions were rare. The Winona Herald noted that the recruitment challenge was not finding women teachers willing to go so far from home, but “to refuse the scores of admirable teachers who want to go.”Footnote 45
These publications also demonstrate that contemporaries did not confuse teachers with voluntary benevolent reformers. Newspaper items made no references to a civilizing mission, nor to spiritually uplifting work; instead they detailed the financial and occupational benefits that would accrue to women teachers. Confirming that “several American ladies” already enjoyed success teaching in the Argentine Republic, the Women's Journal equated success with material rewards and positions of authority. It emphasized how the Argentine government offered renewable contracts of three years with generous salaries and travel expenses paid. Published notices also celebrated the “high places” in education that recruits would fill, referring to positions as directors and vice directors of normal schools. One cited teachers' wishes to “enlarge their field of usefulness,” using a common euphemism of the era to commend women's public ambitions.Footnote 46 Notably absent, however, was praise for purifying, civilizing, or Christianizing others. The focus on material rewards and recognition suggests that contemporaries recognized these women as wage earners pursuing better positions and higher pay.
Migrant Teachers' Reflections on Class, Labor, and Identity
Migrants' private writings allow us to peer further into the lives of these teachers, illuminating experiences that shaped their identities as women, workers, and North Americans. In diaries and correspondence with family and friends, migrant teachers recorded stories about their travels, work, and colleagues, which sometimes spoke to their social aspirations and made telling distinctions between themselves and others. In many respects, migration fueled these women teachers' ambitions to better their conditions and distinguish themselves from other workers. Yet the disappointments and indignities they experienced as migrants also forced them to confront their classed and gendered circumstances as wage-dependent women.
Traveling heightened some teachers' awareness of class distinctions. Ruth Wales declared herself a member of the “second class” in a letter she wrote home from Liverpool while awaiting the second leg of her voyage to Buenos Aires. She described how “the poor people and I judge those of the second class, like myself, go on foot. None of the wealthy appear [sic] to walk about town.” She also commented on class while reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, writing that she hoped to learn “how that class of travelers get about in Europe.” Her choice of words suggests she did not identify with “that class,” but desired to learn how her less privileged experiences compared. Caroline Ober expressed a sense of class identity less directly while writing about her “first glimpse of tropical life” in St. Thomas. “It seemed impossible that it could be really I who was seeing these things,” she wrote in her diary, “it was like a story to me.” Describing aspects of the voyage with dreamlike reverence, Ober demonstrated that she did not think of herself as a member of the class that took international travel for granted. Neither did Wales. Having never seen the ocean before at age 30, she admitted spending many hours on the ship's decks, fascinated by all she could see. When experienced travelers expressed boredom with the monotony of days at sea, Wales's reaction was so defensive it betrayed her insecurities, suggesting she felt like a greenhorn among the other cabin passengers.Footnote 47
Travel gave teachers glimpses into more privileged lives than they had known. Unaccustomed to sightseeing or long days at leisure, they relished the social opportunities that hotels and cabin passage afforded. Wales wrote about how the “fine-looking” English people she met in the hotel drawing room marveled at the “independence of the American girl,” and invited her to join them. Unencumbered by work or family responsibilities, teachers enjoyed taking meals and shipboard strolls with male travelers and ships' officers. Charmed by the attention, Florence Atkinson boasted that two suitors proposed “to have a duel on my account.” No dueling took place on the S.S. Maskelyne, but she, like other teachers, took pleasure in imagining a more privileged life while on board.Footnote 48 Such genteel sociability en route to Argentina contributed to teachers' hopes that migration would yield social and economic opportunities, perhaps transforming them into the expatriate ambassadors of education that Sarmiento and Mann envisioned.
Teachers shared with other immigrants the desire to improve their life chances in Argentina, but these US women seldom acknowledged their similarities. Especially on arrival, they strove to distinguish themselves from less desirable European immigrants. Several wrote letters home assuring family and friends that government officials treated them well. Caroline Ober described the customs house in Buenos Aires as “a mere formality,” expressing the distance she wanted to place between herself and others who would be subjected to inspection and scrutiny. Ruth Wales emphasized how she “pass[ed] unchallenged through the custom-house,” implying that others did not. Both women took pride in the fact that customs officers recognized they were above suspicion, unlike “the poor crowded out citizens of France and Italy,” among others arriving in Buenos Aires during these years.Footnote 49 Including such information in letters home suggests that teachers wanted friends and family to know that government officials did not detain them with questions, nor probe their bodies or possessions, as was common at Castle Garden and other US ports of entry. Such assurances were probably even more important because Buenos Aires was known as the terminus of considerable traffic in prostitution at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 50 Having custom-house officers acknowledge their respectability may have buttressed teachers' hopes that migration would not jeopardize their social status, and might even enhance it.
Traveling amidst more privileged cabin passengers may have encouraged teachers to dream of gentility, but those passengers sometimes voiced unflattering assumptions about them. Ober was appalled to learn that some passengers mistook her for a missionary; others guessed she was part of a minstrel troupe. “What shall I be taken for next?” she wrote indignantly in her diary. Florence Atkinson winced with embarrassment to learn that a rumor had circulated “on board that we seventeen were Salvation Army missionaries.” Even worse, she learned that one of the King sisters had been mistaken for a “lady's maid.”Footnote 51
While teachers' disgust with being mistaken for servants and entertainers reflected clear class biases, their disdain for missionaries reveals more complex social distinctions at work. In the post-Civil War decades, normal-trained teachers likely viewed missionaries as self-subordinating and, above all, not modern—two qualities these women scorned. As several historians have argued, support for evangelical Protestantism softened after the Civil War in the face of growing secularism—which “relativized faiths and proclaimed them spiritually equal”—and growing skepticism about evangelizing the world.Footnote 52 Sarah Atkinson's religiosity exemplified these trends. She did not attend church services while teaching in San Juan but instead read the bible herself every Sunday. Yet Atkinson grew troubled by Methodist missionaries' efforts to convert Argentines. “Missionaries have no business to work against the Catholics in Catholic countries,” she wrote home, especially “when there are so many home and foreign heathen. Perhaps I am wicked but it seems to me better to consider the points of similarity between Catholicism and Protestantism rather than the differences.” While Atkinson remained confident of Christian superiority, her views reflected a liberal shift which several other teachers shared.Footnote 53
Priding themselves on a progressive world view, these teachers probably also developed their disdain for missionaries from depictions in popular culture that emphasized gendered hierarchies within missionary organizations. One of Harriet Beecher Stowe's post-Civil War novels portrayed a female missionary as “left to follow [her husband] with bleeding footsteps.” An 1875 missionary memoir stressed the unending labors that women missionaries bore with “patient, self-denying, self-sacrificing” love. These were not aspects of Americans' gendered culture that normal-trained teachers sought to perpetuate at home or spread overseas. If migrant teachers prided themselves on being modern and capable, they saw the opposite in missionaries. Describing the Methodist Reverend Thomas B. Wood of Rosario, who possessed A.B. and M.A. degrees, teacher Sarah Eccleston wrote: “What a pity he is such a slow dull man.” Wales agreed with Eccleston's assessment; a letter to her sister about Wood's “eloquent sermons!” dripped with sarcasm, while other letters criticized the effectiveness of the Rosario mission. Wales knew her letters would be shared at home, but she had no reservations about voicing her contempt for the missionaries she encountered in Argentina.Footnote 54
Migrant teachers also found fault with missionary schools. Florence Atkinson dissuaded her sister from seeking a teaching position in Chile, writing that the private English schools in Valparaiso and Santiago were mostly “of a missionary turn,” and did not pay well. Wales scorned missionary teaching, too. Frustrated by her slow acquisition of Spanish and its impact on her ability to instruct, Wales reproached herself: “[T]eaching school as I am doing is missionary work I do think.” She confessed, “As yet I can only say such bits as; ‘silence young ladies, I do not like it, Keep quiet, sit down, that is enough, say the same, say it again, it is well, it is not well, that is good.’” Wales took pride in being trained for rigorous academic work, but possessing only rudimentary Spanish, she felt she was reduced to simply monitoring and disciplining students as she believed missionaries did.Footnote 55
In contrast with the contempt Wales expressed toward missionaries, she praised many of her normal-trained colleagues. For example, she described Sarah Cook as an experienced teacher from the Boston public schools, who is “wide-awake, knows her own value, and is determined to have her just dues.” Wales respected Cook's confidence as a skilled teacher and likely envied her assertiveness as a wage-earner. By describing Cook as “wide-awake,” Wales associated her with the 1860 movement advocating the free labor principles, the Republican party, and northern dominance in US government. Wales grew up in one of the regions where the wide-awakes had deep impact; they became known for their modern insistence on democratic participatory citizenship.Footnote 56 Using “wide-awake” to describe her colleague suggests her admiration for ambitious, energetic women teachers who sought to take charge of their lives and their workplaces and benefit from social trends toward greater democratization.
Migrant teachers' identities probably depended on shoring up their sense of confidence, superior teaching skills, and entitlement to high pay. Few had previous knowledge of Spanish, and while early recruits received up to six months of paid language study, that perquisite vanished after 1880. Speaking “imperfectly and ungrammatically” felt demoralizing for experienced teachers. They knew that a poor command of Spanish undercut their authority, and to compensate for their language deficits, many spent extra time preparing lessons. Argentines complimented the Atkinson sisters on their speedy acquisition of the language; still, both worried about how mistakes raised doubts about their fitness to teach. Even after a full year in Argentina, Florence told her family, “I dread the public examination when we shall have to air our Spanish before two or three hundred people.”Footnote 57
Language difficulties likely exacerbated other struggles in the workplace, especially those concerning school authority. Most US recruits expected to fill the highest positions in the normal schools, but in a few cases they did not. Ruth Wales predicted trouble when she learned that “[a] native woman has been put in over Miss Cook and Miss Grant in Mendoza.” The appointment of this Argentine directora was brief, but shortly afterward, Wales herself faced a similar situation. Arriving at the school to which she was assigned, she was horrified to find a French-born “woman of fashion” in charge. Madame Farley was not a normal-school graduate, but, in Wales's words, a “pantaloon maker” and an “imposter!” Expecting to train others in the latest pedagogical practices, Wales seethed at her subordination to a woman whose authority appeared ill-gotten. Wales had come to Argentina believing her North American training and qualifications would be valued at this stage in Argentine institution building. Humiliated when the “imposter” disapproved of her methods for teaching mathematics, Wales coolly informed her that she “did not come here from the United States to be taught how to teach.” Considering herself a highly qualified teacher and Farley a mere seamstress, she felt even more insulted when the directora exploited her like an immigrant, arbitrarily extending her hours of work and withholding her pay. Despite the directora's mistreatment, Wales persevered because the promised salary was more than she could make at home and other North Americans were earning that much and more. Eventually, Wales's North American colleagues helped her transfer to a school with US teachers in charge.Footnote 58
While directoras like Farley were rare, North American teachers learned they would not enjoy the degree of autonomy they expected in Argentina. Members of the community, church, and government ministry monitored their work, sometimes passing judgment in ways that stung. Some teachers claimed to feel church censure keenly, while others described priests as “genial” and declared “that so long as we do not meddle with the religion they are not disposed to say a word.” From time to time, teachers wrote home in frustration about how local newspapers criticized a lesson or a teacher's conduct.Footnote 59 Annual public examinations made teachers more vulnerable to judgment. For example, an audience member challenged normal-school directora Mary Graham in the midst of the oral examination of her chemistry class, exclaiming “Bruta Gringa! … Why does she come here to insult us all?” Graham soldiered on, saying nothing in her defense, although one of the teachers, stunned by the outburst, later wrote that the students had been performing well but doubted whether other observers understood the chemistry being tested. Very likely, the heckler wanted to remind US teachers that their jobs depended on Argentines' approval. With an upcoming visit from the National School Inspector and a summons to Buenos Aires to meet with the newest Minister of Education, Graham was almost certain to endure additional levels of scrutiny in the coming weeks. As outsiders hired to serve in a centralized and politicized school system, North American teachers did not possess the autonomy they associated with male normal school administrators at home.Footnote 60
Problems of authority and language acquisition aside, the US teachers persevered in teaching a rigorous normal-school curriculum, along with preparatory instruction for those students who needed foundational skills and knowledge. The curriculum included academic subjects, pedagogical instruction, and physical education, a staple of US progressive education.Footnote 61 Not surprisingly, these teachers demonstrated a thoughtful appreciation of pedagogy. For example, Wales once mused about why the students in her physical geography class seemed to be struggling, whereas those in her astronomy class did not, writing, “I think it takes considerable imagination to get all there is in [physical geography]. Committing to memory only won't serve …” Such reflection suggests that Wales was deeply committed to her craft. She also had high expectations. After grading one set of final examinations, she declared the results a resounding success: “Of the forty-seven [students] all pass but twelve.” She failed nearly a quarter of the class and considered it successful. Migrant teachers sometimes complained about students' inattention or lack of preparation, but they generally took pride in the subjects they taught and their students' successes, while holding themselves to high standards. Finding her science classrooms well equipped with “plenty of astronomical globes and charts, and hundreds of dollars' worth of physical instruments,” Sarah Atkinson declared, “If I do not teach well it will be my own fault.”Footnote 62
Clearly, the North American-taught normal schools were neither finishing schools for the wealthy nor industrial schools for the poor. Only one teacher, Florence Atkinson, appears to have taught domestic economy; she was also probably the least qualified and least experienced of all the migrant teachers. On being assigned to teach the course, she fired off a letter to her sisters asking that they mail a copy of “Miss Beecher's book,” since, as they knew, she was ill-equipped to offer such instruction. Atkinson exhibited greater confidence teaching academic courses and received compliments on her Argentine history class, another subject she learned by teaching it.Footnote 63
Like many immigrants trying to prove themselves in new surroundings, these teachers often pushed themselves hard to achieve their goals. One priority many shared with other immigrants was to send money home. To this end, Wales devised a four-part plan for arrival: first, pass through the customs house; second, obtain her contract and travel pass from the ministry of education; third, “learn how to send home money, and then [fourth] hasten to my work in Mendoza.” Although her plan began to unravel at step two, she eventually succeeded in sending significant sums home. Wales' remittances to her father exceeded $1,300, and on at least two occasions she sent $100 each to her sisters in Wisconsin and Dakota Territory. Similarly determined, Sarah and Florence Atkinson paid off all their debts at home within a year. On accomplishing that goal, they saved for the future. But even after accumulating more than $3,000 between them, the sisters never exhibited a sense of financial security.Footnote 64
Teachers consciously attempted to economize on living expenses in Argentina. Some did their own laundry; others sought out cheaper places to room and take their board. Virtually all mended their clothing, attempting to make their wardrobes last as long as possible.Footnote 65 Teachers also found low-cost ways to pass their vacations: visiting other North Americans, accepting invitations to their students' family farms, and camping in the nearby Andes Mountains.Footnote 66 Just before Wales set out for her school in the interior, the US consul assured her that she would return to Buenos Aires to spend her vacations shopping and socializing, but the economical teacher knew she would prove him wrong. She did not return to the capital until she departed for home. Sarah Atkinson probably spoke for all the US teachers when she declared, “We came to make money and not to spend it.” Evincing a logic that was common to nineteenth-century immigrants throughout the Americas, Sarah and Florence agreed, “The more we save, the quicker we will get home.”Footnote 67
Earning more money in Argentina offered these women more options, but it was unlikely to emancipate them from classroom teaching. Without alternatives for self-supporting work, Sarah Atkinson knew that she and her sisters might teach for the rest of their lives: “The thought of us poor creatures all having to peg away at teaching because we can't do anything else, with no prospect of ever pegging our way out of it just makes me blue.” Teaching offered little in the way of career advancement for women; positions in US education beyond the classroom were mostly reserved for men. The premium they earned in Argentina made their working lives a little less precarious, but unless they married, very few teachers were able to leave wage-earning work behind. Like women teachers in the United States, many migrants remained single and self-supporting. Of those whose marital status can be traced, 42 percent remained single for life, considerably higher than figures for singlehood among women in the US population. Thomas Dublin found that 30 percent of the Northeastern teachers in his study remained single, whereas in the Northeast generally, about 14 percent of women remained single. The rate of marriage among these migrant teachers was much lower than among US women overall.Footnote 68
Besides providing the financial means to remain single, teaching in Argentina afforded migrant women other social freedoms. Taking advantage of their outsider status, they experimented with gender transgressions which might have invited harsh judgment at home. Wales wrote home about riding horses astride, describing it as “such a free and independent way of getting about.” Several teachers dispensed with wearing “corsets or bustles or anything that might impede … freedom of … movement.” Others described to family how wine drinking had become a regular practice, implying that imbibing was not common at home. Some teachers found adjusting to their new independence took time, but they often reveled in their transgressions. Wales frequently claimed to feel guilty for enjoying the “‘al fresco’ life” and “the freedom to do as one wishes in so many things.”Footnote 69 Some of those freedoms may have also included same-sex life partnerships, as for Mary Morse and Margaret Collord, who began teaching together in Mendoza in 1892 and were still living together in 1945.Footnote 70
For many of these teachers, however, the thrill of these social freedoms coexisted with a sense of disconnection from community. Gender transgressions likely exacerbated their outsider status. Posted to schools in groups of two or three, US teachers often claimed to feel isolated. Caroline Ober lamented: “No callers, no amusements, nothing outside of the school.” Florence Atkinson once complained that she and her sister were “as secluded and without diversions as two young nuns.”Footnote 71 The freer sociability of shipboard life and the expatriate circles of Buenos Aires did not extend to the provinces, where these unmarried foreign women existed outside Argentine social and family structures. The problem was not only romantic companionship; friendships proved difficult for US teachers to establish. Their high-paid work, the source of their pride, set these women teachers apart from the majority of Argentine women and foreign missionaries. They perceived themselves to have little in common with the provincial Argentines they met and sometimes wondered if their salaries made locals jealous. Many teachers felt the lack of community keenly. On the anniversary of her arrival in Parana, Sarah Eccleston recorded in her diary, “One year of ‘exile’ has passed very quickly and not unhappily, in spite of our many trials.” Shortly after arrival, Florence Atkinson wrote that “money” was “the only advantage” of teaching in Argentina, but after more than a year, she began to question whether the additional income was worth all the personal sacrifices entailed in working abroad: “The time so far has passed very quickly but I don't believe it pays to stay away from friends, family and diversions for so long.”Footnote 72
As Florence came to realize, the economic advantages of teaching in Argentina came with some high human costs. Several teachers described feeling alienated and dehumanized by their work. Wales complained: “It is bad enough to be a machine without puffing and tooting when not on duty. I mean to do my work faithfully, and I do enjoy it, but it is a stale subject out of school hours.” Like many workers, she attempted to draw a line between wage work and leisure and guarded those leisure hours for herself.Footnote 73 She did not want to be “unfaithful” to her work, but her devotion to Argentine schools had limits. Far from the family and friends who helped constitute her identity, she felt the need to cultivate a personal life because work threatened to overwhelm her sense of self. Sarah Atkinson developed an even deeper sense of alienation. She tried to content herself with the financial benefits of teaching but grew to resent how it had changed her family relations. Sarah wrote home: “Such slavery not to have any vacation and spend your life among strangers who don't appreciate you except for the amount of work they can get out of you.” While surely an exaggerated play for her family's pity, Sarah nonetheless drew an extraordinary link between migration for work and slavery. She saw teaching as a form of labor that destroyed home life and separated families against their will. Much as the historian LeeAnn Whites has interpreted white Northern objections to racial slavery as rooted in disrespect for gender and family bonds, Sarah objected to teaching on many similar grounds. Teaching took advantage of women's need to earn income, separated them from their families, and required their devotion to children and families outside their natal communities. She felt dehumanized by the imperative to sell her labor power to people outside her family who did not exhibit the same concern for her interests that she was expected to show for theirs. Though she had freely chosen to emigrate for work, Sarah began to question how free she really felt. Florence agreed. After three years of teaching in Argentina, she realized, “We are sacrificing a great deal to money …. [I] would rather live on little and enjoy my family than to have us all scattered.”Footnote 74 Teaching in Argentina enabled North American women to accumulate some savings for the future, but it also made them aware of the potential for alienation in wage work.
Migration had not transformed these teachers into expatriate ambassadors of education as Sarmiento and Mann had envisioned. At times, their work threatened to sink them to the level of commodities, as interchangeable parts in a school system, not unlike the era's “puffing and tooting” machines. In Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, teacher-activist and future NEA president Ella Flagg Young wrote Isolation in the School, criticizing how the rise of educational bureaucracy had reduced teachers and students to operatives in an increasingly mechanized, alienating system. Envisioning schools as potentially democratic institutions, Young called for teachers to have more power in educational decision making. The Atkinson sisters, however, probably did not share Young's faith that teachers' alienation could be overcome by greater collaboration in the schools. For the Atkinson sisters and several other migrant teachers, their experiences of isolation and alienation arose from another source: their anomalous social position as aspiring educators but wage-dependent women. Their letters and diaries expressed how the material conditions of their lives were often at odds with the gender and class ideologies ascribed to teaching. After nearly two years in Argentina, Wales realized she had more in common with European immigrants than she once thought. In a moment of frustration she wrote home acknowledging that she “had no business to straggle to Mendoza if not willing to be overlooked by the many who consider that women who work for money must be inferior.”Footnote 75 Even though she and other migrant teachers tried to convince themselves that their North American training elevated them above other immigrants, their experiences of wage dependency belied that notion.
Conclusion
At home or abroad, these nineteenth-century teachers thought of themselves as wage earners. They often earned those wages by contributing to broader social and political reforms, but the goals of the reformers who recruited them were not identical to those of teachers. Their hard-earned educational qualifications cannot be taken as evidence of class privilege or the availability of family support. In this research, family and class stability seldom characterized teachers' lives, and migration emerged as a deliberate strategy to materially improve their own life chances. Teaching was not a voluntary adjunct of middle-class women's domesticity; rather, it was a form of paid labor that appealed to women who needed to earn their own support and valued the social and cultural benefits that respectably gendered work might afford.
The nineteenth-century experience of self-supporting labor positioned US women teachers apart from other women of the middle classes, while the nineteenth-century ideology of teaching as a gendered service of benevolence positioned women teachers apart from other workers and migrants. These paradoxical circumstances relegated teachers to a liminal position on the boundaries of both the working and middle classes, belonging to neither. While this position may have conferred some social capital on women teachers, it also kept them economically vulnerable. And by emphasizing gender and class ideologies of teaching over the material circumstances of teachers' lives, the narrative that associated nineteenth-century teachers with benevolent reform has since obscured our ability to see these women as workers.
This essay responds to recent calls by labor historians to challenge our notions of what constitutes “work” and to interrogate the boundaries that define the subject of labor history.Footnote 76 Teaching has drawn far less attention from US historians of women and labor than many other occupations, even though teaching was and continues to be emblematic of so-called “women's work.” In the last two decades, feminist historians have demonstrated that women's labor in other realms of social reproduction—housework, domestic service, and sex work—must “count” as work, yet the work of teachers remains poorly understood, caught between the binary categories of productive and reproductive labor, of the market and the family, of the public and the domestic.Footnote 77 The interpretive gulf between the benevolent reform narrative of nineteenth-century teaching and the narrative of teachers' labor organization in the twentieth has impaired our understanding of who taught and why. By demonstrating how reform created a context for teacher migration while economic needs filled the ranks, this essay takes a small step towards bridging these two narratives and restoring nineteenth-century teachers to labor history. Today's teachers remain vulnerable to gendered and classed expectations of self-sacrifice that were never grounded in historical experience, but only served to obscure unjust practices in the past. Revising the long history of teaching as a labor history promises to expose the gender and class politics at stake in categorizing teachers separately from other workers.
