Rules for Female Teachers (1915)

[George Jones]

You will not keep company with men.

You will not marry during the term of contract.

You must be home between hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.

You must not loiter downtown in any of the ice cream stores.

You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board.

You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless it be your father or your brother.

You may not smoke cigarettes.

You may not dress in bright colors, and you may not under any circumstances dye your hair.

You must wear at least two petticoats, and your dresses may not be shorter than 2 inches above your ankles.

You must keep the school neat and clean, sweep the floor at least once daily, and scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water.

You must clean the blackboards once a day, and start the fire at 7 a.m. so the room will be warm at 8 a.m.

Source: the website of University of Toronto's The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_sch/assignment1/1915rules.html

 

[Evo]

Crazy.

 

[Borek]

Quite clear. And it allows having sex, drinking, and smoking pot while riding a bike with other woman, so it is not that restrictive.

 

[Doc Al]

Makes sense to me.

 

[OmCheeto]

Source: the website of University of Toronto's The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_sch/assignment1/1915rules.html

You must not loiter downtown in any of the ice cream stores.

What on Earth was going on in the ice cream stores back then?

(google google google)

No results found for "Sherbet of ill repute".
No results found for "ice cream shop of ill repute".

Erased from history...

Very suspicious...

 

[Monique]

Erased from history...

Very suspicious...

Suspicious indeed, something abhorrent must have happened at ice cream stores for Google to erase it from their search history.

 

[AlephZero]

Well, they were progressive enough to allow female teachers at all.

Employment restrictions on marriage were quite common (not only in teaching), and were logical when married women had no legal or financial status independent of their husbands, and therefore probably couldn't sign a contract of employment, or be paid for working.

 

[collinsmark]

If I correctly recall stories from my grandmother, along with books and movies, ice cream parlors of that time and location (mid-west, United States) functioned as a social gathering place for young adults: a place where young people could hang out, so to speak.

Unlike ice cream stores of today, where one (1) stands in line, (2) orders product, and (3) gets the hell out, ice cream parlors back then were a place for gathering for an extended period of time, socializing and mingling with other members of one's age group.

There's no particular "ill repute" about that. I'm guessing the teachers just weren't allowed to "hang-out" with gangs of youngsters.

[Edit: by the way, I was not able to find the original source of the material. The website quoted in the OP seems to have a quote reprinted from the Nebraska Farmer, September 1999, but the link appears to be broken.]

 

[StatGuy2000]

Makes sense to me.

I'm assuming you're being sarcastic here. :P

As for the particular restrictions on female teachers (assuming the authenticity of the document, which may be doubtful), I find it incredible just how much society has changed within a century with respect to female employment. I live in a day and age where it's perfectly normal for women to work in just about any profession -- to imagine a time not so long ago where women were effectively barred from most workplaces and didn't even have the right to vote is just mind-boggling to me.

 

[phinds]

Sounds a lot like the Arab countries today, just not quite as restrictive.

 

[russ_watters]

Some of the items on the list just plain make no sense, so I share snopes's skepticism pf its authenticity: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1872rule.asp

 

[OmCheeto]

Sounds a lot like the Arab countries today, just not quite as restrictive.

hmmm... Haven't they been complaining about our "bad influence"?

...
Mashhad[Iran] is popular for its religious tourism and old bazaar (old market) where men and women shop together. Eating out is quite popular among the youth, with their first target being ice cream parlors. It is amazing to see that you will not find a cigar shop at every corner of the city, but you will definitely find an ice cream parlor, offering you dozens of flavors. When I asked my companion why there were so much ice cream parlors in the town, she smiled and said, “We are a sweet nation, and we like to eat sweets.”
...
(ref)

That's how all this western decadence got started.

girls eating sweets...

 

[Evo]

Here's some history from PBS.

"God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems...very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price." -- Littleton School Committee, Littleton, Massachusetts, 1849

Especially in big city schools, teachers at the turn of the 20th century felt like the most insignificant cogs in a huge machine. They felt dictated to and spied upon. Furthermore, they were badly paid and lacked pension benefits or job security. Many teaching positions were dispensed through political patronage. Married women were often barred from the classroom, and women with children were denied a place in schools. And daily conditions could be deplorable.

http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

 

[OmCheeto]

Some of the items on the list just plain make no sense, so I share snopes's skepticism pf its authenticity: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1872rule.asp

hmmmm...

Sheila Hobbs Wilcox says . . . | September 16, 2013 / 7:48 pm
I worked in the Pupil Records Department of a public school district for many years. In the back of an old file cabinet I found student attendance books dated around 1895 to 1905. Several pages in the front of each book contained these same rules. The books are now part of the collection of the local museum. (ref)

Not sure if I ever mentioned the fact that I have a web page devoted to a certain brand of boat made in Gray's Harbor Washington, that ceased production in about 1960. I did a lot of web surfing to get a little bit of information. Later, I went to the library in Aberdeen, and found more information. Later on still, I went to the birthday party of the guy who built my boats. He, and his family, told me more than I can reveal.

Moral of the story?

Sometimes, you have to go to the library, and/or museum. And sometimes, well, let's just say they told me that grandpa* was found floating, face down, in Gray's Harbor one night, for no good reason...

*Grandpa started the business in the early 40's. The guy who built my boats, was his son, and was 90 when I met him, in 2005.

 

[256bits]

Some of the items on the list just plain make no sense, so I share snopes's skepticism pf its authenticity: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1872rule.asp

Part of the employment contract - suspicious.

Each school board, district, jurisdiction would have to have had local considerations, so being part of ' education history' from places such as Ontrario, Iowa, Alaska, New Zealand that have nothing to do with one another makes the listing dubious.

Quaint though.

 

[Curious3141]

Those rules might have tempted some women to carry out part of the last one quite overzealously.

...start the fire at 7 a.m. so the room will be warm at 8 a.m.

The room? Let's "warm up" the whole damned school!

 

[Evo]

The room? Let's "warm up" the whole damned school!

In many cases the entire *school* was a single room.

Has no one read the actual historical reference I posted?

 

[russ_watters]

hmmmm...

Would be nice to actually see the source instead of being told about it second-hand from a comment in a message board.

As Snopes says, it would be very odd to put a date in the rules, but very convenient for labeling the chain-letter to help spread it.

 

[russ_watters]

Has no one read the actual historical reference I posted?

I did, but it doesn't contain a copy of the linked rules or show much similarity to them.

 

[Evo]

I did, but it doesn't contain a copy of the linked rules or show much similarity to them.

Of course not, that's because they're the real thing, that's the point, they're *real*. I thought we were trying to determine what the real rules were.

I can imagine that religious schools may have even stricter rules than public schools, but what I posted was what was being normally followed at that time.

 

[256bits]

Whoops - Power went out and now finally a chance to link.

It seems that anybody and everybody and their uncle had it tough enough to have a desire to list the teacher rules. Kinda like "In my day I had to walk to school 2 miles in 3feet of snow uphill both ways".

New Hampshire
http://www.nhhistory.org/edu/support/nhgrowingup/teacherrules.pdf
British Columbia, Canada
http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/bc150/schoolhouse/female.html
Brisbane, Australia
http://www.chermsidedistrict.org.au/chermsidedistrict/01_cms/details.asp?ID=258
Illinois, USA
http://cedu.niu.edu/blackwell/oneroom/aboutTeachers.shtml
National Park Service
http://www.nps.gov/tapr/photosmultimedia/virtual-tour-school-rules-and-tests.htm

Definitely the rules came from somewhere.
Perhaps they are just a written comprehensive composite to give the sense of life of a teacher at the times.

 

[edward]

My mother was born in 1898. She did in fact walk four miles each way in order to attend high school. She graduated in 1916 and went off to Bowling Green teachers college (Normal School) for one year.

With that one year of college she was qualified to teach up to grade eight. Her first job was teaching in a one room school house that consisted of all eight grades. She was required to live with a different family from her district each semester.

Her favorite teaching position was at the one room Tamarack school in NW Ohio. She was frired from that job abruptly when school authorities found out that she had taken a summer trip to Columbus in 1919 to join in a Suffragette March demanding the right to vote for women.

The 19th amendment had been passed by that time, but had not yet been ratified by the states.

I remember her talking about many of the ridiculous things included in the OP. Not just a female teacher, but any young lady simply did not frequent an ice cream parlor.

By the turn of the 20th century, nearly 75 percent of America's teachers were women. But women made up a far smaller percentage of administrators, and their power decreased with each higher level of authority. Their deportment had always been closely watched; increasingly their work in the schoolroom was not only scrutinized, but rigidly controlled. Teacher autonomy was on the decline, and teachers resented it.

http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

 

[edward]

This link traces down the origin of the list in the OP to the USA.

http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/778

 

[collinsmark]

Interesting article on ice cream parlors:

http://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2012/08/19/ice-cream-parlors/

 

[256bits]

Those rules might have tempted some women to carry out part of the last one quite overzealously.



The room? Let's "warm up" the whole damned school!

No. Oversight from superintendants who allocated funds would have prevented that. Parents, who in many cases did not have all that much discretionary money, would have considered that unethical and immoral. Sloth was looked down. This was different times than from now.

 

[OmCheeto]

Interesting article on ice cream parlors:

http://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2012/08/19/ice-cream-parlors/

Well, that explains the ice cream parlor rule:

...
In Chicago, a number of these “ladies’ cafes,” as they were usually known, sprang up on State Street at the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, among them Gunther’s [pictured] and Plow’s. They featured special attractions – positively non-temperance drinks such as Yum Yum and a special version of Roman punch, the former 13% and the latter 20% alcohol!

It is strange, and a little jarring, to see so many advertisements of 19th-century eating places specializing in ice cream AND oysters – until you realize the two were not usually consumed together. Featuring both as specialties makes perfect sense, though, since for decades oysters were not eaten during the summer months and ice cream was eaten only then.
...

bolding and super-sized bolding mine

Booze and oysters...

...
Has no one read the actual historical reference I posted?

I searched your reference for "ice cream", and came up empty handed. So no, I didn't read it.

 

[DeIdeal]

More about why ice cream parlors were (apparently) considered a bad thing. (ctrl+f for ice cream).

 

[HeLiXe]

Those rules might have tempted some women to carry out part of the last one quite overzealously.



The room? Let's "warm up" the whole damned school!

HIlarious!