In his 68th year toward heaven, my father stood in Pendleton splendor before his mirror. He re-combed his hair. He checked his shoulders for any lint that dared touch perfection. He ran a soft brush over pointed-toed boots, put on his best Stetson. He counted enough quarters to run his old Bronco through the car wash, pulled in his stomach, and left the house. He was to lunch with his mother… and his first-grade teacher, a woman who had set standards so high that sixty years later he remembered.
This week we recognize women internationally. I wish to recognize my father’s teacher and the thousands of women who have stood in fronts of classrooms with the mandate and skills to create an educated society. The first American public classroom in 1642 was most likely taught by a stern male: since 1918, when all 48 states required public education, most of those classrooms have been fronted by women, sometimes equally as stern.
I was born 17 years after the universal education laws went into effect. I think my first words were, “Open your books to page 67 and diagram the first three sentences.” I always wanted to be a teacher and, I think, my date of birth helped make that happen.
In 1935, the First World War was over but worse had followed: the 1929 bank closings, a severe depression and years of drought. My parents at 23 and 27 had three children and, as they said, starved out of North Dakota.
They traveled west to the beet fields in Colorado, had another child, then traveled to the cherry orchards along the east shore of Montana’s Flathead Lake. Another child. They provided. And sent us to school where I met the first of many women who were teachers.
Both depression and drought drug on, but there were teachers: wives whose income (low because they were women) helped their families survive, and unmarried women, the spinster or old maid, who would be an economic burden to her family. These women were allowed to teach, paid very little, and had contracts that stipulated their behavior, what they could and could not do, say, wear, or spend. But they could teach.
I was born into that social and economic acceptance for women as teachers. And not long after that a huge need for teachers. WWII created the booming war time economy, a drain on war age males, all citizens united for the war cause. Then it was over.
The birth rate went up, then massive numbers of school age children in classrooms still led by the same women. It took years for universities to increase and handle the trickle of students who chose to be teachers, not at all a sexy choice.
I was a junior in high school before I met a teacher whose hair was neither grey, white, or nonexistent. Years later, in the 1960s, I first met a male middle school teacher, and on into the ‘90s before I met a male elementary schoolteacher. While the numbers have evened out, most administrators were male, but I never wanted the boredom of an office.
As a child of the ‘30s I was pushed by the tradition of female (even unmarried) teachers and pulled by the huge need for teachers – and my lifelong love. I became one before completing a degree. After even two years of college, states offered “emergency certificates” – there truly were emergencies where no teacher was available.
My first effort, then, was such an emergency at a one-room schoolhouse in the mountains almost to Canada, peopled by loggers, Forest Service families, mountain families, seven kids, and me. I had no idea what I was doing but I learned about teaching and the women who kept schools open.
The next year I taught in a small town just off Highway 2 west of Glacier Park and then returned to finish my degrees, but always to teach. I could, and did, teach wherever I wanted. Always I learned more than I taught.
Administration? I was never interested. The numbers have evened out, but for years most administrators were male. Early teacher unions were social but by the 1960s they became bargaining units: salaries based on years of experience and education, male or female.
I have driven by the remnants of the building where my father spent his six years of education. I can envision the short kid with tousled dark hair, dusty boots, clean but wrinkled shirt, pencil in his left hand, examining the single room with desks, blackboard, and the young woman he would call “Ma’am” even sixty years later.
To have been a member of this union of teachers, mostly women who for decades kept schools open and children literate, has been magnificent.