Surrogate family values: The refeminization of teaching

Educational Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 315-339

  Thompson, Audrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF UTAH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002192694     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00315.x     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Redding S. Sugg, Jr., Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 67.
2. See Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), especially 81-83 and 96-100.
3. David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 77-78
4. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 349-51, 357, 362-64, and 367-79.
5. The traditional indictment offered of private sphere values is that they are necessarily too personal, based on private passions rather than considerations of justice.
6. See Carole Pateman, "'The Disorder of Women': Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice," Ethics 91 (1980): 2-34.
7. To some feminists, the private sphere's potential for anti-state activism is a resource to be tapped:
8. see, for example, Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine, 1989). Other feminists, such as Patricia Hill Collins, have pointed out that family values are more likely to serve nationalist interests than to challenge the status quo. Patricia Hill Collins, "On Moms, Mammies, Madonnas, and Matriarchs: Racism, Nationalism, and Motherhood," invited address at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1 March 1993.
9. On the bridging function of schools,
10. see Linda J. Nicholson, "Women and Schooling" Educational Theory 30, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 225-33.
11. This function started to become particularly pronounced during the progressive era, when freelance mothering came under intense scrutiny by "experts." Whereas amateur mothers represented all the dangers of emotionalism and particularity, professional maternal stand-ins such as teachers would subordinate affection to the requirements of rational development. See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979), 196-210.
12. For discussions of teaching as a feminized profession, see Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800-1840," in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Peck (New York: Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster, 1979), 182-96;
13. Sugg, Mother teacher; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 123-27;
14. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 59-65;
15. Nicholson, "Women and Schooling";
16. Margaret Adams, "The Compassion Trap," in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: New American Library, 1971), 555-75;
17. Madeleine R. Grumet, Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
18. Because it is the profession of teaching itself that has been feminized and is being claimed for refeminization, the point is not whether an individual teacher happens to be a woman or a man, but whether his or her standing as a teacher is associated with public sphere or private sphere values and authority. In a feminized profession such as teaching or nursing, both male and female members of the profession will be identified with its "feminine" character (for example, they are charged with nurturing their students or patients).
19. Catharine Beecher herself was neither married nor a mother, and her biographer, Kathryn Kish Sklar, makes a persuasive case that since Beecher found her "natural" vocation as wife and mother closed to her, she was driven to invent a professional alternative to that vocation, an alternative that not only would allow her to claim the domestic virtues but would allow her to maneuver in the public realm of wage-earning and systems-planning. Sklar does an outstanding job of showing how Beecher's attempts to carve a niche for herself were shaped both by the particulars of her family and personal history and by the historical circumstances of young, white, Protestant, middle-class women in the United States at the time. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973). In addition to Sklar's biography,
20. see Catharine E. Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1847), Catharine E. Beecher, Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession (Hartford: Brown and Gross, 1871), and the Beecher selections in Barbara M. Cross, ed., The Educated Woman in America: Selected Writings of Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, and M. Carey Thomas (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965).
21. See also the discussions in Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and Sugg, Motherteacher.
22. Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (Chatauqua, N.Y.: The Chatauqua Press, 1907), 180-207.
23. While Martin, Noddings, and Gilligan and such colleagues as Brown, Taylor, and Sullivan all explicitly indicate the intended inclusiveness of their approaches, my argument will be that they have not theorized the values they endorse in such a way as to avoid simply imposing fairly conventional - albeit liberalized -"family values" on those whom they seek to include.
24. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 187-89
25. Grumet, Bitter Milk, 37
26. Sugg, Motherteacher, 38-39.
27. See Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic and Nasaw, Schooled to Order.
28. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 67-68;
29. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 79-80
30. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 23-24, 135, and 144-54.
31. Henry Barnard, "Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools," in School Reform: Past and Present, ed. Michael B. Katz (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), 10.
32. Nasaw, Schooled to Order, 33.
33. Katz, Doucet, and Stern, Social Organization, 350-51. Although ideologically education is still understood as a form of empowerment, its actual institutional purpose, historically, has been to assimilate children to the dominant social order.
34. See Grumet, Bitter Milk, 37-57
35. Sugg, Motherteacher, 73-74.
36. Sugg, Motherteacher, 61-85.
37. See David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 65. These women had in fact already begun the process of feminizing teaching "long before Horace Mann and Henry Barnard discovered the virtues of women teachers and advocated public normal schools" 66.
38. In claiming women to be naturally purer than men, Beecher was simply accepting the common view of the day, which was that women's role was to exercise moral suasion over men and children.
39. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 80-90
40. Sugg, Motherteacher, 18-37;
41. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman' Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 69-74;
42. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 11-35.
43. On the intended social and moral functions of schooling, see Katz, Doucet, and Stem, Social Organization; Orestes Brownson, "Orestes Brownson in Opposition to Centralization, 1839," in School Reform, 277-87; Sugg, Motherteacher, 49-50, 54, and 70; and Sklar, Catharine Beecher.
44. Beecher spoke of a "Pink and White Tyranny" as promising a new organization to the social order. It is doubtful that readers encountering the word "tyranny" were soothed by the words "pink and white." Catharine E. Beecher, Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession (Hartford: Brown and Gross, 1871), 58, quoted in Sugg, Motherteacher, 51.
45. Women have actually lost ground as men have taken over once-female areas of knowledge and competency.
46. See Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl"
47. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 183-265;
48. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 50-93;
49. Michael Zuckerman, "Dr. Spock: The Confidence Man," in The Family in History, ed, Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 179-207.
50. It is crucial to note, however, that, even just within the United States, the correspondence Beecher and others have assumed between the private sphere and "women's sphere" docs not extend to all women. Working-class women, for example, usually have worked outside the home or else have brought piece work into the home. Black women, under slavery, were expected to do the same work as men,- later, under advanced capitalism, they often worked in other women's homes. For Navajo culture, the Western public/ private dichotomy is also misleading.
51. See Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the I United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
52. Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983);
53. Rose Brewer, "Black Women in Poverty: Some Comments on Female-Headed Families," Signs 13 (Winter 1988): 331-39;
54. Donna Deyhle and Frank Margonis, "Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Schools, Jobs, and the Family," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26, no. 2 (June 1995): 135-67.
55. This argument is beautifully set forth in Lerner, "Lady and the Mill Girl." Lerner points out that, whereas women in the colonial era had enjoyed substantial control over female occupations such as midwifery; women in the antebellum era were subject to male supervision even for "women's work." However, for immigrant and working-class women, teaching did offer greater access to social goods; by contrast, middle-class women experienced no particular social gains from entering the teaching profession. (Also see Grumet, Bitter Milk.) Linda Perkins has extended this argument by pointing out that, for black women, teaching was a considerable source of social power, not only from the point of view of income and respectability but, even more importantly, from that of "uplifting the race."
56. See Linda Perkins, "The Impact of the Cult of True Womanhood on the Education of Black Women," Journal of Social Issues 39 (September 1983): 17-28.
57. "Ethics of care theorists" of course include many other theorists besides Noddings, Martin, and Gilligan, and not all such theorists address caring as an issue for the schools. For the purposes of the present essay, however, I will use the term "ethics of care" primarily'in connection with these three authors and with the project of educational reform through caring.
58. Jane Roland Martin, The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 30. Unfortunately, ethics of care theorists do not address political, economic, or other analyses regarding why families might not perform these functions well.
59. Jane Roland Martin, "The Ideal of the Educated Person" Educational Theory 31, no. 2 (Spring, 1981): 97-109.
60. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 159.
61. Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
62. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation;Jane Roland Martin, "Excluding Women from the Educational Realm" Harvard Educational Review 52, no. 2 (1982): 133-48;
63. Jane Roland Martin, "Sophie and Emile: A Case Study of Sex Bias in the History of Educational Thought" Harvard Educational Review 51, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 357-72.
64. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)
65. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).
66. Betty Bardige, "Things so Finely Human: Moral Sensibilities at Risk in Adolescence," in Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, ed. Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, Jill McLean Taylor, and Betty Bardige (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 87-110.
67. Bardige, "Things So Finely Human"
68. Carol Gilligan, "Teaching Shakespeare's Sister: Notes from the Underground of Female Adolescence," in Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, ed. Carol Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 6-29.
69. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 2.
70. Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), xii, 13, 30-34, 37.
71. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15.
72. Noddings, Challenge to Care, 153.
73. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 17.
74. Noddings, Challenge to Care, 63, 47, and 54.
75. Martin, Schoolhome, 84. The three C's are first identified on p. 34.
76. For a feminist critique of child-centered education
77. see Valerie Walkerdine, "Femininity as Performance," Oxford Review of Education 15, no. 3 (1989): 267-79.
78. See Noddings, Caring. The strength of this model is its refusal to accept adult reciprocity as a framework for all moral relations - a refusal that is key to Noddings's challenge to justice theorists: why should voluntary contractual or abstract egalitarian models of relationship be taken as paradigmatic, when the mother/child dependency relation is both natural and indispensable? Unfortunately, this model also accepts an individualistic conception of relationship, according to which only one person's consciousness can be fully present at any given time. For the child to be present, the mother must temporarily "displace" herself. As Betty Friedan long ago showed, it is all too easy for women's identities to get misplaced in the process. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963/1974).
79. Martin, Schoolhome, 13.
80. Of course, this insight is not unique to theorists of care. Feminist theorists from many disciplines and political traditions have argued that the public realm is parasitic on the free labor of the private sphere - that, for example, the business world operates on the assumption that workers have wives, and that their wives will not only care for workers' personal needs but will help to "restore" workers sufficiently to send them back to the workplace refreshed and able to work at peak efficiency. This continues to be the expectation of the workplace (and of workers) even now that single-earner families are becoming a rarity. See Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).
81. In contrast with the ethics of care (or "feminine" ethics) literature, the literature in feminist ethics focuses far more on power relations.
82. See, for example, Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics (Lawrence- University Press of Kansas, 1991);
83. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988);
84. Rosemarie Tong, Feminine and Feminist Ethics (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1993).
85. Pateman, "Disorder of Women."
86. See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political ThoughtPublic Man, Private Woman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
87. In addition to Pateman's "Disorder of Women,"
88. see Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
89. While at times liberalism has recognized and even valorized caring as a crucial social function, the value accorded caring is strictly sentimental. Sentimental recognition offers a way to grant "equal" status to women without granting them access to public sphere power or privilege. Significantly, it is a status largely reserved for white, middle-class women
90. This assumption has conveniently informed the continual refusal to grant higher pay to teachers or nurses, on the grounds that higher pay would attract people who only pretended to care about students and patients. Of course, this concern has not affected doctors' pay.
91. In her study of the relations between white housewives and black domestics, for example, Judith Rollins found that "the personal relationship between employer and employee" though valued by both groups of women, "allow[ed] for a level of psychological exploitation unknown in other occupations." Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 156. She argues that the "'caring' and 'empathy' that are unquestionably a part of the maternalism from employer to domestic must be scrutinized carefully" since they may "reinforce the inequality of the relationship" 186, 193. Giving old clothes or leftover food to domestic workers, and exacting their gratitude, for example, makes employers feel good about themselves, but demonstrates to the recipients that they are considered lucky to have unsolicited, discarded goods foisted upon them
92. "Emotional labor" as I have used the term in this paper refers in part to "the management of others' emotions." Cheshire Calhoun, "Emotional Work" in Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap McQuin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 118. It also refers to the "psychological labor" involved in attending to and anticipating others' needs. Diane Ehrensaft, "When Women and Men Mother" in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J.: Rowrnan and Allanheld, Publishers, 1983), 53.
93. The phrase comes from a 1923 contest concerning cooperative home services and is quoted in Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), 270.
94. Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: WAV. Norton, 1984), 68-69.
95. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 42.
96. See also 18-23. As Dolores Hayden points out in The Grand Domestic Revolution, the "home" in question is always assumed to be the isolated, labor-intensive, single-family dwelling rather than, say, "kitchenless apartments with nurseries and community kitchens" 282. Even "the new feminists, who tried to share child care and housework with men. .took for granted three-bedroom houses with kitchens full of appliances," 289.
97. Martin, Schoolhome, 20.
98. Brown and Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads, 84
99. Noddings, Caring, 176.
100. Noddings, Challenge to Care, 91.
101. Jill McLean Taylor, Carol Gilligan, and Amy M. Sullivan, Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls. Race and Relationship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 200.
102. In a review of Between Voice and Silence that appeared in Educational Studies 27, no. 3 (Fall 1996), I discuss the individualistic assumptions underlying this analysis (see 253-61).
103. Noddings, Challenge to Care, 13.
104. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
105. Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey, Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters (London: Virago, 1989);
106. Lisa D. Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children" Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 3 (August 1988): 280-98.
107. Martin, Schoolhome, 12.
108. While Martin elsewhere suggests that schools cannot try to protect children from knowledge of worldly evils (see 80-81), her point in this case is that schooling cannot ignore the evils with which students are already familiar. Nevertheless, she argues that in some sense schools can serve as a "haven in a hostile world" 209.
109. Martin, Schoolhome, 11.
110. See, for example, Maxine Seller, "The Education of Immigrant Women, 1900-1935," Journal of Urban History 4 (1978): 307-30;
111. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good;
112. George J. Sanchez, "'Go after the Women': Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 250-63.
113. Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossssey-Bass, 1994).