Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have learned a lot about the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalism, and we have been properly horrified.
The treatment of women by those groups has shocked us, angered us and, to be sure, made us feel not a little smug about how different we are. We don't deny women education and jobs, we don't hide women in burkas, nor do we require them to live subserviently to their men. We look with satisfaction - if you except misogynists like Jerry Falwell - on the feminist movements in our nation's history: the first wave, which culminated in women getting the vote in 1920, and the second wave in the 1970s, which achieved - well, can you specify what the results were? A greater sense of personal freedom, yes; a number of beneficial laws which reined in overt discrimination; a lot of women who do interesting things not previously considered feminine.
Yet there are some very big gaps in women's status in our free country. They don't compare with what the Taliban does, thank goodness, but that doesn't justify them. Most Americans think the feminist push gained complete victory and women no longer even need to call themselves feminists; everything has been taken care of. Sorry, that's just not so.
Most fundamentally, women's equality with men as citizens is not yet a part of our Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment has still not passed. There are many laws which protect women's rights in various ways, but laws can be changed or even abandoned; only the Constitution is an absolute guarantee. The abolition of slavery wasn't left to laws for its enactment; it took several constitutional amendments. Women are still waiting for that assurance.
Does it matter? It is easy for us to look around and say, well, women are doing all right anyway. Look at California, with two women senators. There are women officeholders everywhere - though nowhere near the 51 percent that represents women's part of the population. Women head companies and perform in just about every profession. What's the problem?
Once more, statistics tell the tale. In 1999, the average earnings of a male high school graduate were $26,842. A woman with a high school diploma was paid an average of $10,174. The same year, a male with a B.A. averaged $42,341 compared to a woman with the same B.A. who averaged $32,142. That kind of figure shows up all the way across the job spectrum; wherever they work, women's average earnings are less than men's.
You'd have to study a lot of history to understand all the whys and wherefores of that disparity, that inequity. And one of the things you'd discover, if you hadn't already known it, is that women's professions are the most stubbornly underpaid. That's where we come in.
Teaching has been a women's profession from the beginning. Remember the dame schools you learned about? And all those sentimentally remembered one-room schoolhouses with their single woman teacher? There were always enough women for the jobs too, even when education began to grow and a high school diploma became a possible goal for more and more students. Women's colleges were turning out solidly educated women, and schools were happy to hire them. There was little else for these educated women to do, because other professions were closed to them almost universally. Even today there are only three women CEOs in the Fortune 500. Moreover, it was socially unacceptable for women to work; doing so reflected on the earning ability and social standing of the husbands, who preferred that their wives remained at home, where their hard labor didn't count as work.
And when demand for teachers grew, it was still only for single women. As recently as the Depression, a woman teacher could be fired or just not hired if she were married. Some married women who desperately needed jobs hid their married status and trembled in fear of discovery. As late as World War II and the late 1940s, women applicants for teaching positions were held to different personal standards than men: their purses searched for cigarettes, their personal lives open to examination.
By that time, men were entering teaching in greater numbers and teacher unions were beginning to grow. The combination initiated higher salaries and the start of some professional respect, but the majority of teachers were still female. EdSource reported in 2000-01 that 71 percent of California teachers were women.
You may not be aware that within the lifetimes of teachers I know, there were two salary schedules, one for elementary and one for secondary teachers. Elementary teachers were almost exclusively women, and their salary schedule was lower than that of the secondary teachers, where the few males were clustered. The single salary schedule is a very modern adjustment, a belated recognition that both levels demand equal amounts of skill and preparation, regardless of the age of the students. The salary change drew men into elementary teaching, and now we do find many male teachers there.
There are more men than women at every administrative level, of course, and that's where the power, prestige and pay are. In January 2001, the National Center for Educational Statistics listed figures for 1993-94 showing that of 79,619 principals nationwide, 52,114 (65 percent) were men, and 27,505 (35 percent) were women. Women superintendents are few and far between; and women principals, though a growing force, are still clearly a minority in a profession that claims more women than men.
Today's teachers, men and women together, have developed a strong sense of professional self-respect, which has led to organizing into unions that strive to provide at the very least a decent salary. But our country has a long history of expecting its educational system to operate with dedicated, self-sacrificing women as the backbone. The assumption is that a woman is naturally drawn to children and will nurture them even if doing so means being badly treated herself. That general feeling is seldom actually expressed, but is almost always lying just under the surface of a public demand for teachers not to do something so dreadful, for example, as strike and thereby hurt children. Every professional step forward made by teachers as a group has been a victory over the built-in idea that teaching is a vocation somehow similar to that of monks or nuns, calling for unselfishness and meekness. That attitude is a hangover from the days when women constituted the teaching force almost exclusively, and when women could be depended upon to enter teaching, since so little else was available to them.
Times have changed. Sadly, the people responsible for budgeting our educational system are still caught up in the old feelings, even though they really do know better. Somehow or other, teachers are supposed to make do because they love children. Workplace conditions and salary considerations acceptable in other professions, such as seniority and transfer rights, are seen as impediments to school improvement by reform authorities. Meanwhile, we're running out of teachers: Other occupations are open to women, and they're leaving schoolrooms for better jobs. Rather than blame them, or jail them, we need to listen to them and then do what is right for the classrooms of our state. And while we're at it, let's demand accountability from all the experts who tell us what, when, where and how to teach, and then blame us when their schemes fail.
Make no mistake about it. We all, women and men, chose teaching because we wanted to be with the kids, but that wish should not be held against us, to deprive us of professional standing and privilege. Free public education made this nation great. And that education came primarily from women until recently. America owes a great debt to those women teachers, and the way to pay it is to treat all teachers, women and men, with respect.
