Those Good Gertrudesexplores the professional, civic, and personal roles of women teachers throughout American history. Its voice, themes, and findings build from the mostly unpublished writings of many women and their families, colleagues, and pupils. Geraldine J. Clifford studied personal history manuscripts in archives and consulted printed autobiographies, diaries, correspondence, oral histories, interviewseven film and fictionto probe the multifaceted imagery that has surrounded teaching.
This broad ranging, inclusive, and comparative work surveys a long past where schoolteaching was essentially men's work, with women relegated to restricted niches such as teaching rudiments of the vernacular language to young children and socializing girls for traditional gender roles. Clifford documents and explains the emergence of women as the prototypical schoolteachers in the United States, a process apparent in the late colonial period and continuing through the nineteenth century, when they became the majority of American public and private schoolteachers.
The capstone of Clifford's distinguished career and the definitive book on women teachers in America, Those Good Gertrudes will engage scholars in the history of education and women's history, teachers past, present, and future, and readers with vivid memories of their own teachers.
Introduction 1. ""It Is Well That Women Should Be Unlettered"" 2. ""School Dames in Each Quarter"" 3. ""A Sisterhood of Instruction, Essential to the World's Progress"" 4. ""Overflowing from the Domestic Circle"" 5. ""An Honorable Breadwinning Weapon"" 6. ""The Presiding Genius of His Home and Heart"" 7. ""In the Mind's Eye"" 8. ""Higher Prospects for a Useful Life"" 9. ""Laboring Conscientiously, Though Perhaps Obscurely"" 10. ""The Great Perplexities of the Teacher-Life"" 11. ""That Our Daughters May Be as Cornerstones"" 12. ""The Feast of Reason and Flow of Soul"" 13. ""A Lady Well Qualified to Show the Way"" Notes An Essential Reference Guide Archives Consulted for the Good Gertrudes Project Index
""It is as such a useful resource for historians of the teaching profession and for any of us who wish to reshape labor practices in the academy, who wish to rethink our professional identities, who wish to acknowledge the significant history and work of the educator.""