About Woman's "True" Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching

"Women have always been teachers." So begins this second edition of Nancy Hoffman's classic history of women and the teaching profession in the United States. With this revised collection of her own essays and the writings of early women teachers, Hoffman offers a rich and fascinating portrait of educational life in America.

The documents that enrich this volume include autobiographical writings of teachers who practiced between 1830 and 1920. Hoffman's essays probe the socioeconomic factors that led women into teaching, analyze the roles that women teachers played in effecting social change, and assess the impact of urbanization and bureaucracy on teaching.

This second edition greatly expands on and revises the central focus of the original book, drawing on several decades of feminist research and analysis that was not available when the first edition was published. In addition, it includes a thoroughly reconsidered account of the relationship between race and education, together with archival materials written by Black women teachers that were not known at the time of the first edition.

A book that explores the full range of contributions, challenges, successes, and frustrations that marked these early teacher's careers, Woman's "True" Profession is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the teaching profession.

Back to top

Table of Contents for Woman's "True" Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching

Chapter One
Seminary for Social Power: The Classroom Becomes Woman's Sphere by Nancy Hoffman

Pioneering the Education of Young Women by Emma Hart Willard
Teaching in the Little Red Schoolhouse by Lucia B. Downing
Remedy for Wrongs to Women by Catherine Beecher
"Civilizing" the West: Letters from the Frontier by Ellen P. Lee and Mary S. Adams
Preparing to Teach: A Journal by Mary Swift
Reminiscences of School life, and Hints on Teaching by Fanny Jackson-Coppin
The Schoolmarm by Anna Fuller

Chapter Two
A Noble Work Done Earnestly: Missionary Teachers in the Civil War South by Nancy Hoffman

Teaching During the Civil War: A Fourteen-Year-Old's Story by Susie King Taylor
Missionary Maidens by Mary Clemmer Ames
From Northern Home to Southern Dangers by Maria S. Waterbury
Sisters in the Service by Sarah Chase, Lucy Chase, and Julia Rutledge
Hard Work Every Day: A New England Woman's Diary in Dixie by Mary Ames
An African American Teacher in South Carolina by Charlotte L. Forten
Emancipation's Primer: The Freedmen's Book by Lydia Maria Child
New Rules for African American and White by Elizabeth Hyde Botume
An African American Oberlin Student Goes South by Sara Stanley
A Good Life, Staying On by Laura M. Towne
The March of Progress by Charles W. Chesnutt

Chapter Three
Teaching in the Big City: Women, the Education Bureaucracy, and Teacher Organizing by Nancy Hoffman

The True Character of the New York Public Schools by Adele Marie Shaw
The Inquisition of the Teacher, or, "Gum Shoe Tim" on the War-Path by Myra Kelly
Schoolteacher's Nightmare by Mary Abigail Dodge
The First Class: A Reminiscence by Marian Dogherty
An Immigrant Student and Her Teacher by Mary Antin
My Mother's Principal and Mine: A Personal Interview with Mary Agnes Dwyer by Nancy Hoffman
Teaching in an African American Boarding School by Frances O. Grant
Public Schools "Owned" by Politicians by "Amelia Allison"
Why Teachers Should Organize by Margaret Haley
Equal Pay for Equal Work by Grace C. Strachan

Back to top

Online Resources

Schlesinger Library
http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles/
"The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study draws thousands of researchers each year to study the history of women in the United States. The library holds letters and diaries, photographs, books and periodicals, ephemera, oral histories, and audiovisual materials that document the history of women, families, and organizations, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also home to an extensive culinary collection. Materials do not circulate, but the library is open to all, free of charge. The Schlesinger Library also houses the Radcliffe Archives."

H-Women
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~women
"H-Women, an edited electronic discussion group set up by Richard Jensen in May 1993 as part of the H-Net project at the University of Illinois at Chicago. H-Women now is based at Michigan State University and has an advisory board of scholars. Please visit our website located at www.h-net.msu.edu/~women"

H-Education
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~educ
"H-Education seeks to link participants with shared interests in the history of education, broadly defined as a recognized field covering both formal and informal institutions and processes regarding teaching and learning. We anticipate that our audience will reflect the makeup of our editorial and advisory committee: university professors, independent scholars, educators, and graduate students, from departments such as History, American Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies, as well as Schools of Education."

National Women's Studies Association
http://www.nwsa.org
"NWSA supports and promotes feminist/womanist teaching, learning, research, and professional and community service at the pre-K through post-secondary levels and serves as a locus of information about the inter-disciplinary field of Women's Studies for those outside the profession."

American Women's History: A Research Guide
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women.html
"American Women's History provides citations to print and Internet reference sources, as well as to selected large primary source collections. The guide also provides information about the tools researchers can use to find additional books, articles, dissertations, and primary sources."

National Women's History Project
http://www.nwhp.org
"The National Women's History Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the diverse and historic accomplishments of women by providing information and educational material and programs."

Women, Enterprise, and Society
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/
"The manuscript collections at Baker Library contain a broad range of materials documenting the history of female small-business owners, investors, professionals, executives, consumers, executors of estates, household managers, and wage laborers. These resources, however, were often overlooked because they were not identified as such either in the printed guides to the collection or in the online records. In May 1999 the Historical Collections Department began a comprehensive survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American manuscript holdings in the Business Manuscripts Collection for material related to the history of women."

National Association for Women in Education
http://www.nawe.org
"NAWE's mission is to address issues in higher education, with particular attention to the interests, scholarship, and advancement of women educators and students. In a supportive, diverse organizational environment for educators from a broad range of specialties, NAWE develops leaders for today and tomorrow."

National Council for Research on Women
http://www.ncrw.org/"
"The National Council for Research on Women, founded in 1981, is a working alliance of 92 women's research and policy centers, more than 3,000 affiliates and a network of over 200 international centers. NCRW's mission is to enhance the connections among research, policy analysis, advocacy, and innovative programming on behalf of women and girls."

Five College Women's Studies Research Center
http://wscenter.hampshire.edu
"The Five College Women's Studies Research Center, founded in 1991, supports scholarly and creative work in women's studies by: providing visiting residencies for feminist scholars, teachers, artists, and activists from the United States and abroad creating a structure for Five College faculty, local community activists, and teachers with research interests in women's studies to discuss, critique, and facilitate one another's work sponsoring faculty seminars, community workshops, and networking events on topics of importance to women's studies organizing national and international conferences on scholarship and teaching in women's studies encouraging the use of archival collections on women in the Five College area."

Women in Higher Education
http://www.wihe.com
"Now serving 12,000 readers, it's the only monthly source of news and views to provide an overview of issues affecting women on campus. We're proud to have readers call it subversive, irreverent, humanistic, personal, practical, funny and informative. . . Each month WIHE subscribers receive a current issue of 24-40 pages, which includes 12 to 20 major articles on issues affecting women on campus and about 15 shorter news clips."

History of Women in Education
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/links10w.html
"This page is limited, more or less, to resources about women in formal education history. Some other related links (about motherhood, or growing up as a girl in the past) can be found at the parenthood and childhood links pages."

Women's Studies Programs, Departments, and Research Centers
http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/programs.html
"What follows are links to more than 650 women's studies (including "gender studies") programs, departments, and research centers around the world that have web sites. Programs and departments offering graduate degrees or concentrations have this fact noted in an annotation below the link. For a much larger list of women's studies programs, including those without web sites, see the journal Women's Studies Quarterly, the September issue of PMLA, or Gerri Gribi's listing of Women's Studies programs in the U.S."

Reference and Research Links in Women's Studies
http://www.smith.edu/wst/reference.html
This link is to a reference page produced by the department of Women's Studies at Smith College (http://www.smith.edu/wst/home.html).

University of Wisconsin-Madison's Selected Women and Gender Resources on the World Wide Web
http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/others.htm
This link connects to a comprehensive resource page produced by the Library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It uses the Google search engine to great effect.

If you have any suggestions for links, please contact: hepg@harvard.edu Thanks!

Back to top

Publishing Information

Woman's "True" Profession:
Voices from the History of Teaching
SECOND EDITION
by Nancy Hoffman
©2003
ISBN 1-891792-15-6 $59.95 library, ORDER
ISBN 1-891792-13-X $29.95 paperback, ORDER
350 pages

Back to top