New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage
By Rachel Rosenberg
On May 7, 1908, Carrie Chapman Catt, the famous American suffragist, spoke at Association Hall in New York City. There were women in the hallway outside selling “suffragette” buttons. The hall was packed despite the bad weather, and the event went on past 11 pm. The evening, however, was not about suffrage. It was a meeting of the Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT), the organization demanding equal salaries for men and women teachers in New York City. Alongside many other speakers, Catt spoke as a woman taxpayer about the number of problems in the country that the women teachers in public schools were being asked to solve, and how important these teachers were to the nation. Her speech called for equal pay for women teachers, but also for woman’s suffrage in acknowledgment of that importance.[1]
Yet the IAWT was officially neutral on the suffrage question. It received support from woman’s suffrage and labor organizations and occasionally gave secret aid in return, but its leader sand the organization publicly and vocally distances themselves from suffrage and most women’s labor politics. The IAWT had one goal, and one goal only, in the years between 1906 and 1911: to win, as they termed it, “equal pay for equal work.” And in 1911, three years after the evening in Association Hall and five years after they started their movement, they succeeded, when the governor of the State of New York signed a bill into law mandating equalized salaries for men and women teachers in New York City’s public schools.[2]
This is perhaps the most surprising element in the story of the New York City women teacher’s fight for equal pay: it was successful. More than five years before New York State would pass a woman’s suffrage bill, and almost half a century before the enactment of national equal pay laws, New York City’s women teachers achieved equal pay by state mandate; in fact, without a few key opponents with veto power, they likely would have succeeded more quickly.
How were they successful? The answer is a testament to the power of the rhetoric of maternalism, the strength of teacher organizing, and the singularity of New York City and State.
The problem of equal pay arose most directly from the unusual situation of New York City and State politics. The consolidation of Manhattan and the other boroughs into one New York City under State regulation in 1898 wreaked havoc with the area’s schools. Before consolidation, each of the boroughs had their own school systems, boards, requirements, and teacher pay scales. In trying to maintain local power and unify five different systems, consolidation pleased no one when it came to the schools. One of the problems became how to pay teachers, with salaries slow to come and often going unpaid due to complications with the changing system. The city’s teachers eventually turned to the State legislature, the originators of consolidation and thus the salary problem, to ensure they got their salaries. In 1900, the legislature passed a bill stating a uniform pay scale for them.
This 1900 bill, the Davis Law, codified unequal pay in New York City and set up the precedent for future pay struggles. At the time, the city’s men and women teachers accepted the legislation as a temporary solution to the problems plaguing the system. Within a few years, however, the women began to chafe at the inequality in their pay, especially those from Brooklyn, who had received equal pay in their borough prior to consolidation. After a brief struggle with male teachers in the existing teacher’s organizations, the women teachers created their own, the IAWT, specifically to fight for equal pay with their male counterparts. They launched a massive awareness campaign, gaining the support of much of the city’s population. Because unequal pay was codified by state mandate, they quickly learned that they would also have to turn to the Legislature.
From Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work
Their quest for equal pay proved popular in both the city and the Legislature. The women teachers of the city — almost all of whom joined the IAWT, according to the organization — earned massive public and political support, from political, social, and labor leaders to legislators and members of the clergy. In part, undoubtedly, this was because New York City residents supported their schools and their teachers. But it was also because the IAWT members had a one-issue agenda that they kept separate from all other political questions. They were rewarded for their narrow focus on equal pay, supported by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers without whom their bills might not have been introduced. Many of these politicians were strongly and actively anti-suffrage.
Political distance did not necessarily mean women teachers were against suffrage, however. They were educated, wielded political power, and understood democracy in a special way — after all, they taught it. As Mabel Adams, a Boston teacher, wrote in a pamphlet urging women teachers to support the suffrage movement, “Is it wise or expedient for the youth of any State to receive all its teaching in democratic principles from teachers who are themselves a living negation of the principle that ‘Government derive their just powers from the consent of the governed?’” And, as Alice Stone Blackwell argued in the publication for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, giving women the vote would bring needed money and support to the schools, as demonstrated in the Western states with woman’s suffrage and as claimed necessary by many school leaders and scholars. [3]
IAWT Borough Vice Presidents, 1910. In Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work.
Their educational attainment and role in the classroom also made women teachers more aware of their economic inequalities, just as it could make them acutely aware of their political disenfranchisement. The insult of being paid less than men and women in unskilled jobs, especially considering the time and money they committed to their educations, rankled. These women, at least in the short run, put economics over politics, prioritizing equal pay over suffrage in their organizational strategy. Focusing on the question of equal pay also helped the teachers avoid charges of political radicalism that other women activists faced at the time. Equal pay for equal work, the women teachers argued, was simply a matter of justice; justice for women doing an acceptable and important job they were especially, if not uniquely, qualified for.
This rhetorical and political tactic worked because teaching had long been deemed an acceptable role for young, middle-class women in America. By the early twentieth century, the majority of the country’s teachers were women, and the classroom was seen by many, in the words of education activist Catherine Beecher, as an “appendage of the family state.” Women teachers were workers, but they were workers who could nevertheless preserve middle-class status in a job for which many education activists and much of the public saw them as specifically qualified. If, as the women teachers argued with much political skill, they were doing their gendered duty and helping the nation in their roles as teachers, then anything they did under the auspices of that job, even if it was fighting for their own economic empowerment, was acceptable and not a major break with gender norms of the period.[4]
And so, the women teachers embraced this image as the metaphorical and nurturing mothers of New York City’s children (despite the fact that they were not allowed to be literal mothers, as New York still banned married women from teaching). “We are all of us mothers,” IAWT president Grace Strachan declared. They highlighted their work as equal to, if not better than, men teachers, and laughed at the idea that women were not good teachers for children, suggesting for example, in the words of IAWT member, “If a woman’s influence is detrimental to a boy’s full development, then a law should be enacted to do away with mothers, as they are notoriously open to criticism in this respect.”[5]
LAWT President Grace Strachan. In Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work.
Despite their use of many of the same political tactics as suffrage and labor women, women teachers encountered far fewer accusations from opponents that they were violating their womanhood. One male teacher, after a trip to a hearing over an equal pay bill at the capitol building in Albany, complained: “Everywhere I looked a group of women had some poor devil of a Senator or Assemblyman in a corner, and they didn’t let him go until he promised to support the bill,” adding that the beauty of the women made their strategy unfair. It was not, precisely, that he objected to women in Albany lobbying senators, though perhaps he did. Rather, he did not think he could compete with their strategies, pointing to the success of their lobbying abilities and linking it to their femininity. And a would-be political candidate, considering running for office in Brooklyn in 1908, decided not to run when he was told by his party that he would have to run against equal pay, apparently declaring: “Not on your life. The women have shown themselves too good politicians.”[6]
The women, of course, were not politicians in the traditional sense of voters or elected officials — New York State did not pass a woman’s suffrage bill until 1917. But their political presence significantly impacted political movers and shakers. The women teachers would meet with anyone and support any politician who was for their cause, regardless of party or other political principles. The “women teachers lobby,” as they became known, was formidable in both New York City and Albany. They implemented a “club to club” canvass among civic, labor, taxpayer, and women’s organizations, gaining the support of hundreds of clubs representing hundreds of thousands of voters. They went door-to-door getting signatures on petitions, even having their students bring home petitions to be signed. They used connections they had through family, students, or the organizations that had endorsed them, getting letters of support from the city’s best-known members. “If we needed them, we could get a hundred of the most prominent men in the city to go to Albany to talk for us; but their presence is not necessary. We have their support, and they have signed our petitions,” an IAWT member reported.[7]
Sample Letters in support of the IAWT, 1910. In Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work.
The IAWT ensured there would be hundreds of women teachers at each of the Senate and Assembly hearings in Albany, even hiring special trains to bring all of the women. They testified in hearings and supported speakers. They met with and had allies meet with individual legislators, inside and outside of the committee. They were a major presence anytime equal pay was up for discussion, and many times when it was not. “Influence of all sorts, except bribery, was brought to bear on the legislators,” local paper the Brooklyn Daily Eagle summarized. “Day and night the lawmakers had no peace, and on Sundays at their homes they received visits from friends of the teachers.”[8]
Unwilling to leave anything to chance, the women teachers worked hard to support legislators who had supported them, despite not having the vote themselves. “There are 12,000 [women teachers], and they have friends, and if a man opposed to this bill has political ambitions he might as well bury them,” the New York Times noted. The women teachers and their allies, even before they legally won equal pay in 1911 and certainly before they had the vote, demonstrated that they could be a powerful political force. They were able to do so, moreover, without violating their maternal image or appropriate gender roles. By creating an intensive political lobby and using their connections with voters of all kinds to flex their political muscle, the women teachers demonstrated that, as women, they could achieve legislative success on an issue distinct to them, and significantly influence the political process of the city and state.[9]
After equal pay had been won, some of New York City’s women teachers became active in the suffrage campaign. Others turned their attention to causes like the peace movement or the labor movement or withdrew from political action entirely. Some, undoubtedly, were against suffrage. The organization as a whole had certainly drawn a clear line in the sand: until equal pay was achieved, it was the only political or economic goal they would publicly support. However, in the six years the IAWT was fighting for equal pay, the women teachers of New York City had modeled many forms of political activity that were still up for debate in the suffrage movement. And the images of women marching through the streets in New York City, cornering legislators in Albany, and making it difficult for politicians to win office without their support, all while pushing for their own self-interested economic equality with men and maintaining their middle-class respectability and maternal qualifications, served to open space for later, more radical women’s activism.
Rachel Rosenberg is a PhD Candidate in History at Yale University, where she studies the gender and sexuality history of America’s public school teachers.
[1] “Teachers Applaud Political Equality,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” March 7, 1908, accessed at newspapers.com.
[2] For New York’s women teachers, “equal pay” meant on the basis of sex, not race. While their focus was gender and the organization appeared to be entirely white, however, various proponents of the equal pay laws occasionally included color and race in their lists of qualities that should not define wages, although the final law only explicitly banned discrimination in pay based on sex. At least in theory, however, New York did not discriminate on race in teachers’ salaries at this point, and New York no longer had legally segregated schools; most of the borough’s “colored” schools had been closed or integrated by the mid-1880s, with the last “colored” schools in New York City closed by state law in 1900. See Grace Strachan, Equal pay for equal work; the story of the struggle for justice being made by the women teachers of the city of New York (New York: B. F. Buck & Company, 1910), accessed online at hatitrust.org, 118, 205; Archie Emerson Palmer, The New York public schools; being a history of free education in the city of New York (New York: Macmillan Company, 1905), accessed online at haithitrust.org, 292.
[3] Mabel E. Adams, “The Teachers’ branch of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for good governance [electronic resource]” (Boston: s.n., 1918), accessed at Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Harvard Schlesinger; Alice Stone Blackwell, “Do Teachers Need the Ballot?” (Warren, OH: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1909?), accessed online at Gale Primary Sources.
[4] Redding Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 50. For more on “maternalism,” or political rhetoric of mothers in a pre-suffrage era, see, for example, Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920,” The American Historical Review 95.4 (2000) and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[5] “Teachers Will Not Strike,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 10, 1909, accessed online at newspapers.com; “Women Teachers State Their Case Clearly,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 10, 1909, accessed online at newspapers.com; “Assembly Committee To Hear Women Teachers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 1, 1907, accessed online a newspapers.com.
[6] Women Teachers at Albany,” New York Times,” February 27, 1907, accessed online at ProQuest Historical Newspapers; “Interborough Teachers Active in Politics,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 4, 1908, accessed online at newspapers.com.
[7] Quoted in “Assembly Committee to Hear Women Teachers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 1, 1907, accessed online at nesspapers.com. See also “School Children Circulating Petitions In Its Favor,” New York Times, May 3, 1907, accessed online at ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 205, 545-47.
[8] “Executive Committee of Women Teachers Association Has Decided not to Join the Central Labor Unions of New York,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 22, 1907, accessed online at newspapers.com.
[9] “Teachers Heard by Gov. Hughes,” New York Times, May 25, 1907, accessed online at ProQuest Historical Newspapers.