High School Teachers

History

It is not an unknown fact that in ancient Greece, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato all studied under female teachers-Aristoclea, Diotima, and Aspasia, respectively. While the lower ranks of society during the medieval period would not receive scholarly educations, learned women thrived as scholars and teachers in convents, which provided women the safe haven of a spiritual and intellectual community. Aristocratic girls would be educated in mathematics, history, and the classics right alongside their brothers. By the Renaissance, shifting ideas about women's proper roles in society and the purpose of education limited women's access to education.

Ironically, it may have been in part because of women's limited access to education and, thus, the religious and domestic nature of their resulting educations, that women were viewed as the moral guardians of children and most appropriate choices for guiding their early educations. Even so, women continued to serve as teachers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a few pioneering teachers paved the way for others to obtain access to education, positions in the field, and professionalize the profession.

Catharine Esther Beecher's (1800-78) ground-breaking work in the early 19th century to construct a school for girls and send out her graduates to teaching positions across the country cut the path for hundreds of teachers to follow in their footsteps. Others early leaders include Rosa Philippine Duchesne (1769-1852), who opened three boarding schools for girls in early 19th-century Louisiana; Emma Willard (1787-1870), who opened Troy Female Seminary, which boasted a program of study as rigorous as neighboring boys’ schools; and Mary Lyon (1797-1849), who founded Mount Holyoke college for girls, revised their curriculum, and raised the standard on female education. These women and others cut the path for greater access to education, and also worked across lines of race and class to ensure that under-represented groups of girls would also have access to educational opportunities.

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