| Women's work in the nineteenth-century expansion of public education altered their relationship to the state. Departing from historians' recent focus on how marriage mediated women's citizenship, this study shows how work in schools engaged a large contingent of women in a direct relationship to the state after the Civil War. Schoolwomen, I argue, began to see their work through the new prism of professional service and the older ideology of free labor. At the same time, a range of stakeholders in public education---politicians, reformers, and local school authorities---recognized how women's labors could serve civic obligations as well as domestic ones. Together, these stakeholders and teachers reconfigured gender relations, augmenting women's responsibilities to include service to the public, while they redefined civic service to include education as part of the work of local and national defense.; Far from enforcing domesticity, state practices in the northern, southern, and midwestern sites of this study encouraged single women's employment and assented to some married women's paid and unpaid work in schools. Yet teachers enjoyed neither the freedoms supposedly provided by contract relations nor the patriarchal protections traditionally afforded to women of the middle classes. Outside the family but not quite in the market, work in late nineteenth-century schools constituted a middle ground with potential for greater female autonomy and vulnerability. Seeking both opportunity and security, teachers turned first to mutual aid, but by the 1890s they began to make claims on the state. Demonstrating how teachers won small entitlements to social insurance on the basis of their work, the dissertation complicates the dominant understanding of the origins of U.S. social policy, which posits a two-track system that reinforced a male breadwinner wage and female domestic dependency. White women teachers won pensions---entitlements then reserved to men in the military and civil service---by arguing that dependency was no reward for a lifetime of paid work in the service of the state. Asserting the similarity of their sacrifices to those of soldiers and policemen, teachers laid claim to a category of dependent citizenship more privileged than that of other wage workers. |
