Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873-1995

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SUNY Press, 1998 M01 1 - 244 pages
In 1909, when she became the superintendent of the Chicago schools, Ella Flagg Young proclaimed that women were "destined to rule the schools of every city." After all, women accounted for nearly eighty percent of all teachers by 1910 and their ascendance into formal school leadership positions could not be far behind. After World War II, however, a backlash against single women educators and a rigid realignment of gender roles in schools contributed to a rapid decline of women school administrators across the country, a decline from which there has been little recovery to the present.

Destined to Rule the Schools tells the story of women and school leadership in America from the common school era to the present. In a broad sense, it offers an historical account of how teaching became women's work and the school superintendency men's. Blount explores how power in school employment has been structured unequally by gender. It focuses on the superintendency because an important component of the effort to establish control of schools has occurred in contesting the definition of this position. Unique and important contributions of this volume include: the only published comprehensive statistical study describing the number of women superintendents throughout the twentieth century, an analysis suggesting that the superintendency may have become an appointive position in part to remove it from the influence of newly enfranchised women voters, a discussion of the role of homophobia in creating and perpetuating rigid gender divisions in school employment, and a broad analysis that integrates the histories of teaching and school administration.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
THEIR FIRST GREAT PUBLIC PROFESSION
11
A DISTINCTLY HIGHER WALK
39
OUT OF POLITICS
61
A CHANGE IN FASHION
91
THE WAY OF THE BUFFALO
111
Is THIS ALL?
133
CONCLUSION
153
HISTORICAL DATA ON WOMENS REPRESENTATION IN THE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENCY
171
NOTES
203
INDEX
237
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Jackie M. Blount is a Professor in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University and the author of Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century, also published by SUNY Press.

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