The courts must be enabled to uphold
woman's right of marriage and motherhood, instead of, as in some cases
at present, upholding school boards in their denial of this right.
Contracts which prevent women teachers from marrying or discontinuing
their work for marriage should be illegal, and talk about the "moral
obligation" of normal school graduates to teach should be
discountenanced.
Against the proposal to employ married school teachers, two objections
are urged. It is said (1) that for most women school teaching is merely
a temporary occupation, which they take up to pass the few years until
they shall have married. To this it may be replied that the hope of
marriage too often proves illusory to the young woman who enters on the
pedagogical career, because of the lack of opportunities to meet men,
and because the nature of her work is not such as to increase her
attractiveness to men, nor her fitness for home-making. Pedagogy is too
often a sterilizing institution, which takes young women who desire to
marry and impairs their chance of marriage.
Again it will be said (2) that married teachers would lose too much
time from their work; that their primary interests would be in their own
homes instead of in the school; that they could not teach school without
neglecting their own children.
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