[The Family and it’s Members by Anna Garlin Spencer]@TWC D-Link book
The Family and it’s Members

CHAPTER VIII
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This must give way to an intelligent understanding of two things: one, that experience in teaching is an immeasurable asset to the schools and must not be lost in so great proportion of women as it has been; and, in the second place, that teaching lends itself in unique manner to half-time work, to vacations for maternity duties, to combining of two or three married women in positions that might be filled by one spinster, and to other social expedients favorable to married life; and that all that is needed is good sense and some skill of administrative adjustment to keep the larger majority of good teachers in the field after they are wives and mothers.
Moreover, from the point of view of the family, it is injurious for social practice to keep women who have the qualities of good teachers from marrying lest they lose their beloved profession.

It is one of the best, although one of the least tried, ways of bringing the school and the home together by giving a good many teachers a clearer idea from personal experience of what the home needs from the school, and giving mothers a clearer idea of the reasons for school rules by having them serve in both capacities.

The normal school education of women was obtained by appeals based on the fact of the first half of the nineteenth century that unless women teachers were secured and trained for the task the elementary school could never be enabled to fill the need of the public school system.

The fact of the early part of the twentieth century should be as deeply pressed, the fact that there are not enough women teachers of education and character for elementary school service unless we mix teaching and marriage for many of them.

This fact should make a social appeal to-day equal to that of Horace Mann's great mission.
If we are to have enough elementary school teachers and continue to increase the number from the most fit women for the task, we must also institute a new social backing for the profession.


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