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2. Cremin, Lawrence Arthur, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876, 1st ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1980)Google Scholar; Cremin, Lawrence Arthur, American Education, the Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)Google Scholar; Kaestle, Carl F., Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google Scholar. Tyack, David B. and Hansot, Elisabeth, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982)Google Scholar. Hoffman, Nancy, Woman's “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

3. White means primarily Anglo-Saxon. During the period studied here, non-white women, especially black women in the South Atlantic and South Central states, and women of Mexican descent in the Southwest became teachers as well. However, because of white supremacist ideologies, their role as voters and elected officials was circumscribed. It is possible that the more limited role that white female educators played in the Southern states was due to race cleaving the power of women educators as a whole. There is no doubt that women across the races did not equally share the power women came to have as educators. For historical studies of African-American women educators, see Collier-Thomas, Bettye, “The Impact of Black Women in Education: An Historical Overview,” Journal of Negro Education 51, no. 3 (1982)Google Scholar; Fultz, Michael, “African-American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Growth, Feminization, and Salary Discrimination,” Teachers College Record 96, no. 3 (1995)Google Scholar; Reid, John B., “‘A Career to Build, a People to Serve, a Purpose to Accomplish’: Race, Class, Gender, and Detroit's First Black Women Schoolteachers, 1865–1916,” Michigan Historical Review 18, no. 1 (1992)Google Scholar; Small, Sandra E., “The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen's Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes,” Journal of Southern History 45, no. 3 (1979)Google Scholar; Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

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11. A fundamental text for these studies is Sapiro, Virginia, “The Gender Basis of Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 2 (1986)Google Scholar. On “maternalist welfare state studies” see Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990)Google Scholar; Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930, Women in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, “State Caretakers: Maternalism, Mothers' Pensions, and the Family Wage,” in Pitied but Not Entitled (New York: Free Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar. None of these focuses on public education.

12. Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” 1078–80.

13. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 528.

14. Clemens, Elisabeth S., “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women's Groups and the Transformation of American Politics, 1890–1920,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol, Theda and Fiorina, Morris P. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999)Google Scholar; Crawford, Susan and Levitt, Peggy, “Social Change and Civic Engagement: The Case of the P.T.A.,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol, Theda and Fiorina, Morris P. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999)Google Scholar.

15. Skocpol, Theda et al. , “Women's Associations and the Enactment of Mothers' Pensions in the United States,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 692Google Scholar. More generally, studies of the social welfare state tend to set aside the provision of public education. Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir suggest this absence is rooted in a tendency among welfare-state scholars to identify education as a non-democratic public provision because it tends to “promote meritocracy rather than equality.” However, against this view, and against the thesis that schools expanded to serve the interests of capital, they point out that schools expanded prior to the full emergence of a capitalist economy in the context of a relatively democratized white male electorate. The mass diffusion of public schooling may have been linked to the fact that in the United States “neither the franchise nor the schools were the object of class struggle.” See Katznelson, Ira and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar.

16. The best contemporary account of women's office holding in the 1920s is Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century, chap. XVIII. At the state level, prior to 1920, women held appointed positions on library boards, on state boards for charities or corrections, and as heads or assistants of schools for the blind and deaf and children's bureaus. However, prior to 1920, elective office holding at the state level seems to have been unique to the field of public education. The only exception noted by Breckinridge was Kate Barnard, who was elected Commissioner of Board of Charities in Oklahoma around 1906, a position she helped to create at the state constitutional convention. After 1920, women's hold on other elective offices increased. At the county level in Texas in 1929, 109 women were county treasurers, whereas only 47 county superintendents were women. Breckinridge noted, “The schools have long been considered the special responsibility of women. Their concern with fiscal responsibilities is more surprising,” (ibid., 335). At the state level in the legislatures, women's presence increased as well: in 1921, there were 37 women state legislators; by 1929, there were 149. Most were from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which had very large legislative memberships. At the national level, elected women were quite rare. Janette Rankin from Montana was the first female member of Congress. By 1930, 12 other women had been sent to Congress. I expect that many of them had strong careers in public education in their states. In the executive branch, the most common route to office holding was through the civil service, opened to women in 1919. By 1931, women held 16 percent of about 600,000 positions. There were women office holders in the post office as well: From 1919 to 1929, female postal workers increased from 255 to 940, or about 10 percent to 17 percent of the total (ibid., 311). Finally, presidents appointed women to be heads and assistant heads of the Federal Children's Bureau, created in 1912, and the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor, created in 1918. Many lower-level positions in those bureaus were staffed by women as well. Notably, the only other assistant head to be appointed by a president prior to 1930 was Dr. Bess Goodykoontz, who became Assistant Commissioner of Education. Finally, women received non-presidential appointments, too, among them heads of the Army and Navy Nursing Corps.

17. For a very recent exception on antebellum United States, see Bonica, Joseph, “The Motherly Office of the State: Cultural Struggle and Comprehensive Administration before the Civil War,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Spring 2008)Google Scholar. The ties between education and state development have been more deeply researched by educational historians outside of political science, especially David Tyack and associates. See Tyack, David B. and Cuban, Larry, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue; Tyack, David B., James, Thomas, and Benavot, Aaron, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar. In social science scholarship, two books stand out: Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All; Peterson, Paul E., The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

18. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 88–92; Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940.

19. Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All.

20. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is often cited as the origin of this idea that government is decentralized in the United States (See de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, translated by Lawrence, G. and edited by Mayer, J. P. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969 [1848])Google Scholar). Actually, he only argued that administration is decentralized. In making this distinction, he uses education as an example. Even in Massachusetts, which he holds up as the epitome of “communal independence” from centralized administration, de Tocqueville notes there are “social duties” that the state obliges townships to perform. For example: “If the government wants to organize education on a uniform plan through the county, the township must establish the schools required by the law,” (ibid., 67). The puzzle for de Tocqueville was not that there was no government in the United States: in fact, there were surprisingly strong central governments. The puzzle was that Americans managed to have both centralized government and decentralized administration. In the United States: “the state rules but does not administer” (ibid., 82). For empirical studies of the role governments have played in expanding public education, see Meyer, John and Rubinson, Richard, “Education and Political Development,” Review of Research in Education 3 (1975)Google Scholar; Timar, Thomas B., “The Institutional Role of State Education Departments: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Education 105, no. 3 (1997)Google Scholar.

21. The consensus in public policy circles is that local control is the foundational, genuine political tradition in American public education. For example, see Howell, William G., ed., Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Peterson, Paul E., “The New Politics of Choice,” in Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us About School Reform, ed. Ravitch, Diane and Vinovskis, Maris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

22. Ward Glen Reeder, “The Chief State School Official,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924); Timar, “The Institutional Role of State Education Departments: A Historical Perspective.”; Tyack, James, and Benavot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954.

23. The dollar amounts in Figure 2 are aggregates of local and state resources. To look only at revenues from state taxes would be hugely misleading because local funds typically originated in state-legislated mandates and incentives.

24. Teaford, Jon C., The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

25. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 88.

26. Rubinson, R., “Class Formation, Politics, and Institutions - Schooling in the United-States,” American Journal Of Sociology 92, no. 3 (1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Table 1.

27. Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar.

28. Political development may be defined as “shifts in patterns of authority.” Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. These shifts are related to processes of state formation, of which two are central: the expansion of administrative capacity within the government and the consolidation of political power dispersed across a territory into a governmental center. These two processes are intertwined and reinforcing. As central state actors seek to expand the reach of their power into the peripheral areas of the state, the staffing and financial resources necessary for such expansion are built up in the administrative apparatus of the government. In addition, as this administrative apparatus becomes more powerful, the consolidation and centralization of political power increases. See Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Krasner, Stephen, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 2 (1984)Google Scholar.

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30. See Kemp, Alice A., Women's Work: Degraded and Devalued (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994)Google Scholar; Matthaei, Julie A., An Economic History of Women in America: Women's Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism (New York: Harvester Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Perlmann, Joel and Margo, Robert A., Women's Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Wolfe, Christine E., “Economic Necessity and Opportunity Costs: The Money Matters of Pioneer Women Teachers,” American Educational History Journal 29 (2002)Google Scholar.

31. A useful distinction can be made between supervised “semi-professions” such as elementary education, nursing, and social work and non-supervised “full professions” such university professorships, doctoring, and law. See Etzioni, Amitai, ed., The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers (New York: Free Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

32. See Strober, M. and Gordon, A., “The Feminization of Public School Teaching: A Cross-Sectional Analysis 1850–1880,” Signs 11 (1986)Google Scholar; Sugg, Redding S., Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978)Google Scholar; Richardson, J. and Hatcher, B., “The Feminization of Public School Teaching 1870–1920,” Work and Occupations 10 (1983)Google Scholar.

33. Tyack, David B., Hansot, Elisabeth, and Lowe, Robert, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

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35. Unfortunately, occupational data from the 1930 census is unavailable.

36. Typing positions sometimes paid more than teaching, which helps to explain the rise in number of typists relative to teachers. See Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 147–149Google Scholar.

37. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America; Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Goldin, Claudia, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

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39. Ibid., 219.

40. See Seller, Maxine, Women Educators in the United States, 1820–1993: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), xviiiGoogle Scholar.

41. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.”; Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity.

42. Fraser, James W., Preparing America's Teachers: A History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 41Google Scholar.

43. Quoted in ibid., 36. See also Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity.

44. For a fuller account of such discourses that focuses on Massachusetts and the national influence of Horace Mann, see Joseph Bonica, “The Motherly Office of the State”.

45. Quoted in Lyman Draper, Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction, “Tenth Annual Report on the Condition and Improvement of the Common Schools and Educational Interests of the State of Wisconsin,” (Madison, WI: Atwood & Rublee, Printers,1858): 121–22.

46. Ibid., 119.

47. On the role of Whig political ideology, see Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 45–48. On the history of Normal schools, see Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers, chap. 3; Ogren, Christine A., The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although most Normal schools were the creatures of state governments and funded by them, they were not universally state institutions. Many large cities had their own public Normal schools. In the South, private Normal schools were common. Although some Normals were open for women only, most were coeducational, and none were exclusively open for men.

48. Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers, 131.

49. See Kotin, Lawrence and Aikman, William F., Legal Foundations of Compulsory School Attendance (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

50. Quoted in Blount, Jackie M., Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873–1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 66Google Scholar.

51. Vaughn-Robertson, Courtney Ann, “Sometimes Independent but Never Equal - Women Teachers, 1900–1950: The Oklahoma Example,” in History of Women in the United States, Volume 8: Professional and White Collar Employment, Part 2, ed. Cott, Nancy F. (1992), 414–15Google Scholar, 402.

52. On the contradictory nature of the field of education as a domain in which women are both empowered and constrained, see Antler, Joyce and Biklen, Sari Knopp, Changing Education: Women as Radicals and Conservators, Suny Series, Feminist Theory in Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Apple, Michael W., Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York: Routledge, 1986)Google Scholar. An empirical study documenting the participation of men and women in teaching workforce is Perlmann and Margo, Women's Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920.

53. Originally, the most outspoken actors were John Donnelly (R-MN) and James Garfield (the later president; R-OH). Donnelly first proposed a bill for the establishment of a Department of Education on 14 December 1865, but the bill was tabled immediately. Several months later on 5 June 1866 with a shift in rhetoric, Garfield proposed HR 276 to establish a National Bureau (rather than Department) of Education. See U.S. House, Congressional Globe. 39th Congress, 1st and 2nd Sessions (1865–67).

54. There were other sex-integrated civic organizations, and the NEA was not the most egalitarian. That distinction would go the Granges, which specified that key offices would be held by women, in addition to whatever office they might hold also open to men. However, the NEA appears to be the first professional sex-integrated organization. See Underwood, June O., “Civilizing Kansas: Women's Organizations, 1880–1920,” in History of Women in the United States, Volume 16: Women Together: Organizational Life, ed. Cott, Nancy F. (1992 [originally published 1984])Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Ganz, Marshall, and Munson, Ziad, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Volunteerism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (2000): 534Google Scholar.

55. On the interaction between women's entrance into the education profession and the relative social status of different professionals, see Grant, Gerald and Murray, Christine E., Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Clifford, Geraldine Joncich, “‘Daughters into Teachers’: Educational and Demographic Influences on the Transformation of Teaching into ‘Women's Work’ in America,” History of Education Review 12, no. 1 (1983)Google Scholar.

56. Urban, Wayne J., Gender, Race and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), xixGoogle Scholar.

57. See West, Allan M., The National Education Association: The Power Base for Education (New York: Free Press, 1980), 5Google Scholar.

58. Urban, Gender, Race and the National Education Association, 2.

59. On the life of Katherine Blake, see Rosenberg, Rosalind, Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. This position was the predecessor of the position Arne Duncan held before becoming the current Secretary of Education in the administration of Barack Obama.

61. See Bennett, Helen Christine, American Women in Civic Work (New York: Dodd, Mead and company, 1915)Google Scholar, 262, 70. These figures equaled almost 1 billion and over one quarter of a billion in 2009 dollars, respectively.

62. Bradford was the fourth and sixth female state superintendent of public instruction in Colorado, first elected in 1913, and she became NEA president in 1918; Corliss Preston was elected the first female state superintendent of public instruction in Washington in 1912, and she became NEA president in 1920.

63. The minutes are documented in “Comments in Business Meeting” (Annual Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1910).

64. West, The National Education Association, 6.

65. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap, chap. 6.

66. National Education Association, “Administrative Practices Affecting Classroom Teachers, Part I: Selection and Appointment of Teachers,” Research Bulletin X, no. 1 (January 1932)Google Scholar; National Education Association, “Practices Affecting Teacher Personnel,” Research Bulletin VI, no. 4 (September 1928)Google Scholar. The 1928 study was based on a survey sent to the “school systems” of all 2,880 cities and towns with populations of at least 2,500 people. Only 53.2 percent of the cities responded, but the larger the school system, the better was the response rate to the survey. Whereas 98.5 percent of the 67 cities over 100,000 people responded, only 42.1 percent of the 1,383 cities with populations between 2,500 and 5,000 people responded. Response rates to the 1931 report were worse with only 44.7 percent of 3,333 municipalities reporting, including 91.4 percent of cities with a population over 100,000, and only 27.2 percent of towns with a population between 2,500 and 5,000.

67. Though it is beyond the period of this paper, it should be noted that by 1942, these bans reached their peak, with 87 percent of respondent towns reporting marriage bans and 70 percent reporting retain bans. By 1950, they were rapidly disappearing, with 18 percent reporting marriage bans and 10 percent reporting retain bans. See Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, Table 6.1.

68. Claudia Goldin persuasively argues that the Great Depression was not alone responsible for the emergence of marriage bars in teaching (they were also common in clerical work) and that it is “inconceivable that marriage bars could have gained such wide acceptance during the Depression had previous policies not existed and had social consensus not been built around them.” See ibid., 166.

69. Brubacher, John S., “The Judicial Status of Marriage and Maternity as an Obstacle to the Education of Women for Professional Careers in Public School Teaching,” School and Society 26, no. October 1 (1927): 431Google Scholar. See also David Wilbur Peters, “The Status of the Married Woman Teacher,” (1934); Ward Keesecker, “The Legal Status of Married Women Teachers,” United States Office of Education, Pamphlet No. 47 (1934).

70. National Education Association, “Practices Affecting Teacher Personnel,” 219–20.

71. Brubacher, “The Judicial Status of Marriage and Maternity as an Obstacle to the Education of Women for Professional Careers in Public School Teaching.”

72. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, 170.

73. Strachan, Grace Charlotte, Equal Pay for Equal Work; the Story of the Struggle for Justice Being Made by the Women Teachers of the City of New York (New York: B.F. Buck & Co., 1910)Google Scholar. An important study of the role of these women activists is Crocco, Margaret, Munro, Petra, and Weiler, Kathleen, Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880–1960, Athene Series (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

74. Protsik, Jean, “History of Teacher Pay and Incentive Reforms,” in Conference on Teachers Compensation of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (Washington, DC: Retrieved online from Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), 1995), 8–9Google Scholar.

75. Urban, Gender, Race and the National Education Association, 2.

76. Brint, Steven and Levy, Charles S., “Professions and Civic Engagement: Trends in Rhetoric and Practice, 1875–1995,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol, Theda and Fiorina, Morris P. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 166Google Scholar.

77. Ibid., 176–78.

78. Katherine Blake, “Comments in Business Meeting” (Annual Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1910).

79. Anthony, Susan B. and Harper, Ida Husted, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 4: 1883–1900 (Rochester, NY: Privately published, 1902), 551Google Scholar.

80. Laura J. Eisenhuth, “Third Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction,” North Dakota Public Documents No. 21 (Jamestown, N.D.: Alert, State Printers and Binders, 1894): 42.

81. Ibid.

82. Blackwell, Marilyn Schultz, “Meddling in Politics: Clarina Howard Nichols and Antebellum Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Spring 2004): 27–28, 44–46Google Scholar.

83. Ibid., 59–60.

84. This number excludes New Jersey. See endnotes xiv and xv of Table 1.

85. Colorado also granted full suffrage in 1893, but unlike Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, the territory of Colorado had passed a distinct school suffrage law in 1876, prior to a full suffrage law.

86. On marital status as an obstacle to citizenship, see Ritter, Gretchen, “Gender and Citizenship after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Polity 32, no. 3 (2000)Google Scholar; Ritter, Gretchen, “Jury Service and Women's Citizenship before and after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Law and History Review 20, no. 3 (2002)Google Scholar.

87. As discussed above, martial status did matter consequentially in the right of women to teach in the schools because that right would undermine the male breadwinner model of family life. However, such laws limiting the right of women to teach were very rarely the outcome of state legislatures. Rather, locales made such decisions. Where local districts did prohibit single women from teaching, the main reason seems to have been a sanctioned economic affirmative action for men. This was especially true in the 1930s when jobs were fewer. See Keesecker, “The Legal Status of Married Women Teachers,” 346–49.

88. Nichols, Carole, “Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and after in Connecticut,” in History of Women in the United States, Volume 18: Women and Politics, Part 2, ed. Cott, Nancy F. (1992 [originally published 1983]), 414Google Scholar.

89. Quoted in Harper, Ida Husted, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 5: 1900–1920 (Rochester, NY: Privately published, 1922)Google Scholar.

90. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 63.

91. On explaining the relative success of full suffrage movements in the states, see McCammon, Holly J. et al. , “How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women's Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919,” American Sociological Review 66, no. 1 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Oddly, they do not discuss school suffrage laws.

92. Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

93. State politics, for example, are inconspicuous in Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All; Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940.

94. See also Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, Expanded ed., Praeger University Series (New York: Praeger, 1975); Katz, Michael B., “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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96. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 42.

97. Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, “Report on Rural Schools,” 815.

98. Steffes, Tracy L, “Solving the ‘Rural School Problem’: New State Aid, Standards, and Supervision of Local Schools, 1900–1933,” History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2008): 217–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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100. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 43.

101. Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, “Report on Rural Schools,” 859–60.

102. Quoted in Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 172.

103. Angenette J. Peavey, “Tenth Biennial Report,” Colorado Superintendent of Public Instruction, (Denver, C.O.: The Smith-Brooks Printing Co., 1896): 7.

104. This exchange of professional expertise for moral purity occurred in other policy fields as well. For example, Elisabeth Clemens argued that once women won the suffrage, they tried to “reinvent the relationship between voting and citizenship through the elevation of a standard of nonpartisanship” that “promised to create is own hierarchy of voting citizens, which distinguished the educated and disinterested voter (many of them elite women) from the obedient, uneducated person (thought to include working class men, racial minorities, and immigrants). See Clemens, Elisabeth Stephanie, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 349Google Scholar.

105. Cook, “Supervision of Rural Schools,” 2.

106. In the North, these offices were usually established by law so the state could guarantee that rural schools met the conditions specified by law before sending them state aid. In the South, state supervisors of rural schools were appointed to assist the General Education Board and the Southern Education Board. See Katherine M. Cook and A.C. Monahan, “Rural School Supervision,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 48 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916): 8–9.

107. Ibid., 40–41.

108. Comments from Burkes are from her report to Katherine M. Cook and A.C. Monahan at the U.S. Bureau of Education. See ibid., 54–56.

109. Julian Butterworth, “The County Superintendent in the United States,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932); Walter H. Gaumnitz, “Status of Teachers and Principals Employed in the Rural Schools of the United States,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932); A.C. Monahan and C.H. Dye, “A Comparison of the Salaries of Rural and Urban Superintendents of Schools,” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 33 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917).

110. Monahan and Dye, “A Comparison of the Salaries of Rural and Urban Superintendents of Schools.”

111. On the relation between professional, expertise, and the state, see Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, “Professional Autonomy and the Social Control of Expertise,” in The Sociology of the Professions: Lawyers, Doctors, and Others, ed. Dingwall, Robert and Philip Simon Coleman Lewis, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 1; Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Mills, C. Wright and Gerth, Hans Heinrich (New York: Oxford University press, 1958)Google Scholar, chap. VIII, sections 1, 7, and 13.

112. See Tyack, The One Best System; Urban, Wayne R., “Organized Teachers and Educational Reform During the Progressive Era: 1890–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113. Ibid., 173.

114. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools, 180–83.

115. In 1910, all states had developed county-level governments in public education administration except for some of the Northeastern states: Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Ohio.

116. I used random effects instead of fixed effects because one of the major factors of interest, the woman suffrage rights regime, does not vary over time.

117. Support for woman's suffrage laws was not found to be related to the passage of mother's pension laws in a study by Skocpol, Abend-Wein, and Goodrich Lehman. They used a dichotomous indicator for the states, depending on women possessing full suffrage in the state prior to the Nineteenth Amendment. The suffrage index here reflects more variation in the context of the woman's suffrage and it is centered on the passage of school suffrage laws. The logic of the typology is similar to that constructed by Skocpol et al. for the timing of mother's pensions laws. See Skocpol et al., “Women's Associations and the Enactment of Mothers' Pensions in the United States,” 687, 90.

118. See Beeton, Beverly, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland Publications, 1986)Google Scholar; Cole, “A Wide Field for Usefulness.” For a specific study on attitudes towards the woman educator in the West, the best study remains Kaufman, Polly Welts, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

119. This classic political culture argument is from Elazar, Daniel Judah, American Federalism: A View from the States, 2nd ed. (New York: Crowell, 1972)Google Scholar. State specific studies remain the best guide to assessing political culture, however. Separate studies of New Jersey and Connecticut for example each found, not surprisingly, that women had considerable in school politics despite the low levels of superintendent office holding. See Crocco, Margaret Smith, “Women of New Jersey: Charting a Path to Full Citizenship, 1870–1920,” New Jersey History 115, no. 3 (1997)Google Scholar; Nichols, “Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and after in Connecticut.” In addition, in the South, there certainly differences in women's roles across the states. Although women in North Carolina held almost no county superintendencies, their influence in matters of public education was still considerable. See Leloudis, James T. II, “School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902–1919,” Journal Of American History 69, no. 4 (1983)Google Scholar.

120. Cnudde, Charles F. and McCrone, David J., “Party Competition and Welfare Policies in the American States,” American Political Science Review 63 (1969)Google Scholar; Ranney, Austin, “Parties in State Politics,” in Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis, ed. Jacob, Herbert and Vines, Kenneth Nelson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976)Google Scholar; Brown, Robert D., “Party Cleavages and Welfare Effort in the American States,” The American Political Science Review 89, no. 1 (1995)Google Scholar.

121. For studies of women's direct involvement with political parties, see Dinkin, Robert J., Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See Berman, David, “Male Support for Woman Suffrage: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in the Mountain West,” Social Science History 11 (1987)Google Scholar. For a more general account that also includes a study of Southern Populists who showed little support for woman suffrage, see Marilley, Suzanne M., Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

122. I also estimated ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models for 1910 and 1930 using more detailed information about club activity and membership in those years. In 1910 the GFWC collected information about the involvement of its affiliates in educational activity. In the 1910 model alone, this activity was insignificant. Reports from the U.S. Bureau of Education on MCPTA compiled membership information by state for those organizations. In OLS models for 1930, the membership strength of the associations was not found to be a significant predictor of women's office holding.

123. Urban, Gender, Race and the National Education Association, 20–27.

124. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 147–49.

125. The best study on women's surprisingly high rates of college attendance during this time period is Gordon, Lynn D., Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

126. I also estimated OLS models for each year that included partisanship. In none of the models was the measure of partisanship found to be statistically significant.

127. On the great controversy on what effects woman suffrage actually had on empowering women, see Harvey, Votes without Leverage, 4074–08; Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage, 101–103; Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920, 49, 218; Nichols, “Votes and More for Women”; Degler, Carl N., At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. However, several studies of particular states, as mentioned above, found that school suffrage rights were associated with meaningful gains in women's office holding, as the present study also indicates.

128. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools.

129. Prior to the Civil War, this was certainly the case. See Bonica, “The Motherly Office of the State.”

130. Reid, “‘A Career to Build, a People to Serve, a Purpose to Accomplish,’” 73.

131. Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties.”

132. This disjuncture faced women in other domains of social policy as well. See McDonagh, “The ‘Welfare Rights State’ and the ‘Civil Rights State.’”

133. See Mettler, Suzanne, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.