The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of the women's movement on teaching in the United States, beginning with the late 1800s and continuing through the modern period. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background, scope, and limit of the study, and then to explore the historical context in which parallels between the development of the structure of teaching in the United States and the growth and spread of social movements identified with advocacy of increased women's rights and opportunities can be discerned. To this end, the origins of women's evolving role as educators in each region of the country will be discussed in conjunction with the evolution of social-reform action and advocacy aimed at altering in women's favor their formal position in society, culture, politics, and the law.
The sectionalism of the American people in the formative years of the United States has been well documented. During the formative years of the republic, geographically based sectionalism was considered the "greatest danger to the Union forged at Philadelphia" (Miller, 1960, p. 124). Dyads such as the industrial North versus the agricultural South, embodied in Hamilton's vision of an industrial, centralized nation-state versus Jefferson's vision of multiple communities of agrarian yeoman farmers are commonplaces of post-revolutionary American politics, just as is the creation of the frontier as a region during the continental expansion of America in the early nineteenth century and of course the North-South regionalism fostered by the Civil War and Reconstruction. What is important about sectionalism for the present research is what it implied about the culture informing the structure and shape that the teaching experience assumed in different geographical locations. Accordingly, regional differences between and among the experiences of women as American educators (and, as appropriate and relevant, as students) will b...