Teaching Profession in the United States
Jewish women in America became professional teachers to an extent unprecedented in Jewish history. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, female Jewish teachers flocked into both public and Jewish education, causing the teaching profession to emerge as a primary occupational niche for Jewish women in America. This emergence is remarkable considering that, in the premigration world of most Jewish immigrants, women were virtually excluded from teaching in any official capacity. While the number of Jewish female teachers increased throughout the world in the early twentieth century, their rise was most spectacular in America, where they predominated in both secular and Jewish schools. The increased involvement of Jewish women in the teaching profession had a formative impact on both public and Jewish education in America.
Introduction
The notion of a female teacher charged with the task of educating both boys and girls was inconceivable for most Central and Eastern European Jews. The very act of learning had been traditionally reserved for men, and teaching, an occupation saturated with religious overtones, remained indisputably a male domain. Although in Eastern Europe Jewish women often taught young girls rudimentary skills such as reading and writing Yiddish, the official teachers of the Jewish community were always male. Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did Jewish women in Eastern Europe manage to establish and teach in their own private schools.
The official exclusion of women from the teaching profession began to change dramatically at the beginning of the twentieth century. European Jews began to reconfigure traditional female Jewish education in an attempt to combat the erosion of traditional values and observance. New Jewish schools for girls were opened in such places as Vilna, Warsaw, Istanbul, and Rhodes, and each school demanded an increased number of Jewish female teachers.
In the New York City school system—the largest public school system in the world—Jewish women comprised fifty-six percent of the new teaching staff in 1940 and were the majority of the public-school teaching staff until 1960. By 1982, female teachers in Jewish schools comprised approximately eighty percent of the teaching staff.
Jewish Women and the Public School System
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Jewish Female Teachers and Jewish Education
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