UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West By VAL D. RUST
O
wen Wister’s famous novel, The Virginian, contains a classic story of a young eastern woman braving “a country where Indians and wild animals live unchained” to teach in Bear Creek, Wyoming. After exchanging letters with the people of Bear Creek about a “schoolmarm” position, Miss Mary Stark Wood leaves Vermont, travels west, and falls in love with the Virginian.1 Western fiction often featured such women. Hamlin Garland’s Prairie Folks tells of Lily Graham, an eastern woman as lovely “as if builded of the pink and white clouds.” Graham crosses the prairies of Iowa to teach and finds herself acting as a savior for her pupil’s parents, whose lives with each other have become fraught with difficulty.2 These sentimental stories provided a moving image of the westward migration of young female teachers, but they represented only a small slice of social reality. Men taught school children in the nineteenth-century American West as much, or more, than women did—a function, perhaps, of the region’s demographics. In Utah, the gender of educators was connected not only to population but also to religion. As they settled Utah, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened schools connected to the church’s fundamental unit, the ward. In these settings, and according to the Latter-day Students from the Homer School Saint (LDS or Mormon) worldview, teachers in Salt Lake County, 1911–1912. Val D. Rust is professor of education at UCLA. He is the director of the Center for International and Development Education. He recently served as the faculty chair of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and served for many years as the director of the International Education Office at UCLA. 1 2
Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 60–64, 90 (quotation). Hamlin Garland, Prairie Folks (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 102.
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