Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West

Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West

By VAL D. RUST

Owen 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. 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. 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 Saint (LDS or Mormon) worldview, teachers could be either male or female. In contrast, women primarily served as the faculty of mission schools founded in Utah by Protestant denominations. Then, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the relationship between religion and the gender of teachers took another turn with the creation of LDS “academies,” with their largely male staffs. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century, when the state finally opened public schools, that more and more women began instructing Utah’s children. Thus, in Utah, whatever entity sponsored a school played a critical role in whether men or women led the classroom—and throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, those entities often had religious affiliations.

The assumption that a school teacher will be a woman was established in the mid-nineteenth century and is now so commonplace in American culture that we use female pronouns when speaking of teachers. However, at the time, in the South and in the West, men served as teachers as often as women. Although most mainstream Americans imagined an “impermeable boundary” between men’s public, political, and economic role, and women’s private, domestic, and maternal role, the school crossed this boundary. It functioned in both the public and the private domain.

The idea that a woman might have a career as a professionally trained teacher developed slowly. It was finally established in the 1830s and 1840s with the coming of the American common school, an institution created to meet the budding industrial demands for educated workers, as well as to satisfy the Jacksonian striving for an educated citizenry. The common school in America was an importation of the Prussian Volksschule, an eightyear school for the German masses, distinguished from schools for the elites and charged with imparting the basic skills of arithmetic and reading, patriotism, and faith in God. Americans adopted its curriculum but extended its mission to include all young people, who were to have a “common” schooling experience. In a single generation, almost all the states in the union had created a new, democratic school system. Soon afterward, the states put compulsory attendance laws in place.

The cost of establishing an all-encompassing common school in every city and hamlet of America would have been prohibitive if teachers had been paid a professional salary. The genius of the American school system was that school leaders called on the talents of better-educated females. Women gladly took on the burden of serving as teachers in the common schools, and they made them function without demanding salaries equivalent to those of men. In 1857 New England, for instance, men earned substantially larger salaries than did women.

Even though at the beginning of the nineteenth century most formal school teachers had been men, by the middle of the century, teaching had shifted to become a primarily female occupation in New England. Of course, women had long given instruction in an informal capacity. In 1647, colonial leaders mandated that some mechanism be set up to school the young in every community of at least fifty householders. New Englanders usually accomplished this goal by enlisting and providing some remuneration to a woman who would gather her neighbor’s boys and girls together in her home and teach them reading skills, faith, and habits of good behavior. Throughout the colonial period, therefore, large numbers of women gave instruction, but their work was viewed as a family responsibility.

Table 1. Gender in the West, 1890*

As long as the teaching of young children was understood as an extension of family responsibilities, the separate-sphere concept was retained. Working with small children was seen as a nurturing process natural to women. The establishment of the common school did not destroy that basic dualism of male and female roles because many Americans viewed the entrance of women into the common schools as an extension of the role of the mother. In fact, Horace Mann, the father of the American common school movement, argued for the employment of women teachers by defining “teaching as a nurturing behavior that was natural to women.” The Boston Board of Education reinforced Mann’s claim, declaring that “females are incomparably better teachers for young children than males. . . . Their manners are more mild and gentle, hence more in consonance with the tenderness of childhood.” Educational historians have supported the notion of teacher as female, projecting a New England regional perspective such that it has become a national perspective. It is true that in New England almost all early common school teachers were female. Some historians estimate that just prior to the Civil War, at least one in five women in Massachusetts taught at some time in her life. The educational historian R. Freeman Butts noted that “by the Civil War the American teacher was female.” However, objective data from other parts of the country do not support this claim. Whereas in 1869–1870, approximately 86.4 percent of all school teachers in New England were female, in the South the reverse was true: almost three quarters were male.

In the West, as late as 1890, California and Nevada were the only two western states and territories where female teachers held a majority—and it was slim. A simplistic explanation might be that the population in the nineteenth-century-West was predominantly male. In New England, in 1890, males were in the majority only in Vermont (50.9 percent), while the western states and territories were skewed toward males. Moreover, the 1890 demographics represent a dramatic drop in the percentage of male dominance in the West (see Table 1). For example, in 1870, 76.1 percent of people in Nevada were males, and that figure dropped to 64.4 percent over the following twenty years.

Accordingly, the teachers of the West were not typically “mild and gentle” women, who “cherished the tenderness of childhood.” More often they were men whose lives were honed and strengthened by the brutality of the deserts and mountains of the West. Of course, men did not settle the West alone. Some eastern women, including teachers, also braved the unknown. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the National Board of Popular Education sent more than 250 women west to teach. Still, men dominated the West, and they led classrooms more often than women did.

Utah is a special case. In 1890, there were more men than women in the population, but they held only a slight, 52.8 percent, majority. Utah’s initial Euro-American settlement by Mormon pioneers gave the state a greater balance between males and females than in much of the American West. During the nineteenth century, men somewhat dominated the ranks of teachers in Utah, a fact that was all the more remarkable because the sexes were more balanced in Utah than in other western states and territories. In 1870–1871, for example, 55.1 percent of all Utah teachers were male. With the passage of time, women increasingly led Utah classrooms—by the end of World War I, three quarters of the state’s teachers were female—but the question remains, why did men and women play equal teaching roles in Utah through the end of the nineteenth century? Though the first schools of Utah would today be considered private undertakings, they were part of the communal Mormon environment and were intended to serve all the children of a neighborhood or village. Prior to the 1890 free public school law, LDS wards mainly organized and administered basic schooling in Utah. The Mormon pioneers likely opened the Salt Lake Valley’s first school soon after their arrival in July 1847. That October, Mary Jane Dilworth gathered nine young pupils together in a military tent to instruct them in some fundamental knowledge. As the LDS church sent its members out to settle an area or as they moved on of their own initiative, they gathered in groups for mutual protection and cultivated a strong sense of community. While the Mormons were geographically isolated from the world, they nevertheless maintained a cosmopolitanism that ensured cultural and social development.

By 1854, nearly all the LDS wards in the Utah Territory operated a school, an institution many community members saw as the local “common school,” which provided basic schooling for all children. In Salt Lake City, for example, there were “21 school districts, each coterminous with the city’s 21 Mormon wards (or parishes), and each with its own elected three-person school board.” The ward school had a quasi-public nature, even though an ecclesiastic unit controlled it. While school boards held the formal responsibility of appointing teachers, Mormon bishops (the lay leaders of the wards) played an important role in selecting them. In fact, the position of teacher was considered a “calling” that came from a bishop.

Even though I have not been able to find pronouncements by early church and civic leaders about the value of women teachers, with their unique female traits, as had been made by the fathers of the American common school movement, the Mormon general authorities tended to link teaching with parenting more broadly defined. In 1865, Heber C. Kimball emphasized that “as parents and teachers, we should try with all of our ability to impress upon the minds of our young people, by precept and example, the principles of truth.” Acting as parents and as teachers in the communal environment, both men and women had this responsibility.

A kaleidoscope of teaching arrangements existed in early Utah. In one variation, the LDS church incorporated the school into priesthood functions, and men’s authority over women was not to be questioned. Such an orientation was consistent with the prevailing national ideology that men and women belonged to separate spheres. Other educational arrangements in Utah did not make such a clear distinction, but used the participation and talents of both men and women in educating the young. Sometimes, church leaders simply appointed anyone who was willing to take on the burden of teaching. That person might have been a man who had been maimed in outdoor work. Or it might have been a young girl who saw an opportunity for a person without formal training to yet take up a “holy calling” in a school. Louisa Lula Greene represented such a case. After entering the classroom as a teacher, she lamented, “I want to be a very good teacher, and do not know how. I feel that I am not competent as yet to do justice in this respect and so am not satisfied with what I do.”

In a third variation, a ward would set a specific standard and demand that a legitimate candidate, male or female, must meet that standard. Fifteenyear-old Mary Jane Mount Tanner was just such a person. She tried unsuccessfully to gain a position, but then studied arithmetic, geography, and grammar and practiced reading, writing, and spelling enough so that a year later she impressed the examiners enough to be offered a position. Fourth, a local Mormon school would appoint the best possible teacher, even though that person might not be Mormon. In 1860, Warren and Wilson Dusenberry, two brothers from Illinois, passed through Utah on their way to California, where they attended Vacaville College. The Dusenberrys returned to Utah in 1862 and were the best candidates for teaching positions in Provo’s ward schools. A year later, the brothers started their own private “First Dusenberry School” and subsequently joined the LDS church.

Among these types of church-run schools, Latter-day Saints clearly did not consider it appropriate to separate men’s (public) and women’s (private) roles. The Mormon church had swallowed up the conventional framework and had replaced it with a belief in the unity of all things in God’s sphere. It followed Apostle Paul’s assertion that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.” According to the historian Christine Talbot, as Mormons strived for oneness, they tried to unite things that the broader society “insisted should remain separate.” Ideally, Mormonism did not distinguish between the home and the outside world and, instead, “subsumed the private individual, private property, religious and political conscience, and the private home into a broad, communitarian spiritualpolitical order.”

God’s kingdom on earth demanded that men commit themselves to the home, child rearing, and other dimensions of life that the dominant American culture had marked as feminine. It also demanded that women commit themselves to the wider sphere of social relations, the economy, and political life. Both men and women, Brigham Young proclaimed, would “live together” in heaven “as one great family.” In other words, Mormons disavowed the public and private world and saw only an amalgamation of religion, family, economics, and politics, which they identified as God’s kingdom. This unification of spheres, Talbot argues, was best exemplified in polygamy: Even marriage was not to be based exclusively on love and affection, but also on the idea of a community-wide family whose higher purpose was to further God’s work. The very language Mormons used reflected that unity, for they addressed each other as “brothers” and “sisters” in a heavenly family. Talbot fails to include the schools and teaching as examples of a breakdown of the dualistic world found in eighteenth century America; and yet, it is a powerful example of the unity demanded by Mormon doctrines. Women participated fully not only as teachers but as principals, district superintendents, teacher trainers, teacher association officers, and academics in early Utah.

While the LDS church took for granted that both men and women would devote their lives to the family, the definition of the family had been extended to the broader community, including the schools. This unity of the public and the private allowed women to bypass men’s authority through a direct relationship with God, gain access to important aspects of the broader community, and serve faithfully and fully in spheres denied to many of their female contemporaries. Although the Mormons founded more than three hundred settlements in the Great Basin before the death of Brigham Young in 1876, it would not be possible to provide a statistical profile of male and female teachers in those earliest communities. But we have some indication of the gender of the first teachers from a collection of sites. In Manti, in 1850, Isaac Morley directed the building of a log schoolhouse, in which Jesse W. Fox acted as “the pioneer teacher.” Later, Mary Whiting became a permanent teacher. A year later, in Cedar City, George A. Smith helped establish the Iron County Mission and began teaching children before the settlers had even raised their homes. On February 21, Smith noted that he commenced “a grammar school in my wicky-up” for five young boys, who read by the “light of the camp fire, with only one grammar book.”

This trend of both women and men teaching children in Utah settlements continued throughout the 1850s and 1860s. In 1852, in Ogden, Andrew Jensen recorded that “a common school was opened and conducted by a widow lady named Gean.” On May 2 of that year, in Nephi, Martha Spence Heywood wrote the following in her journal: “Sunday. Had a meeting to regulate about the school and was decided that would commence forthwith engaging Candace Smith to teach at the rate of five dollars a week and board herself.” Smith remained for only six weeks before moving to Manti, and Heywood was persuaded to take her place and teach the seventeen children in the school. While two women first taught Nephi’s school children, the village’s other early teachers included five men (Andrew Love, George Spencer, Amos Gustin, James Bailey, and Thomas Ord) and only one woman (Amy Sigler).

Around 1853, in Provo, David John taught in the Fourth Ward School, while in Spanish Fork, a primitive schoolhouse became ready for use in 1857, and Samuel Cornaby, an English immigrant, became its first teacher. That fall of 1857, the people of Spanish Fork completed two other buildings used for schooling; the teachers were “Hon. Silas Hillam and Mrs. Margaret Leah.” In Midway, the first school was a log cabin, but it was soon replaced by a “pot rock” school house. In the early 1860s, Simon Higgenbotham became the first teacher of Midway’s children, instructing them in a program of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Attewall Wootton, whose family had converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s, replaced Higgenbotham in 1866. Wootton served successfully as an educator throughout his long life. Though exact information is unavailable, these case studies demonstrate that men and women alike took on the role of establishing basic schooling.

This balance of male and female teachers continued in the Mormon settlements established after the Civil War. Phil Mass settled at Henry’s Fork in Daggett County in 1862 and established a ranch. His family consisted of four boys and five girls, so in 1869 he hired William Pearson to come to his ranch and serve as tutor. When, in 1877, a public school was finally established in the area, Pearson became the teacher at that one-room school. Later, Mark Manley and Robert Hereford also served as teachers; each received fifty dollars a month. The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and history. In 1870, Kanab became a permanent settlement under the leadership of Levi Stewart, who brought fifty-two people from the southern Salt Lake Valley to colonize the area. In that year, the colonists organized an LDS ward and built a combined school and meetinghouse. Beginning with forty-seven pupils, the school quickly expanded to more than one hundred pupils, taught by William D. Johnson and assisted by Persis Brown. In 1874, Orderville, just north of Kanab, was established as a United Order settlement, and its first teacher, Ellen Meeks Hoyt, had received a teaching certificate at age fifteen.

As they opened these rudimentary schools, Mormon colonists were responding to their church’s educational imperatives. Brigham Young observed that “Most of the people called Latter-day Saints have been taken from the rural and manufacturing districts of this and the old countries, and they belonged to the poorest of the poor.” Yet he exclaimed that the gospel had awakened in most of them a desire to seek after the best life has to offer. The gathering of the Latter-day Saints of both sexes was intended to inspire them to seek after “every accomplishment, every polished grace, every useful attainment in mathematics, music, and in all science and art.” He admonished his co-religionists to encourage their children to “become more informed in every department of true and useful learning than their fathers are.”

Of course, Young had overstated the case. Early converts were usually poor and certainly did not represent the elites of society, but some of them—both men and women—had received as good an education as easterners and willingly shared their talents with the young in building up God’s unified kingdom on earth. Orson Pratt had attended various schools, for example, including an academy in New York State. Louisa Barnes Pratt attended local schools and finished at the “Female Academy” in Winchester, New Hampshire. She had gained teaching experience before she joined the LDS church and moved west. Samuel Cornaby, the first teacher in Spanish Fork, graduated from Borough Road Normal School in London. Elmina Shepard Taylor received normal school training in New York, and Emmeline B. Wells was schooled in Massachusetts. Karl G. Maeser, the founder of Brigham Young Academy, joined the LDS church in Germany after attending a university preparatory school and the Friedrichstadt Schullehrerseminar, or teacher training college. The father of Mary and Ida Cook, a physician, saw to it that Mary graduated from State Normal School at Albany and that Ida graduated from Oswego State Normal School, both in the state of New York.

Young recognized this talent among the pioneers and emphasized that “a good school teacher is one of the most essential members in society.” However, problems arose from the beginning. As early as 1851, in Salt Lake County, authorities required teachers to present themselves for examination—and those examinations demonstrated that the teachers usually fell “far below the standard of the qualifications.” Mediocrity was not universally the case, however. For more than thirty years during the nineteenth century Mary and Ida Cook had an impact on Utah’s education. In 1871, they were both employed by John R. Park at the University of Deseret. Mary became the principal of the university’s model graded school; both women actively prepared students to become teachers and served as officers in the teacher’s association. Also among Utah’s outstanding educators was Richard S. Horne of the Salt Lake City Fourteenth Ward School. In 1867, Brigham Young called him to go on a mission to St. George to restore order to the town’s rowdy schools. In St. George, Horne emphasized diligence and discipline, and he reminded his students that school was meant “to refine your intellect and store your minds with wisdom.” One of Horne’s fellow teachers honored him by saying that his was “the best school of the town and the teacher was my ideal of what a teacher should be. Good governing ability—he had perfect order and much method.” He had apparently learned that method by attending the Parent School in Salt Lake City.

The initial experience of the Parent School illustrated the extent to which men filled the ranks of Utah’s first educators. In November 1850, Orson Spencer supervised the creation of the Parent School in Salt Lake City to help “gentlemen” qualify as teachers for the LDS ward schools. Early notices for the institution demonstrated its connection with male teachers. One notice implored “young men, middle aged, old men, and all men, married or unmarried . . . to come forward as speedily as possible.” The Parent School held its first classes in the home of John Pack, but his house was not large enough to accommodate women. The school rectified this injustice the next year by offering training to both males and females. The school attended to the best pedagogy of the day, including a “large and well-selected assortment of school books” provided by Wilford Woodruff. Of course, the curriculum included LDS scriptural canon, including the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Old and the New Testament. The intent of such undertakings was to make the Mormon territory as nearly independent of the outside world as possible. The young people were being cultivated to thrive in a Mormon culture and become capable, contributing members of an independent territory.

The position of teacher was considered a “calling” on the part of the bishop. All too often, men failed to respond to such a calling, and the burden fell on willing women. God’s unified kingdom demanded that both men and women respond. The men were challenged to accept their responsibility. For example, in 1872, George A. Smith, speaking in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, exclaimed, “Let me say to you, brethren, there is no calling more important than to teach a common school.” Likewise, at the LDS church’s 1867 general conference, Erastus Snow observed, “I will say that our school teachers should not only be men qualified to teach the various branches of education, but they should be men possessing the spirit of the gospel, and who, in every look and word, and in all their discipline and intercourse with their pupils are influenced by that spirit.” The calling of a teacher was given to both men and women; however, in 1872 male teachers earned, on average, $25.93 a month, while female teachers earned $13.00. We must keep in mind that much of a teacher’s remuneration came as in-kind benefits such as food or fuel.

As time passed, the question of who would instruct school children increasingly became not only a question of gender, but also one of religious affiliation. Not all ward school teachers belonged to the Mormon church. Even though such teachers constituted only a small quantity of the ward instructors, their numbers were apparently significant enough that Brigham Young chastised bishops for ignoring Mormon teachers in favor of outsiders. On the other hand, after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, a growing non-Mormon population complained about the ward schools with their Mormon-controlled curriculum, hiring practices, and facilities. The Latter-day Saints usually operated the ward schools in church buildings, and the non-Mormons claimed that these quasi-public institutions should not be conducted in buildings owned by the LDS church. Non-Mormons were also concerned that the school board not be part of the ward structure, and that the teachers be hired by a broader-based school board.

By the early 1870s, these ward school districts began to be consolidated into county school systems, overseen by a county superintendent of schools. In 1874 Mary Cook was nominated to be the Salt Lake County superintendent, but territorial laws prevented this from happening. In 1877, Ida Cook, who was now the principal of a female high school in Logan, was nominated to be the Cache County superintendent of schools. She too was prevented from such an appointment. In fact, soon after she had been prevented from taking the position, Brigham Young appointed Ida Cook as the principal of the new Brigham Young College, the precursor to Utah State University. However, such nominations suggest that gender was less an issue among Mormons than competence.

The early Mormon ward schools focused almost entirely on basic education. Even though some pioneering Mormon teachers (such as Orson Pratt) gave private instruction in advanced subjects, Utah’s mission schools represented the major institutional options for higher schooling. These mission schools— which Protestant denominations founded after the Civil War—followed the New England pattern in that their teaching staffs were dominated by females, sent from the East by Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, and other churches.

In 1866, the first Episcopal missionary bishop, Daniel Tuttle, arrived in Salt Lake City, and there, a year later, founded St. Mark’s school. The Reverend R. S. Foote served as a part-time teacher to assist a Miss Davenport, who had come west from Brooklyn to teach. The school offered special classes for boys who might wish to go to a university in the East. In 1870, Episcopal Church services began in Ogden, and the School of the Good Shepherd opened that same year. In 1873, St. John’s school opened in Logan, and in 1880, the Rowland Hall boarding school for girls opened in Salt Lake City.

In 1879, the Congregational Church established a “New West Education Commission” and supported a wide range of schools in the West. By 1893, twenty-six of these schools existed in Utah, with the showcase institution being the Ogden Academy, which appointed Hiram Waldo Ring as its principal and Virginia W. Ludden as the head of the elementary department. In the second year Bernice Peaslee Ring, the wife of the principal, became the third teacher. Later Mary L. McClelland and Abbie Parish Noyes joined the teaching staff.

Nineteenth-century Utah also had Meth-odist schools, where, as at other Protestant-run institutions, women dominated the faculty. In the 1860s, in Heber, the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society set up a school and the teachers were, in succession, Angie Steele, Jennie Clafin, M. A. Hand, Miss Crosbie, Miss Lestr, and Miss Stoner. Marysvale was a mining town, and many of the people in the settlement were non-Mormons. In 1891, the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society provided a woman teacher, Lulu Christian, who opened a classroom and offered the only schooling in the community at the time. She was succeeded by Erma Osborn in 1904, Lulu Cole in 1906, Elida Mork in 1907, and Lulu Gamble in 1909.

Presbyterians came relatively late to the creation of mission schools in Utah. In 1877, the Woman’s Executive Committee of Home Missions organized for the purpose of providing schools and teachers in the West and Southwest. The committee had a particular interest in working among the Mormons, Native Americans, and Spanish-speaking peoples. The Presbyterian schools in Utah included Willard Academy in American Fork, New Jersey Academy in Logan, Wasatch Academy in Mount Pleasant, and the Salt Lake Collegiate Institute in Salt Lake City.

All of these Protestant missionary schools followed an obvious gender norm of providing female teachers, women who came to Utah from the eastern part of the country. Though these instructors often had graduated from “the finest colleges,” the local minister or priest (who might also act as a part-time teacher) usually supervised them. The number of females in the Protestant institutions was somewhat offset by the makeup of the faculty at other academies, such as the Catholic All Hallows Academy in Salt Lake City and the Military Academy in Ogden, which preferred to employ men. On the other hand, women apparently taught at private denominational schools that were not connected with missionary activity. In the largely non-Mormon mining town of Silver Reef, the Catholic Church opened St. Mary’s day school in 1879 for children of that faith. Sister Superior Euphonsine became its first teacher; a Sister Regas replaced her.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Utahns increasingly looked to the status of higher education in their state. As opportunities for secondary schooling grew, the gender composition of Utah educators also changed. Protestant mission schools clearly offered the first opportunities for extensive secondary schooling in Utah. The LDS ward schools usually provided only a basic curriculum in one-room schools that made it difficult for wards to establish high schools and higher studies. The commissioner of education for the territory, Jacob S. Boreman, reported to the Legislative Assembly in the late 1880s that no statute existed for the creation of high schools. Mormon-run high schools in Utah were almost non-existent. As late as 1896, when the state issued its first report on public education, Dr. John R. Park, state superintendent, noted that, “Thus far, practically no schools of higher grade than the eighth, have been maintained outside of cities of the first and the second class.” Even then, the cities were lax in initiating public high schools. In fact, the first students graduating from public schools in Salt Lake City received their diplomas in 1893.

In 1875, beginning with Brigham Young Academy in Provo, under the direction of Karl G. Maeser, the Mormon church finally began establishing a series of high schools, known as academies. These academies gave instruction to primary school children, secondary students, and students wishing to become teachers. Men largely made up the faculty of the academies, and one man—Maeser—left his imprint on twenty-two academies that the LDS church established over the next thirty years. Stakes (the Mormon ecclesiastical unit above the ward) ran these institutions, and thus they were named the Weber Stake Academy, Wasatch Stake Academy, Uintah Stake Academy, Emery Stake Academy, and so forth.

Even though the academies provided secondary school curriculum, they were more closely aligned with higher education than with the common schools, and the male teachers in these academies often moved from the academy into university positions. In Beaver in 1886, the LDS church established a stake academy, but transformed it in 1898 into the Murdock Academy, identified now as the first secondary school in the state established south of Provo. Its early teachers included its principal, Ephraim E. Ericksen, George Luke, and Thomas Joseph—each of whom went on to successful careers in academia. At Brigham Young Academy it was difficult to distinguish between a teacher and a professor.

The Mormon academies not only reinforced the presence of men as teachers in Utah; they also undermined the mission school movement. Both the missionary schools and the LDS academies went into decline after 1896 with the establishment of a public school system after Utah gained statehood. Only the strongest of the academies, both Protestant and Mormon, survived. Public schools soon became the primary vehicle of education and contributed to the rapid growth in the number of female teachers.

We have found that the myth that women taught in American schools from the time of the common school movement is accurate only in New England. In the South, men led classrooms almost exclusively. In the West, both men and women taught, a fact that partially reflected the preponderance of males in the general population, but also mirrored an overall openness of society.

In contrast with the rest of the West, Utah had a good balance of men and women, which was evident in the gender of the teachers in both community and common schools. There were two exceptions. First, Protestant mission schools in Utah hired female teachers, in accordance with the New England pattern. The only men in these schools were usually the ministers, who played both an administrative role and a part-time teacher role. Second, LDS academies tended to hire male teachers, although some women worked in most of these schools. Generally, however, not only did a high ratio of male to female teachers exist in Utah, this ratio continued long after the proportion of male to female teachers was tipping in favor of females in the rest of the West. This took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

How do we explain this phenomenon? Perhaps it occurred because the Mormon church disavowed the traditional separation of male and female roles by establishing a communitarian ethos that “made no distinction between the private family and the broad Mormon community.” No pronouncement ever came from LDS leaders suggesting that women should not become teachers. Further, women saw fulfillment of their traditional role by entering the classroom alongside the men, who were admonished that they too must shoulder the burden of educating Mormon youth. Both men and women recognized that this burden should be seen neither as a domestic nor as a public responsibility, but as a responsibility of all adults in God’s kingdom.

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