Margaret Haley, Florence Rood, and Mary Barker

At the turn of this century teachers routinely suffered intolerable working conditions, and women who taught the youngest children were among the most exploited. Facing poor wages, little political or community support, and no national forum sensitive to the needs of classroom teachers, three women who taught urban grade school children helped create, shape, and lead the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) through its early years: Margaret Haley of Chicago, Florence Rood of St. Paul, and Mary Barker of Atlanta.

The American educational system from which these three leaders emerged had undergone dramatic changes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Emphasis on the need for widespread public education for all children, coupled with a decline in the economy's dependence on child labor, had led many states to pass compulsory education laws and to lengthen the duration of school terms. Required education demanded more teachers, but the high costs associated with expanding public education systems and inadequate funding from state legislatures led local education officials to offer meager wages.

Women teachers disproportionally filled the ranks of these low paying jobs. In 1870, about 65 percent of all classroom teachers were female; by 1900 the number reached 75 percent; and in 1920 it peaked at 86 percent.(1) The highest per cent of women teachers always occurred at the grade school level. In 1870, the average male classroom teacher received $35 a week while female teachers earned only $12. Fifty years later, in 1920, the average weekly pay for women teachers reached $36, only a dollar more than men's 1870 wages, while men in the 1920s earned an average $61 a week.(2)

Low pay was not the only reason that school systems recruited women. As early as 1841, women classroom teachers were characterized as "unambitious, frugal and filial."(3) Lacking many of the legal rights of men, women at the turn of the century often had extra restrictions placed on them as a condition of employment. Many school districts refused to hire married women, resulting in a profession where only 10 percent of female teachers had spouses.(4) Although considered more nurturing of young children than men, women teachers were perceived to be second-class workers, cheaper and more malleable than their male counterparts.

Nowhere was this second-class status more evident than at the grade school level. Few college-educated women chose public education as a profession and almost none taught the youngest children. Although many grade school teachers attended "normal schools" that had been established to train elementary school teachers and, in some cases, provide a year or two of training beyond secondary school, a large number did not have a high school diploma. Most often the youngest teachers were perceived as undereducated and unimportant; grade school instructors had little influence in the profession.

For all classroom teachers, both male and female, working conditions in the nation's schools at the turn of the century could be physically harsh and politically demoralizing. This was especially true in rural areas, which as late as 1910 composed 58 percent of the school population. Teachers often worked in log cabins and sod houses heated with a fireplace facing a crude door supported by leather hinges. Windows were small slits and rarely glazed; they were covered with paper in the winter. In some places, there were no student desks; children sat on benches. Textbooks were sparse and frequently old. Sanitary conditions were rudimentary. Urban teachers faced many of the same primitive conditions; the schools were often crowded, boxlike structures that were cold in winter and hot in summer.(5)

In addition to teaching in physically demanding environments, classroom teachers faced a hierarchical and bureaucratic educational structure aimed more at economic efficiency than quality education. Schools had rigid rules and, in many places, teachers worked under constant supervision. Usually, teachers could be fired at a principal's will or whim.(6) Among the critics of this system was John Dewey, philosopher and educational reformer, who pointed out the hypocrisy of the "teacher's obligation to give lessons about democracy, and her obligation to take orders and remain silent at her workplace."(7)

Many teachers were dissatisfied with this situation. They formed local teachers' associations in their cities, but these functioned as forums for complaints, with little or no power. The National Education Association (NEA), a nationwide professional organization founded in 1857, provided meagre support for classroom teachers. In the 1890s, school administrators comprised 50 percent of the membership while classroom teachers were only 11 percent. Supervision and higher education dominated the agenda of the NEA's board, headed by school superintendents and college presidents.(8)

Starting in the late 1890s, Chicago teachers began the fight for classroom rights, increased wages, and guaranteed pensions. Foremost among them was Margaret Haley, a Chicago sixth grade school teacher who became a leader of the movement to unionize teachers. Born in 1861, Haley learned to read from her mother, an Irish immigrant who used the Bible and a pictorial history of Ireland to educate her daughter. Haley's father, also Irish, was born in Canada and immigrated to Illinois as a child. He operated a stone quarry and construction firm but was active in the Knights of Labor as well as the Joliet Illinois Trade and Labor Council.(9) In her autobiography, Haley gave an example of her father's fair-mindedness. She recalled that he led her out of a hall when a speaker criticized women's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony, telling his daughter, "I don't know Susan B. Anthony and I suppose that I never shall, but she's a woman who is working for a cause, a just cause, and I will not allow my children to continue to listen to any half-baked nincompoop who sneers at her." (10)

Trained at a nearby "normal school," Haley began teaching even before she graduated.(11) After she gained experience, she delivered an ultimatum to the school superintendent that she must have a $5.00 raise, and if she did not hear from him by noon of the first day of the fall term, she would quit. Receiving no response, she set out for Chicago to teach.

In Chicago, Haley met Catharine Goggin, a like-minded grade school teacher, who shared a dissatisfaction with the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF). Founded in 1897 and composed of elementary school teachers, the CTF was unable to obtain a needed pay increase for city teachers, who had not had a raise for twenty years. With Haley as her campaign manager, Goggin successfully ran for president of the CTF, receiving 1,701 of 2,243 votes.

The next step was to educate the CTF membership about the benefits of affiliation with the 200,000-member Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). In early 1902, the CTF voted to join the CFL, becoming the first group of teachers in the country to join with organized labor.(12) "We realized," Haley explained, that we had "to fight the devil with fire and, if we were to preserve not only our own self-respect but the basic independence of the public schools, we must make [a] powerful political alliance."(13)

Haley resigned her teaching post in 1901, becoming a business agent for the CTF. She took over the full-time leadership of the organization in 1916 when Goggin was killed in a traffic accident. Haley evoked strong reactions from everyone, including her fellow teachers. Opponents referred to her as a "lady labor slugger."(14) She travelled across the country, speaking about her positive experience with organized labor in Chicago and trying to convince other teachers' organizations to join the labor movement. In 1916, she sent Ida Fursman to represent the CTF at the founding meeting of the American Federation of Teachers. A movement to make Haley the AFT's first president was weakened by concern that she had been overly entangled in Chicago politics. Ironically, her involvement centered on the fight to defeat legislation to prohibit Chicago teachers from joining a labor union.

The AFT elected Charles Stillman, a Chicago vocational high school teacher, as its first president. He had the support of male and female high school teachers who predominated at the meeting. The AFT did, however, elect Haley as its national organizer, an unpaid position.(15)

The following year, Haley made two far-reaching decisions. She pulled the CTF out of both the CFL and the AFT. She reluctantly withdrew from the city labor federation, forced to do so by a court decision upholding a ban on teacher unions. She did this only after securing passage of a state tenure law for teachers. Removal from the AFT was ideological, mainly due to her differences with Stillman. The immediate cause was that Stillman, without consulting the AFT board, had joined with AFL President Samuel Gompers in support of America's involvement in World War I. This angered Haley, who along with many of her grade school colleagues, had strong anti-war beliefs. The CTF also considered Stillman too conservative on issues such as his backing of Gompers' support of a no-strike pledge for public employees.(16)

Although separated from the AFT, Haley continued her efforts to spark teacher interest in joining the labor movement. She led the CTF until her death in 1939, crusading from every podium she could find on behalf of better teaching conditions. Perhaps Chicago poet Carl Sandburg best summed up her accomplishments: "this one little woman has flung her clenched fists into the faces of contractors, school land leaseholders, tax dodgers and their politicians, fixers, go-betweens and stool pigeons . . . . manipulators who hate Margaret Haley have not been able to smutch her in the eyes of decent men and women of this town who do their own thinking."(17)

The influence of the elementary school teacher in the AFT did not end when the CTF left the organization. Six years after Haley's departure, the AFT elected kindergarten teacher Florence Rood as its president. Born in 1873, Rood could trace her ancestors back to the Mayflower. She was from a family that prized education and learning. Following her lifelong ambition to be a teacher, Rood attended St. Paul City Normal, known as The Teachers' Training School. In 1894, after she earned her two-year diploma, she began teaching kindergarten-aged children.(18)

According to Rood's associates, Frances Biskup and Elizabeth Newton, "Miss Rood had an unusual insight into child nature and introduced innovations in educational method long before the new approach to this education was recognized by all educators."(19) Her kindergarten room and her teaching style drew visits from educators as well as students from teacher training schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and she became a demonstration teacher and a critic teacher at the St. Paul Normal School in 1913.(20) When the normal school closed in 1916, she was appointed assistant supervisor in charge of kindergartens in the St. Paul school system.

Rood believed in "democratic supervision," regarding teachers and supervisors as co-workers, cooperating to improve the classroom teaching. She helped form the Grade Teachers Organization (GTO).(21) At first, the superintendent of schools outlawed the organization. When that did not deter the women, the superintendent formed "Loyalty Clubs" made up of teachers who were rewarded for reporting the names of those who belonged to the GTO. The state education commissioner, business groups, and the press all attacked the GTO.(22) These attacks were a reflection of the anti-union activity occurring across the country--spurred by fear of workers uniting and managers losing their near-absolute control.

Soon, almost every grade school teacher in St. Paul belonged to the GTO. In 1909 and again in 1917, Rood, as a GTO lobbyist, fought against the so-called "merit pay" plan, helping to win the cooperation of other teacher groups in the state and civic organizations including Minnesota Farmer Labor groups and the Farmer Labor Women's Club. Helen Conway, one of her biographers, noted that Rood's strongest trait was the "ability to select real leaders and to inspire confidence in her coworkers." Conway reports one of Rood's colleagues as saying, "We worked harder than we ever thought we could, and loved doing it with Miss Rood."(23)

In the GTO, Rood began her lifelong work on pensions for teachers. Before the expansion of the public school system in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, teaching had been seen as a temporary occupation and career teachers were an anomaly. In the twentieth century, the situation changed. Single women, like Rood, who were entering the profession in growing numbers, knew that they were primary bread winners who had to be self-sufficient; they needed the assurance of a pension for their retirement years.(24)

Rood led a group of fellow teachers, both women and men, to take advantage of an enabling act on pensions passed by the Minnesota legislature. The pension plan devised by Rood's group was simple and workable and involved contributions from both the city and the teachers. It went into operation in 1910, and Rood managed the pension system for St. Paul's teachers until 1939.(25)

Rood joined the NEA and in 1913 headed its newly formed Department of Classroom Teachers. Margaret Haley and others had fought to create this department because they believed the NEA neglected this segment of the teaching profession. After her election, Rood drew up an ambitious agenda that dealt with salary and tax issues for the NEA to consider. She particularly wanted the NEA to understand the problems of administrator favoritism inherent in "merit pay," and spoke out about the need for tenure for teachers. Due to her work for teacher pensions, she learned a good deal about state and local taxing systems and was eager to share her expertise. Through the NEA's National Council, however, college presidents and school superintendents controlled the finances of the NEA as well as its priorities. Among them, there was a strong sentiment that teacher welfare issues were not "professional." The National Council never gave Rood's new department a budget or empowered it to tax its own members. Rood felt that the department only served as a place to air grievances without actually compelling recognition of the needs of teachers. Accordingly, she turned to other organizations.(26)

Rood and her associates began to receive support from the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly. The Grade Teachers Organization issued a series of "Letters to the Public," protesting merit pay and other problems facing teachers, but were unable to get them published in the local newspapers. According to the historian of the St. Paul local, "The only organization that recognized teachers' problems, having similar problems themselves, was labor."(27) The St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly published the teachers' letters and publicized their causes. The campaign defeated merit pay and resulted in a salary increase for teachers.

In 1918 Rood led the St. Paul grade school teachers into the AFT. Rood's name was on the top line of the St. Paul charter, and she was the group's key leader. The new 400-member St. Paul Federation of Women Teachers, AFT Local 28, was entirely female; a year later, fifty male teachers in the city formed the St. Paul Men Teachers' Union, AFT Local 43. No publications mention why the men did not join the women teachers, but the decision to remain separate seems to have been mutual. They did, however, form a coordinating committee to work together on various issues, and Rood served on it. The two locals did not merge until 1957. Rood never became president of the St. Paul Federation of Women Teachers, but she was always active in the leadership of the group, chairing committees and working behind the scenes.

The St. Paul union was one of the largest in the AFT; from 1922, Rood was a member of the AFT executive council. In 1923, Charles Stillman, with an empty union treasury and faced with opposition to his conservative policies, resigned the AFT presidency. Rood was elected president. According to the convention's proceedings, "Miss Rood modestly tried to bring before the convention necessary pressure through her remarks and suggestions to sway the convention to the negative as regards her name on the ballot. Miss Rood did not attempt to withdraw her name from the ballot but suggested that she be not so elected."(28)

In Rood's first presidential report, delivered extemporaneously, she did not hesitate to criticize the problems she saw in the AFT. From a high of 10,000 members in 1920, the union's membership had plunged to 3,600 in 1923.(29) One mistake the AFT continued to make, Rood believed, was to charter a local and give it insufficient support. Under Stillman, the AFT had tried to organize as many locals as possible, but many floundering locals had disbanded. Rood argued that if the AFT could not support a local, it should not charter it. To strengthen existing locals, Rood encouraged each to share their successes and failures by writing about them for the AFT semi-monthly bulletin.(30) She wrote to AFT local leaders and offered advice and encouragement. She continued to stress the importance of tenure and pensions throughout her term of office, and encouraged locals to campaign for these benefits. She was also able to offer advice from her experience about how to lobby for these goals.

Preferring to work behind the scenes, Rood had been a reluctant candidate for the AFT presidency, and within a year was contemplating who might succeed her in office. In 1924, Mary Barker, AFT vice-president and president of the Atlanta Public School Teachers' Association, invited Rood to Atlanta to speak to her members. The event solidified their friendship.(31) In 1925, Barker succeeded Rood as president of the AFT. Rood remained on the AFT executive council and was an active vice-president. Later, Rood stepped down from the AFT executive council but continued to work for her local and for the national AFT, until shortly before her death in 1944 at age seventy-one.

Barker was born in 1879. Both of her parents were teachers and she and her two sisters followed their parents' vocation. Barker trained to be an elementary school teacher at Agnes Scott Institute in Decatur, Georgia, and then began her teaching career in small Georgia communities. In 1904, she moved to Atlanta, where her career in the public grade schools spanned the next forty-four years. Although she was promoted to school principal by 1921, her writing and actions show that she always thought of herself as a classroom teacher, not a manager. She continued to teach at her school and had very little autonomy as a principal.(32)

As the school population in Atlanta continued to grow and school funding did not, working conditions deteriorated. By 1910, salaries had been dropping for three decades.(33) The school board required teachers to furnish their own desk copies of textbooks, and the threat loomed constantly that the schools might have to close for lack of money. To take care of the crowding, Atlanta initiated summer school, paying teachers only $10 a week. Merit pay also went into effect, and when teachers examined the wage levels under merit pay, they found that more salaries decreased than increased.(34) Atlanta also adopted a system of paying teachers on a twelve-month basis, instead of the usual nine months.

In her second year of teaching in Atlanta, Barker helped found the Atlanta Public School Teachers' Association (APSTA), a broad-based, city-wide, white teachers' organization. It became a substantial organization in the 1920s. Unlike the teachers in Chicago and St. Paul, who formed multiple associations in their cities that were separated by grade level and gender, 90 percent of the white Atlanta teachers soon belonged to the APSTA.

Shortly after the APSTA was formed, the Atlanta Federation of Trades sought its affiliation. Some of the teachers, including Barker, resisted, feeling the connection to labor would lower their status as professionals or, as Barker recalled, "for fear of being drawn into other people's strikes."(35 )In 1918, however, the Atlanta firemen formed a union, and in 1919, when the teachers were denied a raise because of lack of funds, the city found the money to give the firemen a raise.(36) A committee of APSTA that included Barker then recommend affiliation with the labor movement. As Barker recalled:

"The suggestion that teachers affiliate with organized industrial workers once seemed to me an absurd proposition. Their work was so different. Organized association on the basis of their work appeared incongruous. How little I knew about organized labor and what it was all about! The organizers of the American Federation of Teachers gave us the common denominator. We are all employees, they said. As such we have common problems. We pool our resources the more effectively to solve those problems."(37)

The APSTA became Local 89 of the AFT in 1919 and affiliated with the Atlanta Federation of Trades. Barker became reading secretary of the latter.

The dire financial position of the Atlanta school system was exacerbated by the continued failure of city tax and bond issues that would have helped fund the schools. A well-organized African-American community showed that it could use its power at the polls to defeat bond issues as a way of protesting the inadequacies of the segregated school system. Barker was atypical in her concern for of the problems of African-American teachers. She belonged to the League of Women Voters, the Urban League, the Atlanta Commission of Interracial Cooperation, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Barker encouraged a group of African-American teachers to organize and apply for an American Federation of Teachers charter in 1920. The AFT asked APSTA for its endorsement of the African-American teachers' local, but despite Barker's motion to support this new local, the APSTA refused. The AFT nevertheless granted the charter without Local 89's approval.(38 )There were also divisions between grade school teachers, who believed they deserved a raise because they had such low pay, and the principals and high school teachers, who argued that their extra training and, in the principals' case, extra work, deserved more pay.

Despite her liberalism, Barker was elected president of the APSTA in 1921. Membership in the APSTA grew under Barker's leadership and, during her two years in office, teachers won a tenure law. This had been Barker's top priority. Early in her presidency, she had had to cope with the firing of Julia Riordan, a teacher with thirty years of teaching experience, an APSTA founding member, and an activist who was targeted because she was a Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan decided to make an example of Riordan and, through their members on the school board, had her fired. Though the Atlanta Federation of Trades supported her, Riordan was not rehired.

Barker used the Riordan firing and the surrounding publicity to work successfully for the new tenure law. At that time, teachers worked on a one-year contract, and they could be ousted from the system by the superintendent. Rood worked with the APSTA's legislative committee, presenting a tenure proposal to the school board. She also worked through the Georgia Education Association and the Atlanta Federation of Trades to garner support. She had an attorney draft a proposal for statewide teacher tenure; that proposal lost, but focused statewide attention on the tenure proposal in Atlanta, and contributed to its passage. Under the new law, after three years in the school system, a teacher could not be dismissed except for cause, after presentation of charges at a formal hearing.(39)

Barker stepped down from the APSTA presidency in 1923, after two years in office, but remained first vice-president. In the 1920s, she devoted much of her energy to the national teacher's organization. Barker had been elected to the AFT executive council in 1922, and served three years before taking over the presidency from Florence Rood in 1925.

During Barker's presidency, the AFT became outspoken on racial issues. At earlier conventions, the New York City local, led by Abraham Lefkovitz and Henry Linville, had supported unsuccessful resolutions calling for a more balanced view of African-American history in textbooks and calling for a "more tolerant attitude between races that constitute the nation."(40 )These passed in 1928, and that convention also attacked the intolerance of the Ku Klux Klan and of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The AFT's support of liberal causes sometimes caused problems. Its support for left-of-center Brookwood Labor College led to a souring of relations with AFL leaders during Barker's term. AFL President William Green was concerned with the radicalism of the faculty at Brookwood, an institution that the AFL's more liberal unions helped finance. In 1927, Green further strained relations with the union when he declined an invitation to speak at the AFT convention but did accept one to address the NEA gathering. An outraged Baker wrote to the AFT's secretary-treasurer Florence Hanson about the episode: "The affinity between the AFL and the NEA has finally dawned on me. As much alike as two peas in a pod. Autocratic, complaisant, monopolistic-antisocial, fear ridden, illiberal inherently."(41) Barker never, however, considered leaving the AFL. In 1950, she wrote an article about her long association with the labor movement, acknowledging that there are always people in it who fall short of its goals. Nevertheless, she believed that "Association promotes understanding . . . and provides opportunity for assembling the forces that project forward steps in human progress."(42)

Barker stepped down as AFT president in 1931, in favor of Henry Linville. She continued as an AFT vice-president until 1934. That year, her local finally withdrew its support of her because of her liberal statements and votes on racial issues.

Haley, Rood, and Barker are representative of a generation of women teaching in the primary grades in the expanding school systems of the early twentieth century. The AFT provided a vehicle for such women to grapple with issues central to the reality that they were career women, not secondary workers, and to tackle some of the most important educational and social issues of their day. In return, their talents benefited to the leadership of the AFT in its formative years.

Reference Notes