History of Education

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Teaching as a woman’s job: the impact of the

admission of women to elementary teaching in
England and France in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries

Susan Trouvé‐Finding

To cite this article: Susan Trouvé‐Finding (2005) Teaching as a woman’s job: the impact of the
admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, History of Education, 34:5, 483-496, DOI: 10.1080/00467600500220689

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HISTORY OF EDUCATION, SEPTEMBER, 2005, VOL. 34, NO. 5, 483–496

Teaching as a woman’s job: the impact of the

admission of women to elementary teaching in
England and France in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries

SUSAN TROUVÉ-FINDING
Faculté des Lettres et Langues, Université de Poitiers, 95 ave. Du Recteur Pineau,
86022 Poitiers Cedex France
Email: Susan.Trouve@univ-poitiers.fr
Faculté&des
SusanTrouvé-Finding
History
10.1080/00467600500220689
THED122051.sgm
0046-760X
Original
Taylor
2005
September
000
05
34 and Lettres
ofArticle
Francis
Education
2005
Francis et
LtdLanguesUniversité
(print)/1464-5130
Group Ltd (online) de Poitiers95 ave. Du Recteur PineauPoitiersCedex 86022FranceSusan.Trouve@univ-poitiers.fr

This paper proposes to examine the causes and impact of the admission of women to the
teaching profession, by comparing the professional situation of women elementary teachers
in England and France. An examination of the avowed or implicit reasons for allowing
women into the profession in the two countries, looking in particular at recruitment, training
and employment conditions, will contribute to the debate on what Albisetti calls ‘the remark-
able consensus’ about the factors behind the feminisation of the teaching profession in
various countries. In both countries, feminisation was accompanied by shifts in age pyramids,
social origins and qualifications. These developments in turn brought about a change in
perceptions of the elementary teacher in general. However, rooted in specific political differ-
ences, the modifications wrought by feminisation in elementary teaching in France and
England show variations in degree and timing that underscore the parallel developments and
put the place of women within the elementary teaching corps into perspective.

The time when all the best pupils of girls’ schools wanted to become teachers is not long gone … It was
thought that women primary teachers had an honourable, safe position, that they had a right to a pension,
and families that knew the precariousness of female earnings, of job instability, of the threat of unem-
ployment and the uncertainty of the future, happily approved of their daughters preparing the teaching
examination. Things have changed … Those same families are now sensitive to the hope of high earn-
ings, rapidly achieved; they recoil at the prospect of the long training imposed on teachers … Certainly
one can only rejoice in the opening up of perspectives, the more numerous avenues available to women,
but we wish the teaching career to remain a choice one among female career options.1

The remarks of a French women’s training college head in 1920 read as an epitaph for the
women elementary teacher. They raise questions the entrance of women en masse into
elementary teaching begged; quality of entrants, job status, salary, training and vocation.
This paper proposes to examine the causes and impact of the admission of women to the
teaching profession by comparing the professional situation of women elementary teach-
ers in England and French institutrices from the 1890s to the 1920s. An examination of
the avowed or implicit reasons for allowing women into the profession in the two coun-
tries, looking in particular at recruitment, training and employment conditions, will
contribute to the debate on what Albisetti calls ‘the remarkable consensus’ about the
factors behind the feminisation of the teaching profession in various countries.2
Previous work has contributed to a greater understanding of the feminisation of the
teaching force, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. Albisetti argues that similar

1 D. Billotry, ‘Le recrutement des institutrices’, Manuel général de l’Instruction primaire, 25 December 1920.
2 J. C. Albisetti, ‘The feminization of teaching in the nineteenth century: a comparative perspective’, History of
Education, 22, 3 (1993), 253–263.
History of Education ISSN 0046–760X print/ISSN 1464–5130 online © 2005 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/00467600500220689
484 S. Trouvé-Finding

structural causes in a wide range of countries led to differing degrees of feminisation

whilst other factors, which might have been deemed to have had an impact on the level of
feminisation such as formal training and certification of women teachers or marriage bans,
did not. Work by Van Essen provides further analysis of the strategies women teachers
adopted in The Netherlands in response to the low level of feminisation achieved.3
Following the lead of Bergen, Copelman and Oram cast the debate on women teachers in
England firmly in feminist history, whilst the work of Robinson and Edwards remains
embedded in the history of education.4 In France, there has been qualitative work on the
experience of women elementary teachers and the changing relations between men and
women teachers, but no single work attempting to explore the implications of the chang-
ing structure of the elementary corps, although political and feminist activism among
women teachers has been explored.5
The influx of women elementary teachers brought into the profession by the expansion
of girls’ education had a similar impact on the composition of the primary corps in
England and France. Feminisation was accompanied by shifts in age pyramids, social
origins and qualifications. These social and professional developments in turn brought
about a change in perceptions of the elementary teacher in general in both countries.
However, rooted in specific political differences, the modifications wrought by feminisa-
tion in elementary teaching in France and England show variations in degree and timing,
which underscore the parallel developments and put the place of women within the
elementary teaching corps into perspective.

Influx
The increase in employment opportunities for women in the tertiary sector and the expan-
sion of the educational systems in England and France in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century appear to feed on each other as reasons for women entering elementary teaching
in large numbers. In England, the expansion of girls’ education created jobs for women
teachers and provided candidates for training as women teachers, while the expanding
services required literate and numerate workers. ‘White blouse work’ had begun its irre-
sistible rise with a shift towards the service sector in women’s employment,6 even though
the overall percentage of women at work remained fairly constant at around one-third
between 1861 and 1951 (37% at the beginning of the twentieth century). In France, the
second industrial revolution led to similar overall results (in 1906, 37% of women were

3 M. Van Essen, ‘Strategies of women teachers 1860–1920: feminization in Dutch elementary and secondary
schools from a comparative perspective’, History of Education, 28, 4 (1999), 413–433.
4 B. H. Bergen, ‘Only a schoolmaster: gender, class and the effort to professionalize elementary teaching in
England 1870–1910’, History of Education Quarterly, 22 (1982); D. M. Copelman, London’s Women Teachers.
Gender, Class and Feminism 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1996); W. Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their
Professional Training in Pupil Teacher Centres in England and Wales 1870–1914 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen,
2003); E. Edwards, Women in Teacher Training Colleges, 1900–1960. A Culture of Femininity (London:
Routledge, 2001).
5 D. Delhome, N. Gault and J. Gonthier, Les premières institutrices laïques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1980);
J. Ozouf and M. Ozouf, La république des instituteurs (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1992); P. Meyers, ‘From
conflict to cooperation: men and women teachers in the Belle Époque’, in D. N. Baker and P. J. Harrigan (eds),
The Making of Frenchmen. Current Directions in the History of Education in France 1679–1978 (Waterloo,
Ontario: Historical Reflections Press, 1980), 493–505; A-M. Sohn, Feminisme et syndicalisme. Les institutri-
ces de la Fédération unitaire de l’Enseignement 1919–1935, Thèse de 3e cycle, Paris X Nanterre, 1973.
6 E. Roberts, Women’s Work 1840–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 31–40; J. Lewis, ‘Women and society:
continuity and change since 1870’, in A. Digby & C. Feinstein (eds), New Directions in Economic and Social
History (London: Macmillan, 1989), 130–142, Table 10.
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 485

active),7 with one major difference. France remained essentially rural (60% of the popula-
tion in 1901) until 1931, when the number of urban dwellers first outnumbered rural
inhabitants, 50 years after England.
The order in which free, compulsory schooling was tackled in both countries underlines
the more overtly political motivation behind the employment of women in state elementary
teaching in France. School buildings were provided (1876), women’s training colleges
established (1879), followed by free schooling (1881) and compulsory attendance (1882).
Finally, the removal of all religious influence in state schools was initiated (1881 minimum
requirement for teaching, replacement by lay teachers from 1886, religious symbols forbid-
den in schools in 1887). The creators of the French Republican school system had set up
girls’ education on an equal if separate footing to that of boys’ education.8 Every commune
was to provide a school building and the state would appoint and pay a qualified teacher
trained in a departmental training college, école normale. In England, such systematic and
overtly political provision was absent. Schools were provided (1870), attendance made
compulsory (1880) but was not completely fee-free until 1891, whilst denominational state
schools continue to exist to this day. Meanwhile, provision of pupil-teacher centres and
teacher-training college places remained local and unplanned.9
If the total number of state elementary teachers in England was comparable (115,000
in 1899, and the same number in France for 1906), the massive staff requirements had led
to the recruitment of an average annual recruitment of 4000 elementary teachers per year
from 1870 to 1910 in England, but only 1,100 per year from 1886 in France. The rate of
increase in numbers of teachers in France was higher before 1886, in the first decade after
the introduction of state schooling (1876–1882: 73,246–94,000) than after, while England
continued to recruit apace throughout the four decades. Whereas in England the number of
teachers rose by 89,000 in the 20 years from 1890 to 1910, in France the overall increase
was four times less, at 20,000 between 1886 and 1906. The increase over 20 years from
1886 to 1906 was slightly more than 20,000 or barely 25% over 1886 levels, at an average
rate of 1,075 new teachers per year.10
Such was the rate of women entering elementary teaching in England that by 1899,
four-fifths were women, with a heavier distribution in less qualified employment: 61% of
qualified teachers, 84% of unqualified teachers, and all supplementary teachers were
women.11 By 1910, the proportion of male teachers in the active male population had
doubled, whereas that of women teachers in the active female population had been multi-
plied by ten since 1870.12 In France the ratio was similar. Recruitment stood at an average

7 See S. Schweitzer, Les femmes ont toujours travaillé, une histoire du travail des femmes aux XIXe et XX e
siècles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002); F. Guéland-Leridon, Le Travail des femmes en France (Paris: PUF, 1964),
Table 1.
8 See L. L. Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: textbooks and the socialization of girls in modern
French primary schools (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984). For England, see F. Hunt,
Lessons for Life: the schooling of girls and women 1850–1950 (London: Blackwell, 1987).
9 For the former, see Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training. For the latter, see Edwards,
Women in Teacher Training Colleges.
10 Calculated from statistics in P. Horn, ‘The recruitment, role and status of the Victorian country teacher’,
History of Education, 9, 2 (1980), 129–215; Meyers, ‘From conflict to cooperation’, 493–505.
11 Board of Education statistics 1900–1901, Parliamentary Papers XLX, 27 quoted by P. L. R. Horn, Education
in Rural England, 1800–1914 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978), 76 ; A. Roberts, ‘The development of
professionalism in the early stages of education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, XXIV, 3 (1976),
254–264 ; A. Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996), Table 2.
12 Figures calculated from Parliamentary Papers, XXVI, 1, 1897, xxxiii and Statistical Abstract for the United
Kingdom, Table 3B, in Bergen, ‘Only a schoolmaster’.
486 S. Trouvé-Finding

288 men per year and 1,400 women. Although the proportion of women teachers rose in
France, it neither rose as quickly nor as dramatically as in England, despite the more
overtly political motivations behind the recruitment of lay institutrices. In England,
elementary teaching was set up to provide a basic education for the working classes. In
France girls’ elementary schooling was provided by Republican institutions to combat the
influence of the Catholic church over the female population and in the domestic sphere.
Partially intended to counter the influence of the church over women by providing
hitherto non-existent lay education for girls, the creation and development of the French
state school system had significant political and cultural stakes, replacing teaching nuns
with lay state women primary teachers.13 By 1896, just over half of all school teachers
(elementary, post-elementary, secondary, lay and congregational) were women.14
Whereas in 1876 almost 60% of woman elementary teachers had been teaching nuns, by
1906 lay institutrices were now the norm. However the replacement of teaching nuns (a
loss of 12,212) is almost equal to the net gain in women teachers (15,736) over the twenty
years from 1896 to 1906.15 Progression was slower owing to the delays in the building of
a women’s training college (1879 law) held up by procrastinating conservative local coun-
cils.16 Where écoles normales d’institutrices did open normally, girls were being trained
and qualified faster than local primary schools were being built, and they had to reduce
their intake to match demand.17 This placed the institutrices within a tradition which
although secular, nevertheless conformed to the idea and ideals of a teaching sisterhood as
they spread the gospel of republicanism.18 This does not deny the ‘missionary zeal’ that
existed in pupil-teacher centres in England,19 but underlines its political as opposed to
social nature in France.
Female employment overall in the elementary schools, therefore, did not increase in
the same way or at the same rate as it did in England. The training of women elementary
teachers in England had also been a monopoly of voluntary religious societies, with school
boards receiving powers to open schools but not training colleges.20 However the inclu-
sion within state educational provision of voluntary schools and the values of the estab-
lished church meant that this was less of an overt political issue in England. The
inexorable advance nevertheless continued into the twentieth century. By 1926, 59.2% of
all French teachers were women (36.7% national average of women in the active popula-
tion, and 39.4% in the service sector).21 Thus it was only in 1929, several decades after

13 R. Gildea, ‘Education in 19th century Britanny: Ille et Vilaine 1800–1914’, Oxford Review of Education, 2, 3
(1976); J. Girault, Instituteurs, professeurs, une culture syndicale dans la société française (fin XIXe-XX e
siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 64.
14 Guéland-Leridon, Le Travail des femmes en France; M. Rivet, ‘L’enseignement primaire en France depuis la
guerre’, Bulletin de la statistique générale de la France, XXV, II (1936), 314; Schweitzer, Les femmes ont
toujours travaillé, 96.
15 Meyers ‘From conflict to cooperation’.
16 Bulletin de l’Association Amicale des Anciennes Élèves, 31 March 1938.
17 F. Granvaud Jourdanneau, Images et Vie de l’Ecole Normale d’Institutrices de Poitiers 1887-1991 (Poitiers:
Éditions du Pont Neuf, 1994), 50.
18 The term was used by Ferdinand Buisson, 1909, L’Instituteur et la République, La Grande Revue, 10 Novem-
ber. Christina de Bellaigue discusses this divergent tradition for mid-nineteenth century France and England:
‘Behind the school walls: the school community in French and English boarding schools for girls, 1810–1867’,
Paedagogica Historica, 40, 1–2 (2004), 107–121.
19 Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training, 195.
20 Edwards, Women in Teacher Training Colleges, 6–7.
21 M. R. Clark, A History of the French Labor Movement 1910–1928 (Berkeley, CA: University of California,
1938), quoting Bulletin de statistique générale de la France, October –December 1931, 140; C. Dyer, Popu-
lation and Society in Twentieth Century France (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), Table 32; Guéland-
Leridon, Le Travail des femmes en France.
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 487

England, that the percentage of women elementary teachers reached 71%.22 This slower
progression can be attributed to the initial rapid phase prior to 1886 and the continuing
resistance to the employment of institutrices in boys’ schools, as much on political as on
moral and pseudo-pedagogical grounds.23

Impact
This heavily female recruitment had immediate repercussions on the age pyramid, family
situation, social origins and qualifications of elementary teachers. The rapid growth in
France can be judged from the age pyramid for personnel in two French departments. In
the Maine et Loire and Vienne départements on the eve of the First World War, more than
half the institutrices (63% and 53%) had been born since 1880 and appointed after 1900.
In the Vienne, nearly half the male teachers and two-thirds of those in the Maine et Loire
had been born before that date. The local teaching corps was becoming even younger with
the arrival of women.24 In England, a similar enlargement of the base of the age pyramid
in the teaching profession took place. It lent even more heavily to the female side.
Whereas one-quarter to one-third of male teachers were under 25 at the turn of the
century, half of their female colleagues were of that age group. At the same time, 40% of
single working women over the age of 45 were teachers,25 a proportion which weighed
heavily in the public perception of the teaching profession. Female elementary teaching
staff in England and France at the turn of the century were thus largely inexperienced
young women.
In France, rural isolation only served to reinforce the bonds between teachers. Fraught
with political overtones, fraternisation outside the profession was difficult. Besides
strengthening professional unity, this also led to a large number of marriages between
teachers.26 Paradoxically in France, where state institutrices had replaced teaching nuns,
celibacy was not imposed on the secular sisterhood. ‘Professional marriages’27 were
encouraged by the authorities a form of economic, moral and political expediency. It was
a way of increasing their living standard on the meagre pay granted around the turn of the
century. Marriage to a colleague also provided the unmarried, unattached institutrice,
lacking the aura of sanctity the teaching nun had, with a professional companion and
social respectability. Under one-fifth in 1897, the proportion of married institutrices rose
to over a quarter six years later and to 56% in 1922. In 1921, teaching couples made up
nearly one-quarter of the French primary corps. In 1929, a quarter of the assistant teachers
in boys’ schools were women, more than half of whom were the wives or a relative of the
male head teacher.28 In view of these statistics, the expression ‘la grande famille enseig-
nante’ carries its full weight. Marriage, often as not to a colleague, and operating as a
tenured, qualified, teaching couple, thus reinforced the status and respectability of the
teaching corps in France and somewhat countered the arrival of large numbers of young
and inexperienced women teachers.

22 Journal des Instituteurs, 1929, 22 June; S. Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931. Their
evolving role in the third republic’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 1987, 38–39 and Table 23.
23 Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, ch. 2 .
24 Ibid., Table 5.
25 H. Kean, Deeds not Words. The Lives of Suffragette Teachers (London: Pluto, 1990), 147, note 18.
26 J. Ozouf, ‘Les instituteurs de la Manche et leurs associations au début du XX e siècle’, Revue d’histoire
moderne et contemporaine, XIII (1966), 95–114.
27 Charles Péguy, ‘De Jean Coste’, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, IV, 3, 4 November 1902.
28 Bulletin du Syndicat National des Instituteurs du Maine et Loire, 1921, 3, 4; Schwarz, Manuel général de
l’Instruction primaire, 30 March 1929.
488 S. Trouvé-Finding

In England, where there was no separation between state and church, and where volun-
tary schools received state funding, qualified women teachers were expected to remain
celibate in a way in which neither male teachers, nor male clergy were. The marriage bar
operated in a third of Local Education Authorities (LEAs), but was only applicable to
tenured employment. The appointment of the tenured male teacher’s daughter or wife as
supplementary teachers was a loophole open to some, but those women who sought tenure
as qualified teachers had literally to espouse the profession and remain single. The
marriage bar only appears to have become an issue when it affected recruitment, for exam-
ple in 1914, when the ‘usual practice for engagements in schools to terminate when
engagements to marry were fulfilled’ was denounced as ‘extraordinary prejudice in the
matter’.29 It corresponded however to the social norm; when two-thirds of all unmarried
women worked in 1911, only 10% of married women did.30 Following the war, the reinte-
gration of demobilised male teachers and economy measures (if replaced, qualified
married women teachers were replaced by temporary non-certificated staff) led to an
extension of this practise in England from 1922 (despite the 1919 Sex Disqualification
Act), covering three-quarters of all Local Education Authorities in 1926. As a result, only
10% of all married women teachers were still teaching at that date.31 The exclusion of large
numbers of qualified but married women from the profession in England must have
reflected on the status and perception of the profession as a whole.
More numerous and considerably younger than their male colleagues, women teachers
in France and England also came from a higher social background than schoolmasters and
generally had a higher level of qualification than men. The social origins of elementary
teachers clearly shows the evolving prestige of the profession as recruitment from differ-
ent social categories and the increasing levels of feminisation reveal. In France, elemen-
tary teachers’ working conditions were considerably better than the villagers and workers
among whom they lived. As a civil servant, all French instituteurs received a state salary
from 1889 and pension (1875). Alternative employment with equivalent benefits was
available in the post office but carried less prestige. English elementary teachers were only
to receive a salary on nationally determined pay scales from 1919 and general pensions in
1898, a good 20 years later. French teachers were also granted free secondary schooling
for their children (1895). In France, the numbers recruited from rural families declined,
although remaining essentially rural until the first decade of the twentieth century, whilst
those from more urban professions increased.32
While for instituteurs, the career, highly prized in the nineteenth century, had been
devalued in social terms (it had never been highly paid), for women this was less so. For
girls leaving the higher primary schools between 1898 and 1907, the most popular destina-
tion was teacher training college (17%) apart from returning home to their family (one-
third).33 ‘To the peasant and the worker, the institutrice with her decent clothes and
lodgings, is a lady, almost a woman of independent means’.34 Usually from higher social
backgrounds than their charges or their male colleagues, in France a large number of

29 W. F. Goldstone, NUT. sponsored Labour MP, 1910–1918, NUT General Secretary, 1924–1931, Times
Educational Supplement, 7 April 1914.
30 Roberts, Women’s Work 1840–1940; Lewis, ‘Women and society: continuity and change since 1870’.
31 Edwards, 2001, Women in Teacher Training Colleges, 1900–1960, 11; A. Oram, ‘Serving two masters? The
introduction of a marriage bar in teaching in the 1920s’, in London Feminist History Group (eds), The Sexual
Dynamics of History (London: Pluto, 1983), 134–48.
32 Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, Table 1.
33 Statistique de l’enseignement primaire, 8, 1909, Table 12, in Clark Schooling the Daughters of Marianne.
34 Manuel général de l’Instruction primaire, L’instituteur et l’institutrice dans la société moderne (Paris:
Hachette, 1912).
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 489

institutrices came from urban middle-class families such as doctors, army officers, entre-
preneurs. For women, teaching was accepted as a genteel way of earning one’s living.35 As
a result of this gender-differentiated motivation and social class of recruits, female recruit-
ment to the Ecoles normales was never as sensitive to economic circumstances as that of
men. Women candidates for entry were always more numerous than male colleagues, whilst
paradoxically, the number of recruits admitted was always lower than that for the men’s
training college.36 There were fewer candidates for the latter, but more men were accepted
precisely because of dearth of male vocations. This inevitably led to a noticeably better
calibre of women training college student and young teachers.
In England, elementary teaching became a select profession for lower-middle-class
women, who entered the profession in vast numbers. Bearing the ratio of women to men in
mind, it is also possible to detect a gendered class difference in available statistics for the
years 1908–1909 and 1913–1914. These show that double the percentage of women
trainee teachers came from middle-class backgrounds than men, whilst they recorded a
10% point lower rate for working class origins.37 Predominantly recruited from urban
areas at the turn of the century, it would seem that pupil-teachers tended to come from
‘independent, respectable, religious, hardworking upper working-class traditions’.38 But,
as Coppock puts it, a displacement of male skilled working-class recruits by female lower-
middle-class entrants was occuring.39 These differing social backgrounds can be expected
to have had an impact on their attitudes towards their training and their professional
duties. When considering the moral and social constraints placed on these recruits, and in
particular the girls, this factor should not be overlooked.

Injustices
However, again paradoxically, despite this greater attraction of elementary teaching as a
profession for women and the ensuing greater selection, the expansion of the teaching
profession was accompanied, as in other sectors such as office work or shop work, by a
‘dilution’ of skills. Despite qualified women teachers having higher qualifications than
their male colleagues, the proportion of qualified women teachers, although growing,
remained lower than that of men. In England, the funding of education created additional
factors increasing both the preference for women teachers and their lower general level of
qualifications. No pay premium resulted from college certificates (see below). Thus there
arose a situation where despite the increasingly professional training afforded to women in
both countries, widespread use of unqualified, untenured women elementary teachers was
made as pupil-teachers, supplementaries or uncertificated assistants.40

35 I. Berger, ‘Hommes et femmes dans une même profession. Instituteurs et institutrices. Premiers résultats d’une
enquête dans le département de la Seine’, Revue française de sociologie, (1960), 173–185 ; I. Berger and
R. Benjamin, L’univers des instituteurs. Etude sociologique sur les instituteurs et institutrices du département
de la Seine (Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1964), Ozouf and Ozouf, La république des instituteurs, 52.
36 Trouvé-Finding ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, Table 10.
37 F. Widdowson, Going up to the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training 1840–1914 (Women’s
Research & Resources Centre, 1980), 45–46, Tables 2 and 3; Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 34,
Table 2.4.
38 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 33; Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training,
188–190.
39 David A. Coppock, ‘Respectability as a prerequisite of moral character: the social and occupational mobility
of pupil teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, History of Education, 26, 2 (1997),
177.
40 A. C. O. Ellis, ‘The training and supply of teachers in the Victorian period’, History of Education Society
Bulletin, 24 (1979), 22–38; Roberts, ‘The development of professionalism in the early stages of education’.
490 S. Trouvé-Finding

Seen as a practical apprenticeship, teaching practice in England took the form of paid
employment as a pupil-teacher under the instruction and supervision of a certificated
teacher. Academic and professional instruction was increasingly provided in pupil-teacher
centres as professional self-regulation developed.41 In France, unpaid teaching practice
took place in the third year of training college, following two years’ study of academic
subjects and the theory of education. The resort to such ‘training’ in England meant that
raw recruits several years younger that their French counterparts and overwhelmingly
female to an extent unseen in France were used.
From 1870 to 1875, the number of pupil-teachers in England doubled to keep pace
with the expansion of the system. By 1899, 80% of pupil-teachers (32,000 in 1902 at the
zenith of the system)42 and 75% of tenured teachers were women.43 11,000 pupil-teachers
were still being trained in 1906, when the bursar scheme was progressively introduced.
Far from having the intended effect of a better quality of candidate and standard of
teacher, this scheme discouraged recruits daunted by longer secondary study prior to
teacher training. Candidates preferred to accept unqualified but paid teaching positions at
the age of 18, with the intention of gaining their qualification by inspection or as non-
teacher training college candidates for the examinations. This tendency was magnified for
women. Further sacrifice of potential earnings for longer study was not acceptable for
daughters from modest families.44 By 1912 in England, regrets as to the lesser influence of
the career could be expressed, ‘teaching attracts few girls and yet fewer boys. We obtain
as teachers those who lack the vigour and independence to risk their fortunes elsewhere’.45
A mill girl’s earnings were double the starting salary of £29 per annum.46 Nevertheless,
the proportion of scholarship pupils girls choosing elementary teaching as a career (67.4%
compared to 12% of boys in Northumberland)47 confirmed the profession’s continuing
attraction for women and the disaffection of male candidates. Despite being as successful
at the scholarship examinations (rising for both from 65% pass rate to 76% from 1887 to
1897, an indication of the success of the pupil teacher centres, according to Robinson) the
take-up of training college places was proportionally lower for women. Three times as
many young women as men were scholarship candidates in 1899, but only one woman in
five, against one out of three men, actually took their training college place.48
A marked gender division in training is visible in England and in France. In England,
women elementary teachers were ten times less likely to be training college-educated than
men (three in one hundred, to one in four). Men were more frequently ‘certificated’ than
women (two-thirds, to under half).49 However, these qualified teachers were but the tip of
the iceberg. The overall average level of certification for the whole primary corps drops to
7% for men and a mere 3.5% for women if one includes pupil-teachers and 20,000

41 Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training.

42 Ibid., 32, 155.
43 Special Reports on Educational Subjects 1897–1898, Education Department, Vol. 1, Public Elementary
Education in England and Wales 1870–1895, quoted by A. Tropp, The School Teachers. The Growth of the
Teaching Profession in England and Wales from 1800 to the Present Day (London: Heinemann, 1957), 114–
117, 170–171.
44 J. Purvis, A History of Women’s Education in England (Oxford: OUP, 1991), 21.
45 Letter from G. L. Bruce, Times Educational Supplement, 2 July 1914.
46 J. Liddington and J. Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us. The rise of the women’s suffrage movement (London:
Virago, 1978).
47 ‘After-careers of scholars’, Times Educational Supplement, 3 December 1912.
48 Tropp, The School Teachers, 118, note 22; Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training, 161.
49 Certification (by inspection) did not necessarily mean college trained. Figures collated from Board of
Education Report 1900–1901, Parliamentary Papers, XIX, 27, in Horn, Education in Rural England, 1800–
1914, (Dublin Gill and Macmillan, 1978), 103.
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 491

supplementaries.50 The changes in qualifications and training introduced from 1905 were
necessary but seem to have been illusory.51 With a national average of 12.5% college
trained men and women teachers in 1900, it remained true in 1911 that ‘college training
was a luxury for the few, not a necessity for the many’,52 to which a gender qualification
must be added: a luxury for the few men, not a necessity for the many women. The low
levels of qualification accompanying the feminisation of teaching were flagrant. Skilled
work in teaching was being de-skilled by social circumstances as cheaper, lower skilled
and lower-qualified women teachers entered the profession.
The national average percentage for college trained teachers in the French primary
corps was higher than in England, for the simple reason that the recruitment policy
adopted by the Republican governments since the 1880s had systematically provided for
regimented republican training (not to say indoctrination) of the lay teachers. If one takes
1899 as the reference point, an average 22% of the women teachers in the Vienne had
attended training college, compared to 54% of men. By 1914, although less than half the
women teaching in elementary schools in the Vienne had attended training college, this is
still much higher than in England, whilst more than half, and a higher percentage than
their male colleagues thanks to the academically proficient newest intake, had passed their
Brevet supérieur (equivalent to the baccalauréat, taken in the second year at training
college), whereas men’s entry qualifications remained close to the strict minimum require-
ment (Brevet élémentaire).53 The higher calibre of female entrants to the French training
colleges remained a constant. In an attempt to improve the level and lack of male candi-
dates and the general status of the teaching personnel, the Brevet supérieur became a
compulsory condition for entry in 1923. It had been a de facto condition for women for
more than a decade. But, for the same reasons as the introduction of the bursary scheme in
England 15 years earlier, this attempt was judged partially responsible for the continuing
crisis in recruitment.
Salary scales were a further deterrent to professional training for women in England.
Women’s low take-up of scholarship training college places is hardly surprising. The
regional pay scales betray widespread pay discrimination. In all 12 areas in a Times
Education Supplement’s April 1912 sample,54 women’s salaries were equivalent to those
of men with lesser qualifications in the band below. This consistent pattern is surely the
best indication of the lower value placed on women teachers in England. Similarly,
women who were employed in the same school as their husband or father did not receive
a separate salary; a ‘family wage’ was paid,55 thus masking the individual woman’s
contribution to the running of the school but also keeping their pay to a minimum. It
must also be remembered that few men and fewer women teachers reached either the
upper echelons or the maximum pay rates. In Birmingham, career structures analysed by

50 Calculated from figures in Special Reports on Educational Subjects 1897–1898, Education Department,
Vol. 1, Public Elementary Education in England and Wales 1870–1895, in Tropp, The School Teachers,
113–114, note 12, 117–117, 170–171.
51 Robinson, Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training, discusses fully the implications and agenda
behind the reforms in secondary schooling and elementary teacher training at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
52 ‘The training of teachers. New difficulties and their solution’, Times Educational Supplement, 2 May 1911.
53 Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, Table 3.
54 Chester, Devon, Essex, Lancashire, London, Birkenhead, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Hastings,
Leeds and West Ham.
55 A joint salary of £75 in 1890 and £90 in 1894 was paid to the incumbent families at Great Rissington.
M. Boyes, A Cotswold Village School from Victorian Times (Cheltenham: The Rissingtons Local History
Society, 1997), 54–57, 69.
492 S. Trouvé-Finding

Coppock confirm greater promotion prospects for men than for women, even when
excluding uncertificated teachers (mainly women).56 In Oxfordshire in 1904, three-quar-
ters of the men earned between £80 and £149 per annum, and three-quarters of the
women earned from £69 to £89.57 Co-education was opposed on both educational and
professional grounds. Girls were expected to be educated ‘equally’ but ‘differently’,
whilst women working in boys’ departments were flagrantly being paid less for the same
work as their male colleagues. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) was alerted to the
situation as the number of women thus employed increased around 1906.58 Women had
no hope of ever attaining the heights of headmasters’ pay scales, since they would never
be placed in charge of the largest, mixed schools. Criticism of the employment of
women as heads of mixed schools was voiced, as the practice became more and more
frequent in the 1920s. Paradoxically in both cases, the complaints were not criticism of
women per se, but because these appointments were considered, and rightly so, as econ-
omy measures.
In France, women, far less numerous in posts of responsibility, were also usually on
lower scales than men. The basic salary scales for French elementary teachers show the
low premium giving to training visible between the sixth scale and fifth scale in the early
stages of their careers.59 The major advantages were elsewhere. As state civil servants
with tenure, elementary school teachers were assured of a job for life, a modest pension
and social ascension for their children.60 These did not go far enough to induce male voca-
tions as continuing recruitment difficulties from the 1900s show, despite significant pay
increases in France in 1913 and again in 1919. The numbers of low-paid, low-qualified
women teachers cannot but have reflected on the general desirability of the profession in
both countries.
The overall growth in the numbers of teachers, while leading to a higher proportion of
women teachers, modified career structures and accentuated rather than decreased the
differences between women teachers and male teachers, between rural and urban teaching
jobs. Male assistant teachers could no longer aspire so readily to headships, let alone
younger and less experienced women. In France, village schools remained predominant,
and schools remained single-sex. Thus there were not only two state schools per village
(68,473 state primary schools in 38,000 communes), but two state school teachers. As a
result, the number of teachers per school in France averaged out at three in 1925,61
compared with eight in England and Wales in 1895 (14,500 schools). This absorbed large
numbers of younger women teachers, giving them both more widespread responsibility
than in England and greater individual visibility on the local level. A gradual accession to
grades of responsibility and higher scales by women was accompanied by a concentration
of responsibility for men, although, as has been seen, the proportion of older men was also
greater and promotion was proportionate to length of service.62

56 Coppock, ‘Respectability as a prerequisite of moral character’, Table 4.

57 Figures calculated from statistics Horn, ‘The recruitment, role and status of the Victorian country teacher’;
D. Wardle, English Popular Education 1780–1975 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1977), 109.
58 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 211–213.
59 Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, Tables 39 and 40.
60 It is worth noting that major studies into social reproduction and ascent through education first appeared in
France and largely concerned teaching dynasties: P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, La Reproduction: Eléments
pour une Théorie du Système d’Enseignement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973).
61 P. Chevallier and B. Grosperrin, L’enseignement français de la Révolution à nos jours (Paris: Mouton, 1968),
56.
62 Trouvé-Finding, 1987, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931’, Table 6.
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 493

The unequal pay structure and large numbers of unqualified women led some authori-
ties to prefer women teachers to reduce the costs of providing schooling. In France, the
economic argument had been used as an excuse for the delay in building women’s training
colleges to cover up more political motives. The wider range of male career opportunities
and preferential female recruitment by local authorities seeking to cut costs thus affected
the number and the qualifications of women teachers employed in each area. In addition, a
plentiful supply of cheap, uncertificated, largely female workforce depressed the salaries
of qualified teachers.63 In England, rural counties tended to employ more supplementaries,
for which one should read ‘non-qualified, untenured women’, (31% in Herefordshire, 26%
in Dorset and Norfolk) than industrial and urban districts (10%).64 The socio-economic
situation in each region, dictating the different career possibilities open to young men and
women, explain the choice of teaching as a career (mainly by women) or its rejection
(mainly by men). Birmingham, in the ten years up to 1903, had to do without male pupil
teachers65 and 50 French écoles normales had to open a second entrance session in 1918
due to the low number of male candidates. Albisetti confirms this correlation between a
higher number of (more qualified) women teachers in urban areas as a general factor in
feminisation. Gender and geographical variations are linked as the gradual drying up of
the number of male pupil-teacher candidates shows.
In France, supply was (and still is) theoretically adjusted to demand, via the Ecoles
normales. Each year, every department had a quota of 30 training college places. This was
to prove insufficient for the demand.66 As a result, intérimaires – teachers with the Brevet
élémentaire school leaving certificate but no professional training – were employed.
Condemned to the limbo of non-certification without training, they could not be granted
tenure. In the Vienne between 1900 and 1914, one-quarter of the new male appointments
and over one-third of the female ones had not been trained at the écoles normales.67

… more than 50% of the women who have entered the profession in the last ten years, need to finish their
teacher-training, before they are really capable of coping with a class and goodness knows how many in
the last school year (1914–1915). Certainly older mistresses have as many virtues as our older masters,
but they will hardly suffice for our girls’ schools; girls with elementary certificates, just out of school,
will be used in all our mixed schools and in at least a third of boys’ schools.68

In England, supply also remained ‘haphazard and unobserved’, the terms used to
describe the unapproved and unorganised recruitment of pupil-teachers and provision of
training by the local authorities,69 forced, or preferring to rely on the temporary, stop-
gap employment of women.

63 Widdowson, Going up to the Next Class, 57; Coppock, ‘Respectability as a prerequisite of moral character’,
181.
64 Horn, ‘The recruitment, role and status of the Victorian country teacher’. Norfolk’s education provision
appears to have been in financial straights. See Times Education Supplement, 6 October 1914,; HMI Report
to Committee of Council on Education, 1896, quoted by Horn, Education in Rural England, 1800–1914, 79.
65 Wardle, English Popular Education 1780–1975. Coppock, ‘Respectability as a prerequisite of moral charac-
ter’, analysing recruitment in Birmingham notes the importance of high industrial wages for working-class
males as a pull away from the profession, but seems to have overlooked this dearth of male recruits to
teaching locally.
66 The question of the supply of trained teachers in response to demand remains open.
67 Trouvé-Finding, ‘French state primary teachers 1914–1931, Table 2.
68 E.Bugnon, ‘L’école de demain: le personnel’, Manuel général de l’Instruction publique, 15 April 1916.
69 B. Allen, Sir Robert Morant: A Great Public Servant (London: Macmillan, 1934), 219, quoted by Robinson,
Pupil Teachers and Their Professional Training, 39–40.
494 S. Trouvé-Finding

Issues
Women elementary teachers formed the bulk of the less-qualified section of the profession
in both countries. The supply of trained and qualified teachers was insufficient. Elemen-
tary teaching was losing its attractions because of the general perception of its low pay and
low status, brought on in part by the process of feminisation, partly by the long training
required and insufficient payback. The recourse to unqualified and low-paid womanpower
to cover the shortfall in recruitment served only to reinforce the lowering of prestige and
status. It is hardly surprising that by 1910, teachers’ unions in both countries were press-
ing for increased standards in the levels of qualifications (the teachers’ registration council
in England, higher entry requirements in France) and a phasing out of supplementary
teachers70 as a way of improving the status of teaching in general. However, the debates
gloss over the gender-specific aspects of the problem.
The impact of the changing structure of the primary corps as the number of women
increased is reflected in the issues around which women teachers were involved in mobil-
ising opinion within the profession, issues which stemmed from the influx of women into
the primary corps and the injustices of low pay, low status and the termination of employ-
ment on marriage, which were becoming more flagrant as the numbers of women
subjected to them increased along with the ‘lower-middle class women’s desires for
respectable, secure work with opportunities for advancement’.71 It may be that the class
shift in feminisation was responsible for making women’s susceptibility to these injustices
even greater, as men from ‘lower’ social backgrounds continued to be treated more benev-
olently. The issues which were aired in both countries, perhaps more acutely for women
elementary teachers in England, concerned predictably, equal pay, higher professional
standards and the marriage bar72 (inoperative in France).
‘Why should capable women teachers be compelled in many cases to serve under
semi-capable headmasters, to work twice as hard and receive half their pay and, almost as
galling, to receive less pay than assistant masters of the same grade?’73 So complained an
editorial in the National Federation of Women Teachers’ paper, The Woman Teacher, in
1911. The complaint becomes yet more poignant if one enters the class factor into the
unequal equation. In England, the issue of equal pay was intimately linked with the strug-
gle for the vote, as professional and civic debarment were associated. Women teachers
fought to get both put on the NUT agenda at the four pre-war conferences, and again in
1916 and 1918, when a motion on equal pay was finally adopted. The NUT failed,
however, to impose the equal pay principle in the post-war negotiations for national salary
scales abolishing regional disparities, enshrined in the Burnham scales and accepted as a
general principle that women should be paid 20% less than their male colleagues, at the
same time as the French budget established higher, equal pay scales for state teachers. In
England, an equal pay lobby had been created in 1904,74 and in France in 1907, an indica-
tion of the moment when the impact of the growing numbers of women was first recogn-
ised. The principle was accepted by the Fédération des amicales in 1909, getting an easier

70 Times Educational Supplement, 7 April 1914; Circular 709, March 1909 had permitted their recruitment to
cover vacancies. Circular 836 had extended this provision by five years; Roberts, ‘The development of
professionalism in the early stages of education’.
71 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 51.
72 Oram, ‘Serving two masters?; A. Oram, ‘“Sex antagonism” in the teaching profession: equal pay and the
marriage bar, 1910–39’, in M. Arnot and G. Weiner (eds), Gender and the Politics of Schooling (London:
Hutchinson, 1987).
73 Woman Teacher, 1911, September, 26, 70.
74 See Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 212.
 Admission of women to elementary teaching in England and France 495

reception and a quicker resolution than in England, which may be put down to recognition
of the role institutrices played in the establishment of Republican school system.
The issue of under-qualification did meet with better results than equal pay in
England. The NUT was anxious for professional recognition for elementary teaching as a
remedy for the (male) recruitment crisis in the pre-war years. It spoke out against the
employment of supplementary teachers and in favour of a minimum number of qualified
teachers per school (one per 70 pupils, in addition to the head teacher). It also fought for
headships of small schools to be reserved for qualified teachers, obtaining government
acquiescence and the projected implementation of these measures from 1 August 1914.75
In France, the minimum requirements for entry into the écoles normales were raised in
1923 (for women they had been higher due to the selection process as has been seen) in an
attempt to improve the calibre of entrants to the écoles normales which backfired, like the
bursary scheme in England, discouraging entrants with longer training requirements. Male
vocations continued to fall as the prestige and advantages of a career in elementary teach-
ing remained low. ‘The number of young persons adopting the profession of an elemen-
tary school teacher must ultimately be determined by its attractiveness in respect of
emoluments, immediate and progressive, status and security …’.76
Recruited as a stop-gap measure to fill the increased needs of elementary teaching,
little value was placed on women teachers as is witnessed by their lower salaries and level
of professional qualification despite their overall higher social origins. This lack of esteem
reflected on the profession in general, now composed overwhelmingly of women. It rein-
forced the negative image of elementary education designed for the ‘lower’ classes, in
which ‘inferior’ individuals, by class or by gender, were all that were needed for the job.
Analysis of the impact of the increasing numbers of women teachers on the profession in
England and France may thus reinforce stereotypical interpretations of gendered work.
Women’s work was discredited, to the discredit of the whole elementary teaching corps,
despite the rising social composition of the majority, female contingent. Copelman argues
that any failure (if failure there was) to professionalize teaching cannot be attributed to
blurred class origins or predominantly female composition of the profession.77 Coppock
argues that while class and gender are interlocked, class was probably a more significant
factor than gender. However, he concludes that increasing feminisation and lower
perspectives for women teachers ‘may have had repercussions for the status of a teaching
profession fighting for recognition’.78 I argue not only that they did have repercussions,
but that the fight for greater recognition in the profession stemmed precisely, in part, from
that very lowering of status, and this despite elementary teachers having a higher social
background as a result of the feminisation. According to Coppock, one outcome of the
feminisation of the profession was the move to improve status by recruiting from higher
social classes. However the evidence presented here shows that the combination of greater
gentility and cultivation among women teachers from the lower-middle class may also
have contributed to the antagonism between male and female teachers, which led to a
polarisation in professional circles and union politics, particularly in England.79 Increasing
female and lower-middle-class recruitment was blocking prospects in teaching for

75 The Times, 4 April 1918.

76 ‘The training and supply of teachers’, Times Educational Supplement, 5 May 1914.
77 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 47–48.
78 Coppock, ‘Respectability as a prerequisite of moral character’, 166.
79 Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900–1939; A. Oram, ‘Inequalities in the teaching profession:
the effects on teachers and pupils, 1910–1939’, in F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life. The Schooling of Girls and
Women 1850–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 101–123.
496 S. Trouvé-Finding

working-class men. The analysis presented here points to facts indicating that the femini-
sation of the elementary teaching profession reinforced the social hierarchy in a problem-
atic crossover of class and gender. Women individually gained access to a respected
position, but the impact of the admission of women in large numbers to elementary teach-
ing sapped the prestige of the profession in general. To put it crudely, lower-middle-class
teachers dominated upper-working-class ones, but the latter, more usually men, dominated
the women. Albisetti’s parameters for explaining feminisation do not include ‘respectabil-
ity’. Van Essen points out that in The Netherlands and in German states, teaching was
regarded as a respected male profession, due in part to the lack of white-collar jobs prior to
the 1890s, which goes some way to explaining the low levels of feminisation in those
countries. It may be that, conversely, high levels of feminisation were due to, and fed into,
low esteem for teaching as a profession. The fact that in France this was translated less
visibly into professional politics, may stem from the political role institutrices were given
from the outset, compensating for their civic and professional debarment.