Feminization Of High Schools In Toronto 1871-1930 Summary

The Feminization of the High Schools in Toronto 1871-1930 In this article a woman, Mrs. Howes was hired at the Toronto Collegiate which was previously an all-boys grammar school. Her career was short and rocky since she was the only female in a male’s school. She may not have been employed there long and she faced many problems but she was able to open up opportunities for women. Men did not consider women equal to them back in the nineteenth century and this article proves just that. The problems Mrs. Howe faced with the director was due to the way the Toronto High School Board of Education dealt with changes in the public secondary education. “Her appointment was tied to changes in the structure of state-provided secondary education …show more content…
Women were not only coming into the paid work force but also into nontraditional occupations for them such as public secondary school teaching. Male educators were concerned with the number of women in university and high school teaching jobs because of the object of attention they became as the number of women grew. With that being said, the second objective of this article is to observe the reaction of the male educators to the role of women in secondary school teaching. In Upper Canada, grammar schools were separate from common schools and they provided boys with a classical education to get them ready for universities and the public province. Girls being admitted into these schools became a problem because the purpose of these schools was not being satisfied since they were letting in a lot of young women. They came up with the Ontario School Act of 1871 to solve this problem. “It gave official sanction to the public secondary education of girls in the newly created high schools and collegiate institutions” (121). In Toronto, they also had a School Act of 1871, this made a change for …show more content…
The second reason that the normal image of a teacher was male is because the main role of the secondary school was for boy’s education so the teaching role was still seen a male occupation. Even though schooling was opened to girls, the concern continued to create a male teaching force. “This, in turn, was to secure the best possible level of instruction to educate the leading men of the next generation” (124). The Chief Superintendent stated the allowance for hiring one female teacher in every mixed school and raising the number in accordance to the proportion of female students. There was an interesting argument made by R.A. Pyne who was the new Minister of Education. He argued, “if the objective of education was merely to impart knowledge then he would be willing to agree with the “frequently” heard statement that “the work of the woman [was] as good in the school as that of the man.” But since an essential goal of education was character building, women were not suitable teachers for older boys. It is unreasonable to think that for large boys a woman is as competent as