Male Teachers, Male Roles: The Progressive Era and Education in Oklahoma

In 1975 a total of sixty-seven Anglo men responded to a letter sent to all its members by the Oklahoma Retired Teachers Association (ORTA), asking them to record in autobiographical sketches their reasons for becoming teachers and the benefits that they had derived from that choice. l A collective portrait of these transitional professional men spans the Progressive Era, the 1920s, and the Great Depression and, in so doing, describes two sets of phenomena: first, the social context within which the men became teachers and administrators-- communities\u27 willingness to pay men more and to exclude women from so-called male positions-and second, the various career patterns of male educators that evolved partially as a result of ever changing professional expectations. For the most part society expected the male teacher to provide boys with a physically active role model and to serve as a father not only to his students but to the community at large. At the same time, however, the schoolmen continued their own educations, pursuing degrees and exposing themselves to theories of professionalization that urged them to remain detached from their clients. As this study will show, the male teachers who answered the ORTA request attained a high degree of formal education but never abandoned their fatherly commitments to students and community