The teachers' dilemma: gender, education, and empire, 1879-1918

This dissertation examines two experiments in U.S. imperial education at the turn of the twentieth century by analyzing the role of teachers tasked with “civilizing” colonized peoples at home and abroad. As the United States gained control over new territories—including American Indian and Filipino homelands—it developed policies to assimilate peoples resistant to its authority. These policies framed the teachers’ dilemma. Translating national policy into practice proved challenging. Founded in 1879, white female faculty at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania—the nation’s first off-reservation boarding school—sought to acculturate Indian youth to norms of the dominant society. These societal norms suggested that women were especially suited for the work of nurturing the young. Twenty years later—after receiving the Philippine Islands as a bounty of the War of 1898—the U.S. government recruited primarily men to establish a U.S.-style school system in the islands. Administrators perceived men as better equipped to withstand the rugged, isolated environment and take on leadership roles. This study demonstrates that teachers’ racial assumptions—especially white superiority—shaped the work of cultural transformation more than gender. Still, gender affected teachers’ experiences in other ways, including internal power dynamics, salary differentials, the formation of friendships, and marriages that shaped their lives in these intense, immersive environments. A close analysis of teachers’ experiences and perspectives at Carlisle and in the Philippines exposes the fragility of U.S. endeavors to build an empire through the intimate spaces of schooling. In both case studies, teachers’ personal and political needs often conflicted with the broader mission. Some teachers challenged their supervisors’ authority or questioned the “benevolence” of their colleagues, countrymen, and national policy. Other teachers navigated their role as cultural mediators boldly, if carefully, as they faced resistance from students and families. Nearly all encountered death and disease, which periodically plagued the Indian boarding school and was ever-present in the Philippines where military and biological violence profoundly shaped teachers’ experiences. Ultimately, despite such challenges, teachers demonstrated considerable agency at Carlisle and the Philippines, helping to shape generations of students as well as the U.S. empire and its legacy.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Elisabeth Eittrei