Education: Sex War

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If jealousy and sex pride rankle in the hearts of U. S. schoolteachers of opposite sexes, they seldom find expression outside committee-rooms. On the surface, at least, men and women work together harmoniously in U.S. education as in U.S. business.

Not so in England. There the women schoolteachers, whose voice is heard most strongly in the National Union of Teachers, have been agitating for some years to obtain sex equality on the payroll. Last year the Board of Education adopted a scale granting women 83% of men's pay and the contest has grown hotter since.

The National Association of Schoolmasters constitutes, as its name would indicate, an old defensive phalanx of masculine supremacy in pedagogy. Meeting last week at Hull, this body passed resolutions to fight the women's "irrational" policy as relentlessly as the women were pursuing it. One speaker drew a dreadful picture of what would happen to the nation if wage equality were granted: young women would not have to marry.* Another fighting male explained: "It is a bold young man who today proposes marriage to a woman teacher, because he knows he will have to suffer adverse financial and social changes."

The schoolmasters further resolved that no man shall serve as assistant master under a headmistress.

At their conclave last year, these British schoolmasters condemned women teachers out of hand; said they were responsible, by their mollycoddling methods, for increase in juvenile crime; said that every boy over seven should be under the firm hand of a man. Meeting shortly afterward, the National Union of Teachers referred to the general activities of the National Association of Schoolmasters as "pugnacious prancings" (TIME, April 27, 1925).

At Harvard