Moreover, when the charge of inefficiency is brought against women teachers, it must be remembered that the administration of the schools very largely has been in the hands of men, and the women have been merely routine agents of the authorities. The type of person always content to carry out some other person’s orders is not likely to have either force or initiative. Women seem to have both. Women are no longer content to be mere agents of school authorities. They are seeking and obtaining high administrative positions, and demonstrating by their efficiency and capacity for sustained and unselfish labors their fitness for such work.
For example, “four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent. The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women ‘district superintendents,’ as against twelve ‘school commissioners’ in 1900.”
The most conspicuous battle waged by women for a share in the administration of schools took place in Chicago. It was thus described in _The Survey_:
The struggle over the superintendency and the policy of Chicago public schools acutely emphasizes the crises which popular local government must meet and turn for better or worse. Coming to the superintendency four years ago in the most troublous times the Chicago public schools had ever experienced, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young brought the badly divided teachers into harmonious relations with each other and with her management and secured an equally remarkable unanimity in the public support of her administration, after a long period of bitterly divisive discussion in the press and among the people.
