Expanding System.

Alongside the expansion of public education rose the demand for an expanded teacher corps that could be trusted with the increasingly critical task of overseeing proper moral instruction. This demand, together with women's own aspirations for an alternative to the narrow opportunities available to them and the rise of an intermediary, bureaucratic layer of administrators, opened the door to large-scale employment of women in the classroom. Prior to 1850, popular acceptance of the notion handed down from the revolutionary period—that women were especially suited for the role of raising and training a republican citizenry —had meant that teaching was one of very few professions open to women. Even before midcentury, women made up a significant proportion of the teaching corps, though in most places men still predominated. Between 1840 and about 1860, however, the trend was reversed. Almost every school district in...