Education: Teachers’ Troubles

Axel Anderson, fireman, had almost won the hand of Rita Coates, teacher, when the Lynn. Mass, school committee intervened last month to say that Miss Coates could not have both her job and Axel. “This condemns me to the life of a spinster,” mourned Rita Coates. “I have no choice unless I wish to desert my father and mother who are absolutely dependent on me.”

In countless U. S. cities marriageable teachers currently find themselves in the same fix as Rita Coates. Last week the National Association of Women Lawyers, meeting in Los Angeles, was at pains to appear solicitous in revealing that teachers less virtuous than Rita Coates find solutions less virtuous than hers. According to President Percilla Lawyer Randolph of the Women Lawyers, it is common practice for a teacher to divorce her husband, keep on living with him. By working fast a teacher can go through marriage and divorce before her school board gets around to dismissing her. Said Felice Cohn, Nevada’s only woman lawyer: “An appalling number of women teachers come to Nevada for ‘convenient’ divorces. Five of them came on the day I left Reno. Four of them told me they wanted such divorces. Most of them intend at some time to remarry their divorced husbands.” Meanwhile lovesick teachers took heart from two straws in the wind: 1) In London the County Council agreed, after holding out for twelve years, to hire married women as teachers. 2) In Washington Dr. Caroline Ware, onetime NRA Consumers’ Adviser, one-time associate professor of history at Vassar, prepared to sue the University of Wyoming for breach of contract. Grounds: Wyoming offered her a job in its summer school, reneged when it found she was married.

“Big & Strong.” Neither sin nor suit can solve the problem which confronts Rose Freistater, 26, of The Bronx. When Miss Freistater applied for a teaching job in 1931, New York City examiners put her on the scales, found she weighed 182 Ib. Normal weight for a woman of Miss Freistater’s 5 ft., 2 in. is 120 Ib. The examiners split the difference, gave her six months to train down to 150. The fretful life of a substitute teacher brought her down to 162 but at the end of six months she was back at 180. Refused a permanent job, she appealed to the New York State Commissioner of Education, who last week asked Board of Examiners Chairman Henry Levy to state his grounds. Fat teachers, said Examiner Levy, cannot climb stairs, move fast enough in fire drills; they are a poor risk for the compulsory pension system; they are “esthetically undesirable.” Said Rose Freistater’s sturdy father David: “Rose is not fat. She is just big and strong. That fellow Levy said she wasn’t pretty. What does he know about it? Why, Rose has always had a fellow. A lot of boys call her up but she’s always busy with her teaching.”