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Adventures in Teaching: The Scandalous Career of Carrie Amidon Stanton (1839–1897)

2023; University of Arizona Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jsw.2023.a900098

2158-1371

Susan E. James,

Historical Education Studies Worldwide

Adventures in Teaching:The Scandalous Career of Carrie Amidon Stanton (1839–1897) Susan E. James (bio) In the late afternoon of Wednesday, 26 October 1881, only steps from where a 42-year-old schoolteacher named Carrie Stanton was teaching 52 third-graders in Tombstone's Fourth Street schoolhouse, Doc Holliday and Morgan, Virgil, and Wyatt Earp faced down the McLowrys and the Clantons on a vacant lot beside the OK Corral.1 Both teacher and children would have been able to hear the 30-second blast of gunfire that left three men dead. The gunfight at the OK Corral was just one memorable moment in the life of a woman whose chosen career was marked by drama and scandal. Over a lifetime of teaching, Carrie Stanton (1839–1897) challenged accepted gender roles, received communal praise, faced communal censure, and employed the alchemy of relocation to reinvent herself and her past. Stanton represented a significant class of women in the second half of the 19th century who went west and found employment as educators. Teaching was considered an honorable profession offering social status and income and calling for intellectual and communication skills that were generally considered part of the masculine domain. Yet it was one of the few white-collar jobs that allowed women to hold social if not economic parity with men. The job also provided entrepreneurial possibilities as many women set up private schools either in rented spaces or in their own homes and offered specialized teaching or scheduled classes during periods like summer vacation or winter holidays when the public schools were out of session. Teachers and the schools they enabled were often the pride of their community, implements of social integration and primary anchors of a community's claim to identity and continuity.2 For small towns and rural areas, schools also acted as lures for population growth, "[increasing] the value of property hereabout, and [making] all [End Page 26] kinds of business more brisk."3 Outstanding teachers became the imprimatur of a civilized society. Another perquisite for women in the teaching profession was the ability to hold the job whether married or single. There is a frequently repeated myth that married women were not allowed to teach but, as Carrie Stanton's own career demonstrates, in the West this was not the case. Skilled educators there were too hard to come by. In the 1870s, 40% of teachers on Nevada's Comstock were married women, and this was true across the West.4 In California in 1875, of the seven women running in different counties for superintendent of schools, five were married.5 During the same period in Stanton's teaching community of San Luis Obispo, California, half of the women with whom she worked were married. Yet it was nearly always a man within this occupational class who held the highest positions of authority, but from the mid-1870s on this was beginning to change. Stanton's career, rising from small-town schoolteacher in Connecticut to head of public schools in Phoenix, Arizona, exemplifies expanding possibilities where women were beginning to make breakthroughs into the upper echelons of the profession. One of a growing population of wage-earning women in the West, Stanton's personal history marks a dramatic odyssey predicated upon escape and reinvention in changing locales and schoolrooms. Escape from family, escape from scandal, and the assumption of a gender role as family breadwinner commonly awarded to men, these were all part of her lived experience. The tensions between expectation and performance, between acceptance and rejection in the communities in which she found herself form the social landscape that shaped both opposition and opportunity for herself and for her husband. "One of the Best Teachers that Ever Stepped Inside a School Room" Like many women who went west after the Civil War, Carrie Stanton was a woman who reinvented herself several times during her life. Born Abigail C. Amidon on 19 April 1839 in Woodstock, Connecticut, she was the younger of the two daughters of a shoemaker-turned-farmer named Lester Amidon and his wife, Hannah Corbin.6 According to her 1897 obituary, written by...