Transcript: Susan (Season 1, Episode 2)

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Transcript:

Susan was a teacher. And she must have been a good one, because she was hired to be the headmistress at the Academy at Canajoharie, New York in 1846. It wasn’t her first teaching job; she had worked for several years at a Quaker boarding school, and in many ways she was a good stereotypical Quaker girl, still wearing intentionally plain dresses when she first came to town, her speech peppered with thees and thous. But while she worked at Canajoharie, her dresses became a bit more modern, maybe a bit more colorful, and most of her thees and thous turned to yous.

As the headmistress, she worked hard, but she didn’t get much autonomy or respect. A 19-year-old man was hired as her supervisor. And even as a teenager with not much experience, his salary was already higher than Susan’s ever would be.

So in a couple of years, when Susan made the transition out of the classroom and into a more public arena, she knew all about doing more work for far less pay than a man. And Susan did something about it. She made her first public address (at least, the first one we know about) when she spoke to the New York State Teachers’ Association in 1853.

She said, “Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative profession, as here men must compete with the cheap labor of woman. Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you.”

When Susan sat down, there was no thunder of applause – no applause at all. There was silence. Finally, awkwardly, three gentlemen found the courage to stand up and congratulate her.

And that night was the beginning of a historic speaking career for Susan B. Anthony.

You probably know her for the suffrage movement, or maybe for her work against slavery or alcohol, or maybe you just saw her on the dollar coins that never quite caught on in the late 1970s. But in her sixties, before introducing Frederick Douglass at a conference, Susan said, “I wasn’t ready to vote, didn’t want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work.” And because she was a teacher, a good teacher, working for a teenage boss, she had the motivation to demand better.

Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin
The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, re-released in 1999. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Now, over 160 years later, a few things are different. And a lot of things are the same. A majority of teachers are still women, but about half of principals are women now, too. And in a profession that still holds a reputation as “women’s work,” the women and men in the classroom often work for a lot less than what experts define as a “living wage.” It’s hard to find another profession that requires so much education for such a modest salary.

But in the ranks of modern teachers who give their lives to children day by day, maybe we still have some revolutionaries – some Susans within the ranks – and in a century and a half, we’ll look back with admiration at what they did to change the world. And we’ll remember about them, as we do about Susan, that the cradle of that change was the classroom.

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