Millie and the Teachers’ Association

Most people who knew that my mother Millie also knew she was a strong supporter of professional unions. But few know that the reason for her loyalty was engendered by her experiences as a teacher before they were allowed to bargain collectively with the school board.

She told me her experiences before collective bargaining were uniformly negative with respect to equality in the workplace. In fact, those experiences seem almost unbelieveable in light of today’s labor market. But, in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, they were deadly serious to Millie and stood to transform her thinking about the value of labor unions.

She told me that she was first hired to teach in a four room, four-class high school in Reeds Ferry, NH called McGaw Normal Institute. It was a public high school serving the town of Merrimack and the hamlet of Reeds Ferry, one of four which comprised the town of Merrimack. She had seven classes with seven preps. She taught all four math courses, plus biology, physics, and French. A part of her duties was to arrive early at the school to stoke the large coal furnace in the building’s basement. She also had recess and study hall responsibilities.

Apparently these were standard duties for teachers in small schools at the time, however it was the non-classroom expectations that fueled her support of unions. She told me that when she was hired, she was told that if she were to become engaged, she would be expected to resign her position. Later, that rule was loosened to being married. By the time she was married, the rule had morphed to being pregnant. That was the line over which she could not cross. She resigned when she got pregnant and was told that her career as a teacher was over. Later, after her second child, she inquired whether she could teach again and was told that she could, but that she would have to go on a religious retreat to be “freshened.”  She refused, and two children and 17 years later she was indeed hired to teach math at Merrimack High School, where she taught until the age of 66.  

Apparently the prohibition on pregnant teachers was still in effect many years later. My sister Dianne told me that in 1968 she was sent a letter from the Fall Mountain Regional school board demanding her resignation after she told them she was pregnant. She said the letter referred to her condition as a “sickness.” She told them that she had no intention of resigning her position. She said they never got back to her and never followed through on their resignation demand.

Millie sounded a bit bitter about those early experiences, but one other seemed to solidify her support of unions. In her third year of teaching, the school board hired a man to be the teaching principal at McGraw.  She said he had a college degree, but not in education, no experience, and no certification to teach, and that in fact he was only going to be there until he found a suitable job in his field. She said he was given twice her pay, mainly because he was married and needed the money. She told me he was a complete failure at the school and mercifully found a job late in the school year. The four female teachers were not sad to see him go.

Millie loved teaching and wanted to be a teacher from an early age, putting her at odds with her mother Effie Sleeper. Effie was a teacher herself until she married, and resented the life it afforded in the early 20^th century. As part of her pay, she was force to board with her students’ families, moving every few weeks during the school year. In the summer she was on her own. She was underpaid, overworked and, in her view, humiliated. When Millie told her she was going to become a teacher, Effie all but disowned her, and never gave her money for college. But Millie soldiered on. She graduated from UNH while receiving a variety of scholarships and working for the math department, who took special interest in her. She also worked at a soda fountain as a waitress during her years there.

My family was then and is now very conservative politically, starting with my father Chappie and reinforced by his sons Edmund and Kevin. I was very liberal from an early age and felt my differences with my father and brothers, but not so much with my mother. In my view, Millie was a closet liberal, always supporting my father’s views in public, but perhaps quietly pressing her own views privately.  Certainly her strong support for the teachers’ association was evident and perhaps informed her thinking on other political issues as well.