were ''undeveloped and uncomplicated" and that academic study would
make
women "unfit for motherhood and upset the natural order of things,"
the be-
ginnings of the co-education movement were not easy. The beginnings of the
co-education movement are the subject of Part One of this book - THEY
CAME TO LEARN.
Those women who survived undergraduate and graduate training and
CAME TO TEACH in the University of Wisconsin System are heralded in Part
Two of this book. These essays are neither inclusive nor definitive; some
wor-
thy women were excluded for wont of a biographer; some are not represented
because of the limits of space. The essays tend to be fond recollections
of wo-
men important to current members of the University System and are
"stimulation" pieces that hope to encourage further work.
The reader will note certain characteristics shared by these professional
women who were "called" to their "mission" of teaching.
For these women,
juggling a career and a family was not a viable option; these women chose
to
teach rather than to marry. Early in the century, in fact, teachers' contracts
bore the stipulation that marriage would void the employment agreement.
Thus, unmarried women teachers formed little communities that set them
apart from the unmarried women of the towns in which they taught.
Like their religious counter-parts, many of these women, although aware
of the suffrage movement around them, were not active in the political world
and bore their burden of poverty very well. For many of these underpaid and
unpromoted women, teaching was doing what they liked or felt the need to
do.