This is the final part of my 3-part series on San Francisco teachers in 1880. I hope it helps deepen your enjoyment of Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series. “Who were the women who did succeed in passing their examinations and securing jobs in San Francisco, Portland, or Los Angeles? And, what were their jobs like once they got them? Over eighty percent of the female teachers in these three cities in 1880 were single, and over two thirds of them were single and under the age of thirty. In Portland and Los Angeles, over two thirds of the female teachers had native-born parents. Nearly three quarters of the young single women teaching in (San Francisco) were either foreign-born or of foreign parentage, and a least a third of those who lived at home Read more…

In my newest Victorian San Francisco Mystery, Bloody Lessons, the question comes up over whether a teacher got her position through undue favoritism on the part of a school board member. Once again, a plot point came right out of the pages of my dissertation and the newspapers of the time period. And once again, the controversies of the past, in this case over city policies governing the hiring and retaining of public school teachers, echoes controversies in the present. “No matter what their salary, women highly coveted the job of teaching in the nineteenth century, and by 1880 a position in the California or Oregon public schools was not always easy to obtain. In the 1850s and 1860s a teacher had to go through a yearly examination order to get and to retain her job, and examination that was Read more…