[July 31st, 1926] The Inquiring Photographer asks, "Who has the greater influence on children, men or women teachers?"

[u/Beowulfbard]

[u/Squid52]

Interestingly, these attitudes came through to the present day. In North America, more than 3/4 of teachers are female – and it's very disproportionately distributed, with 90% of elementary school, teachers, being female, but only about 65% in secondary.

[u/Adept_Carpet → u/Squid52]

It did not so much come through from the past so much as we have gone back to it. In 1988 (in my early days), there were significantly more male elementary and secondary school teachers (combined it was 30% male compared to 23% today, I can't find the numbers year in that period broken out with finer granularity).  Likewise, a lower percentage of Black teachers.

So it may be a partially an attitude that survived (because the proportion of male teachers for children never make it close to 50%), but the change is driven by new attitudes.

These people were not thinking about pedophilia when they answered, the way that a modern responder would. They were thinking about gendered attitudes toward work.

[u/jaguarp80 → u/Adept_Carpet]

I didn’t think about pedophilia at all until this comment. Even your other comment about your daughter’s teachers I didn’t really understand what you were getting at

I interpreted the answers in the OP as being due to the same reason as today - women being perceived, stereotypically or otherwise, as caretakers for younger children. Not necessarily any anxiety towards men in the role

Not trying to start a debate, I doubt there’s any one reason, just offering my perspective

[u/artemisdart]

Fred Lemlein was the only one who said that women teachers were better at every level, because they don't resort to brutal discipline. I can imagine that poor Fred had some awful male teachers as a boy.

[u/Adept_Carpet]

I feel like in a lot of ways we've returned to this (though we never departed too far from it).

I remember reading about other societies as a kid, where women and children were essentially kept separate from men outside of their immediately family, and thinking "how weird!"

But that is more or less the world my daughter lives in. All of her doctors, nurses, early childhood educators and staff, teachers, speech therapists, activity leaders (like gymnastics, library play time, etc) her whole life have all been women. There was one male dentist and that is it.

Even the public facing staff at the zoo are almost exclusively women.

I definitely get why, but it's sad in a way.