"Unpensioned Veterans": Women Teachers and the Politics of Public Service in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States

This article offers a new interpretation of the creation of teachers' pensions and contributes to the scholarly dialogue about gender and welfare state formation in the United States. To date, historians have regarded teachers' pensions as a form of compensation much like salary. Established just after the 1890 expansion of Civil War veterans' pensions, however, teachers' pensions represented more than deferred pay. They were designed to acknowledge women teachers' sacrifices and secure their long, loyal, underpaid service in public schools. This study argues that women teachers and policymakers looked to pensions as a solution for social problems emerging from the shift away from the family economy and its informal relations of obligation to a wage economy driven by relations of exchange. Both groups used pensions as a means to negotiate a relationship that incorporated some features of the market economy while introducing new mechanisms to protect deserving women against it.