In a recent essay on teachers and teacher training in Germany between 1870 and 1914, historian Hartmut Titze noted the growing numbers of women teachers in the elementary schools. He suggested that their'astounding percentages' by the end of this era, which would not increase significantly until the Second World War, indicate how'modern'Imperial Germany really was. Shortages of male teachers, Titze argued, provided the opportunity for women to gain a larger presence in primary education. Such shortages had arisen not only because of greater demand stemming from efforts to lengthen periods of schooling and to reduce class size, but also because'in light of the increased employment opportunities in industry, the profession became ever less attractive to the independent strata in the old Mittelstand (artisans, small merchants, innkeepers, farmers) that had always provided it with the largest contingent of recruits'. 1

Titze's picture of the feminization of elementary school teaching in Imperial Germany agrees in many ways with the views of scholars who have explored this phenomenon for other countries. If he had commented on the restricted employment opportunities for women and their willingness to work for lower salaries than male teachers received, which he certainly could have done, the agreement would be total. In the USA, for example, Patricia Schmuck has argued,'The industrialization of the eastern seaboard and the movement of pioneers westward created so many employment opportunities for men that schools could no longer attract enough males'. In her view,'school teaching became a good exercise for the young and unmarried female;... it was also cost efficient'. Research on Canadian education, as summarized by Alison Prentice and Marjorie Theobald, has concluded in a similar fashion that'the major justification that school boards used for hiring women teachers was a financial one'and that even in rural areas of Ontario'poverty and the presence of a resource frontier which offered important alternative employment to young men'led to an early feminization of the profession. With regard to Canada as well, Patrick Harrigan has recently argued that'an elongated school year, restricting supplemental employment by teachers, led to a shortage of men interested in teaching by making opportunity costs for them too high or making the expense of hiring men too high for school boards'. 2