Betsey Holsbery's school: place, gender, and memory

Abstract

Historical memory is constantly being reframed though images and objects presented as capturing the past. In the USA, the nineteenth-century country or one-room school has come to symbolize an authentic American experience and seen as evidence of the lost pure and simpler time. Central to the work of the rural school was the teacher, and in the nineteenth century, this was almost always the woman teacher. This article explores the work of one woman teacher, Betsey Holsbery, and the ways in which memorials to her help construct a picture of an idyllic and unchanging past in one rural town while ignoring the profound cultural and demographic changes the town underwent.

Keywords:

• social theory
• geography
• history
• North America

Notes

1. The moral panic over failing public schools was encouraged by the 1983 publication of ‘A Nation at Risk’, the report of the Presidential National Committee on Excellence in Education. ‘A Nation at Risk’ argued that the decline in US economic dominance was the direct result of failing public schools. Although its claims have been repeatedly challenged, its basic premise of public school failure has continued to be called forth to justify a variety of school reforms, including the introduction of high-stakes testing, the charter school movement and the move to privatise the administration of large public school systems.

2. See the discussion of this literature in Chapter One, Weiler (1998).

3. Holsbery Family Bible. File: Holsbery. Truro Historical Society, Truro, Massachusetts.

4. By the late nineteenth century, normal schools, which offered post-secondary training in pedagogy and educational theory, prepared the majority of elementary school teachers in the USA. Normal school graduates received higher salaries (Ogren 2005).

5. This process has always been more complex in the nearby town of Provincetown. The change of name of the annual celebration of the Blessing of the Fleet to the Provincetown Portuguese Festival, which occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, is an example of the continued maintenance and construction of a Portuguese identity. In both Truro and Provincetown, people of Portuguese descent are active in town government and business. The Truro Historical Society has sponsored exhibitions at the Truro Historical Museum in the last decade documenting the Portuguese experience, but these acknowledgements are not yet expressed in physical monuments or celebrations.