Often for good and sufficient reasons, the American West of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is perceived as a Dionysian mix of careless enthusiasm, greed, violence, and irresponsibility—its icon the lone cowboy on horseback, its principal institution the swinging-door saloon, its communities slipshod arrangements of dirt streets and false fronts, occasionally disturbed by the sound of gunfire.

This perception, for all the germ of truth that lies behind it, obscures something else about the West—the strain of ironclad respectability that infested any town that survived long enough to acquire a family population. Which is to say, wives and mothers. The most visible expressions of this respectability were churches and schools. Especially the schools. A woman would put up with a great many things on the frontier: she would endure isolation; she would work herself in the house and in the fields until exhaustion drove her to a premature old age and an early death; she would survive the primitive amenities and masculine excesses of a rowdy little industrial mining city or a dusty cowtown. But she would not let her children go uneducated.

So, the country schoolhouse. Most were not much to look at. Few had more than one room and many would fit the description given by Curtis Harnack of the Kansas schoolhouse of his youth: “Because each year was expected to be the last, the schoolhouse had slipped into disrepair and listed to one side over its foundation of cracked limestone. The building was about the size of our corn-crib, large and peeling-white, with sparrows’ nests straggling from the eaves.… When a high gale blew off the flat cornfields, the loose shingles fluttered and snapped like the flag we ceremoniously raised aloft each morning.” The pupils crowded into such schools ranged tremendously in age. In one room there might be five- and six-year-olds painfully studying their first McGuffey reader next to a twentyyear-old studying—often with equal pain—his last. Scholastic standards were not high.

They could not have been. The salaries offered to both men and women teachers were grotesque, anywhere from $180 to $600 a year, and the rules and regulations laid down by local school boards frequently were oppressive, particularly for women. “Women teachers are not to keep company with men,” the school board of Mount Harris, Colorado, proclaimed as late as 1927, “and agree to be home between the hours of 8 P.M. and 6 A.M. … Women teachers agree not to get married. This contract becomes null and void immediately if a woman teacher marries. … Women teachers are to dress and conduct themselves in a puritanical manner as follows: Not to dress in bright colors, not to dye her hair, to wear at least two petticoats, not to wear dresses more than two inches above the ankle, not to use face powder, mascara, or