Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Obsolete Information Dep't - Teacher's Pay in 1920

Project Gutenberg has just added a little document to their online library called The Schedule of Salaries for Teachers, by the Boston School Committee, dated 1920. It lists the salary for every school employee from the headmasters down to first-year clerical assistants ($984 per annum. Nineteen dollars a week was good money compared to what most women were making. At that time, the average weekly pay in the United States for a shopgirl was eight dollars. An experienced seamstress in an upscale dressmaking establishment could make twelve).

I was not surprised to see the difference in pay between the head of the Department of Household Science and Arts (girls) and the head of the Department of Manual Arts (boys), but who would think that the director of Music and the director of Physical Training received the same salary? In Boston!

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