From Single to Married: Feminist Teachers’ Response to Family/Work Conflict in Early Twentieth‐Century New York City

In 1914, Henrietta Rodman, a high school English teacher and president of the newly formed Feminist Alliance in New York City, announced her group&s plan to develop a twelve‐story cooperative apartment house, based on the ideas of feminist philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that would meet the needs of professional working women like her, married with children. This research illustrates strategic activities teachers used in their attempts to reconceptualize wage‐earning as the legitimate province of women, regardless of their marital or maternal status, and highlights the Feminist Alliance&s contention that women&s lack of economic self‐determination lay at the root of female subordination.