Why Hire Female Teachers?

As a class, [women] never look forward, as young men almost invariably do, to a period of legal emancipation from parental control, when they are to break away from the domestic circle and go abroad into the world to build up a fortune for themselves; and hence, the sphere of hope and of effort is narrower, and the whole forces of the mind are more readily concentrated upon present duties.

From the Boston School Board annual report of 1841, cited in Spring, The American School, p. 127.