Teaching Jobs & Women

I think my mother, Virginia (Brown) Murray (b. 1917, d. 1982), would have loved to know and talk with her grandchildren. I am thinking of one of her grandchildren in particular who today is leaving one high school, in which she taught business courses and coached girls' soccer, for a position in another high school. She never knew my mother, who was also a teacher.

In contrast to my successful niece, my mother was not successful in getting a permanent teaching position as a mathematics teacher when she graduated from college in 1937. The country was still amidst the Great Depression, jobs were scarce, and math teachers tended to coach boys' athletics.

From family reports, it seems she would have preferred to work and earn money but there was no guarantee of a job. She had little choice but to go to college as she had received a university scholarship from "The University of the State of New York, the State Education Department". She graduated in 1937 at age 19 with a bachelors' degree in mathematics. The college yearbook quote attached to her photograph reads: "They gazed and gazed and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all she knew."

However, brilliance in college did not readily translate for her into a teaching job in mathematics. As the following letter illustrates, both the times and her gender worked against her.



Other than one temporary teaching position in the year immediately following her graduation, my mother never held a teaching position. She did manage to rear several teachers amongst her offspring and would have been extremely pleased with the success of her grandchildren, who currently carry on this family tradition.

Old Newspapers Reveal Surprise

It shouldn't be a surprise any more, really. I mean, once I discovered that my great-grandfather, Daniel Hardie, had 3 wives, the second of whom had an illigitimate child prior to the marriage, I should be inured to surprises. I guess having ingested some silly childhood mental mantra-myth that goes "no one in our family (except poor, unfortunate Uncle Eddie) has ever been divorced" explains why I am surprised by today's findings reported in the 1924 Utica Observer-Dispatch and in The Ostego Farmer and The Ostego Republican.

Background
Mary Brown (1888-1976) married Pearly Hanlon in 1907. They had 2 children. Last March we visited her grave in Oneonta, NY. She was buried in a plot with her children, notably sans first husband Pearly. I was curious where he was buried -- and actually still am. I figured Pearly had died prior to Mary's second marriage. Au contraire!

News Articles

Pearly Hanlon of Oneonta, charged with desertion of his wife and children, threw himself upon the mercy of the court and sentence was suspended on the plea of his attorney Tennant. He assured the court that a position was awaiting him on the D. & H. and that arrangements had been made to have the company pay a stated sum to the wife.
-- The Ostego Farmer, March 7, 1924

Several cases appear reflecting matrimonial infelicity. Among these is one in which May (sic) Brown Hanlon seeks a divorce [OMG] from Pearley (sic) Victor Hanlon, and there is another in which Pearly Hanlon is seeking damages from William T. Norwood for alienation of affections.
-- The Ostego Farmer, March 1, 1935

Alienation of Affections

At common law, alienation of affections is a tort action brought by a deserted spouse against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage. The defendant in an alienation of affections suit is typically an adulterous spouse's lover . . .
-- Wikipedia

It may be readily obvious, but Mary Brown's second marriage was to one William T. Norwood. So much for my mental mantra-myth . . . How on earth do such myths get transmitted anyway?

Patrick Brown 1841-1901

To the best of my knowledge, Patrick was born in Murraugh Parish, County Cork, Ireland in February of 1841. He immigrated to the United States about 1851, along with his parents, James Brown and Johannah Murphy, as well as his sister, Ellen, and his three brothers, John, Michael, and James. The 1860 US Federal Census indicates that Patrick, his parents, and his sister Ellen could neither read nor write.

Patrick was 43 when he married Mary Watson in 1884 at St. Mary's Cathedral in Ogdensburg, New York. Mary died at home from Typhoid fever in 1899 at age 44. Tragically, Patrick died two years later at age 60. While in the process of oiling a staging platform in the elevator of the Rutland Transit company, he fell 14 feet and fractured his skull. He died shortly afterwards. In September 2007 we found the grave site of Patrick Brown and Mary Watson in St. Mary's Cemetery in Ogdensburg, New York.

The story in the Ogdensburg Advance News reporting Patrick Brown's death states that he left "a family of five children, the oldest a girl of fifteen years of age". My grandfather, James Lawrence Brown, was eleven at the time of his father, Patrick's, death.