Margaret Haley

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Margaret haley (1861–1939), the teacher and unionist dubbed the "lady labor slugger," was born in Joliet, Illinois on November 15 1861 to immigrant parents of Irish descent; her mother came from Ireland and her father from Canada. For the first six years of her life she lived on a farm. Her parents supported agrian activism, including the grange. Economic upheaval in the 1880s and the 1890s depression contributed to her later activism. Haley, however, attributed her opposition to injustice and monopoly to a family tradition of fighting English oppression and land monopoly in Ireland. A commitment to democracy and an opposition to business interests guided her teaching practices and education. At the Illinois Normal School in Bloomington, Haley imbibed the lessons of single-tax advocate Henry George. At the Cook County Normal School and the Buffalo School of Pedagoy, she received instruction from progressive educators Francis Parker and William James. Haley credited her appreciation for academic freedom to time spent at a Catholic summer school in Wisconsin.

Family financial troubles prompted Haley to begin teaching at age 16 in Joliet. She moved to Chicago in 1882 to teach in the Cook County school system. In 1884, she took a position as a sixth grade teacher at the Hendricks School in the Stockyards district on Chicago's South Side. She remained there until ending her career as a teacher in 1900.

Haley joined the Chicago Teacher's Federation in 1898, and became its business representative upon ceasing to teach in 1900. The CTF was the most promising union groups in the country. The CTF majorly relied on courts, political campiagns, and worked with allied judges and liberal school board members. She retained her affiliation with the CTF until her death in 1939.

The fight against the Harper Commission in 1898 constituted Haley’s first major fight on behalf of Chicago teachers; it drew her to the Chicago Federation of Teachers. William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, headed the commission that proposed a complete restructuring of the Chicago school system. The Harper Report called for the superintendent’s increased power, the instilling of corporate-like efficiency in the schools, the reduction of the school board’s size, the increase of “experts” in educational leadership positions, and the introduction of a salary system based on merit that would favor male high school teachers and administrators over the largely female elementary school teachers. Perhaps most well known, the Harper Commission also proposed ninety-nine year leases, not subject to taxation, of school property for Chicago businesses. Haley joined the “tax fight” to ensure that the public schools received due funding, and to keep teachers from having to beg for salary increases and security of pay when the Board of Education pursued inequitable tax and lease policies. After the Harper Bill’s defeat, Haley and Catherine Goggin strengthened their rule over the CTF, thus purging any opposition within the union.

Probably equally well known to historians is Margaret Haley’s affiliating white-collar Chicago teachers with blue-collar organized labor. During the time of the “tax battle,” 1900-1904, the Chicago Teachers’ Federation joined the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed by Margaret Haley’s friend John Fitzpatrick, which led the CTF to become Local 1 of the American Federation of Teachers. Historians debate to what degree labor accepted the teachers, and vice verse. Nevertheless, the Board of Education used the teacher’s affiliation with labor as a tool against them. In 1900, Haley ended up being the district vice persident of the CTF and eventually gave up teaching to be a full-time union worker. During the 1915-1916 school year the Board of Education created the Loeb rule, which prohibited any alliance between teachers and organized labor. To make matters worse, the Board refused to rehire 68 teachers (38 of whom members of the CTF) in the aftermath of the decision. The fight went before the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled against the teachers. The CTF soon withdrew from the Chicago Federation of Labor.

The CTF also tied its fortunes to city politics and, for example, in 1905 it supported the mayoral bid of Edward Dunne. Like Haley, Dunne favored the municipal ownership of streetcar lines and the principle of popular control. Both Dunne and the teacher-labor alliance benefited from one another, and during Dunne’s first two-year stint as mayor the teachers diminished the power of “administrative progressives” over teachers. As part of Dunne’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” Margaret Haley advised the mayor on school issues. Dunne appointed women and CTF supporters to the school board to ensure that business interests did not dominate school policies.

Haley also took a stand at the national level. In 1904, the year Haley became president of the National Federation of Teachers, she became the first elementary school teacher to speak before the National Education Association at the St. Louis convention. She presented the famous speech, “Why Teachers Should Organize.” In it she stressed democracy, citizenship, John Dewey, and Horace Mann in arguing against corporate corruption and business-like efficiency in education. She also placed a premium on teachers’ autonomy in the classroom. In particular, she emphasized the importance of professionalizing teachers.In her speech Haley listed 4 major obstacles to efficient teaching. They are:1.) To low of salaries for teachers to get and try to make a living off of. 2.)Bad offices and lack of provision for old ages. 3.) Too many people in a small classroom. 4.) No recognition for teachers as educators. With Haley's great leadership, the teachers union became a political force with both school and social reform.

Haley also pushed for greater numbers of women in leadership roles at the local and national levels of teachers' unionization. She played in instrumental role in Ella Flagg Young’s election to president of the National Education Association in 1910, which then paid greater attention to the needs of classroom teachers.

Historians debate whether Margaret Haley should be classified as a “progressive.” Her causes often overlapped with typically progressive ones. Haley saw a direct relationship between women’s suffrage and the success of teachers’ reform goals, and she fought valiantly for the vote. She also spoke out in favor of child labor laws, public ownership of utilities, initiative and referendum, direct primaries, and popular election of senators. Yet her ideas did not always square with those in the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. Scholars debate whether the rank-and-file of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation shared Haley’s democratic principals. In turn, it is difficult to determine how much Margaret Haley actually accomplished. During the Depression, for example, Chicago teachers went unpaid. Many teachers eventually looked to the National Education Association for leadership, thus siding with the values of hierarchy and centralization that Margaret Haley believed undermined democracy in the classroom and teachers’ rights as citizens. Today, in direct opposition to Haley's vision, public school teachers are losing more and more control over what is taught within their own classrooms. Nevertheless, Margaret Haley made it so that the Chicago schools remained far less “reformed” in comparison to other major urban school districts until after World War I.

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  • Haley, Margaret (1982). Battleground: the autobiography of Margaret Haley (edited by Robert L. Reid). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
  • McCormick, Maureen Elizabeth (1988). "The Female Grade School Teacher and Equal Rights for Women: An Alternative View on the Meanings of Education and the Organization of the American School" (Ed. D. diss, University of Cincinnati).
  • Murphy, Marjorie (1990). Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
  • Murphy, Marjorie. "Taxation and Social Conflict: Teacher Unionism and Public School Finance in Chicago, 1898-1914," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 74 (Winter 1981): 242-260.
  • Lazerson, Marvin. "If All the World Were Chicago: American Education in the Twentieth Century," History of Education Quarterly 24 (Summer 1984): 165-179.
  • Nolan, Janet. "A Patrick Henry in the Classroom: Margaret Haley and the Chicago Teachers' Federation," Éire-Ireland (Samhradh/Summer, 1995): 104-117.
  • Pegram, Thomas R. (1992). Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
  • Tegnell, Geoffrey Gordon (1997). "Democracy in Education: A Comparative Study of the Teachers' Council Movement, 1895-1968" (Ed. D. diss., Harvard University).
  • Tyack, David (1974). The One Best System: A History of Urban Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • Tyack, David and Elizabeth Hansot. (1982) Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980. New York: Basic Books.
  • Urban, Wayne J. "Organized Teachers and Educational Reform During the Progressive Era: 1890-1920," History of Education Quarterly 16 (Spring 1976): 35-52.
  • Urban, Wayne J. (1982) Why Teachers Organized. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
  • Rousmanier, Kate (1999). "Where Haley Stood: Margaret Haley, Teachers' Work, and the Problem of Teacher Identity" in Women's Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women's Education, eds. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
  • Schwartz, Kathleen Barker (1986). "Scientific Management and Administrative Reform in Education, 1900-1920: 'One Specializes in Science, the Other in Practice' (Bobbit, Follett, Taylor, Haley, Hoxie)" (Ed. D. diss, Harvard University).
  • Wrigley, Julia. (1982). Class, Politics, and Public School: Chicago, 1900-1950. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
  • Haley, Margaret (ed. Robert L. Reid). Battleground, 1982

Hoffman, Nancy. Woman's True Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching, 1981

  • Herrick, M.J. (1971). The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.