The spinster schoolteacher is an archetype from the decades when the only two respectable professions open to women were teaching and nursing. Teaching may have been the more “respectable” because, while it could involve the tending of other people’s children, it did not involve cleaning other people’s bedpans. The 20th century was nearly half over before women teachers were allowed to be married and work; a revision in society’s rules that came about because of the shortage of male teachers during the Second World War. Married women were permitted to work as nurses; that privilege also a result of a shortage of nurses. The spinster has been a frightening figure to girls and young women for many, many decades, and continues to be so today. She has been the subject of at least as many cruel jokes as were/are mothers-in-law. There can be little doubt that the spinster schoolteacher in this story must have been the butt of many jokes during her lifetime; it is easy to imagine the laughter, the snickers, the behind-the-hand remarks she had to have felt and pretended to ignore. Even her colleagues discussed her odd behavior with anger and resentment. But the spinster had a secret life, as many, many spinster schoolteachers did. When more women find the courage to speak about their secret lives, perhaps society, and hopefully women in particular, will re-evaluate the spinster, and this figure that has silently endured so much ridicule and rage will be able to be seen and written about in a heroic manner.
     A side note: Olga Sikorski is a pseudonym. The woman who told me this story about a spinster who hid her good deeds was herself afraid to be identified publicly.

OLGA SIKORSKI
The Spinster’s Secret

My first job as a teacher was as a substitute in New York City. The pay was six dollars a day.
     On one of my first assignments something happened that made a deep impression on me. When I arrived at the classroom where I was assigned to teach, I saw a group of teachers crowded around the regular teacher. She was still in her chair, and they were saying, “Now you must go home, Miss Goodrich. You really must go home.” Miss Goodrich was burning with fever. Later, we learned that she had pneumonia. She was pale and weak, and still she had come to school to teach. Women teachers were like that; they were spinsters because a woman had to quit as soon as she got married, and they worked like horses.
     Ellenie Goodrich. I found out quickly that everyone at school thought she was strange. She wore the same dress every day. It was a black dress, and it had no belt. She put rouge on her face in two round circles, like a cupie doll. She wore a wig on her head. The kids and the teachers used to call her wiggie behind her back. The other teachers thought she was a cheapskate. They said, “She doesn’t buy clothes. She doesn’t travel. She never goes out. What’s she doing with her money?”
     I took over her class. People nowadays get so nostalgic about the good old days. They say how much better everything was. But I remember how things really were and they weren’t so good, believe me! Teaching junior high school was murder, and Miss Goodrich’s class gave me a headache. Miss Goodrich was considered the best disciplinarian in that school, and I wondered how she did it. In her desk, in one of the bottom drawers, I found a rubber hose. I’m not saying she used it, but she kept a rubber hose in her desk drawer. That made me think again about what was expected of people in the profession I had worked so hard to enter, and what I might have to cope with now that I was on the other side of the desk.
     That’s interesting, but it isn’t the point. The point is this. Miss Goodrich died the next day. That’s how sick she was. She taught until the very end. I went with the other teachers to the viewing. While we were at her wake, three gentlemen came to pay their respects. At first, nobody knew who they were, but they told us. They had been Miss Goodrich’s students, and they told us that she had paid their way through college and medical school.
     That’s the truth. It’s like the old movie The Corn is Green, except this really happened. Miss Goodrich educated those three boys herself. She never told anyone she was doing this. It was a secret. People were shocked. The other teachers were amazed. Educating those boys, that’s where Miss Goodrich had been spending the money she earned as a teacher. She had taken those three poor boys who she thought were promising, and she had paid to send them through college and medical school. People thought she was odd, but they found respect for her after she was dead, when the secret came out.

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