abstract
| - The female teacher at a one room schoolhouse. In rural communities of the past, particularly on the frontier, there would often not be enough children of different ages in the area to justify a school separated by grades, and insufficiently fast transportation to bring children from a wide area together every schoolday. So there would be a one-room schoolhouse, with a grand total of one teacher (usually female) presiding over a class of children of all ages and scholastic ability. Generally, a child would attend the one-room schoolhouse from early elementary age through the minimum dropout age required by law; those seeking further education would have to go to a larger community's boarding school. In fiction, a schoolmarm will tend to be portrayed as rather prim and proper, and will have the best diction in town. This tended to be true in Real Life as well, since most communities had strict moral and behavioral requirements in the contracts for their teachers. In many school districts, teachers had to be single and any "courtship" would raise fears that the town would lose its schoolmarm. Nevertheless, the Schoolmarm is a frequent choice for female love interest in a Western as she'll be the only single woman around who isn't in the entertainment industry. As an instructor in the arts of civilization, she also made a good Foil to a wild and footloose hero. In male viewer-oriented stories, the schoolmarm tends to be young and pretty--sometimes suspiciously so. In stories from the schoolmarm's point of view, she may be a bit older and somewhat plain-looking, to make her eventual romantic involvement that much sweeter. If the story is from the children's point of view, the schoolmarm will often be a hatchet-faced spinster, who's not afraid of using a switch on misbehaving youths, for loose values of "misbehaving." Since schoolteachers were usually from out of town, they would often board with the different families of their students in turn over the course of the school year. In fiction, this might be an awkward situation, the beginning of a romance with an adult member of the family, the discovery of a Big Sister Mentor for a younger member, or otherwise played for drama. The Spear Counterpart was a "schoolmaster" (who WAS expected to be, or become, a family man). See also Two-Teacher School. Examples of Schoolmarm include:
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