May the work of the L.T.A. go on ever upward and onward-gaining ground year by year; so that in future it will have its voice in the community, not low & sweet-but clear and resonant showing power and strength; may it gain that strength by increased membership, held together by strong bonds of love.Let us then be up and doing,With a heart for any fate;Still achieving, still pursuingLearn to labor and to wait.1Miss Ophelia S. Newell believed that teachers occupied a public office of unappreciated responsibility. As the secretary of the Lady Teachers' Association (LTA) in Boston, she penned these hopeful remarks as a coda to her 1875 annual report, borrowing the last stanza of a popular Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. For Newell and her fellow teachers, “learn to labor and to wait” underscored their steadfast commitment to the schools. They founded the association attempting to bring women teachers “nearer together in sympathy and friendship and also for a mutual benefit in debate and parliamentary rules.” Frustrated with being “accused of a lack of enthusiasm in our profession,” they hoped such criticism could “be remedied by an organization of this kind.” Honing their debating skills represented one of the women's objectives, but they aspired to do more than polish their chances for professional advancement.

Texts introducing students to women's and gender history typically emphasize how gender refers to the social meanings attached to sexual difference, which vary over time and across societies and cultures. As one of these texts explains, “Definitions of what is masculine and feminine are learned as each society instructs its members from infancy through adulthood as to what behavior and personality attributes are appropriate for males and females of that generation.” Given wide agreement that gender is learned, it is surprising how seldom the places and people who institutionalize learning appear in the texts used to teach U.S. women's and gender history. Teachers are remarkably scarce in the literature, even though vast numbers of U.S. women have taught since the mid-nineteenth century. The reasons for this absence are not clear. Perhaps teachers' social location, at the murky boundaries of the working and middle classes, has contributed to their omission from sharply defined studies of class and gender consciousness. Or perhaps the conventional association of women and teaching has deterred gender historians, following the theory that studying the margins of women's experiences better reveals the mainstream. Yet, the perceived ordinariness of the woman teacher may be especially helpful to illuminate periods of significant change in the meaning of gender.

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Lacking the power to improve the terms and conditions of school teaching at home, more than seventy US women migrated to work for the Argentine government in the last third of the nineteenth century. Only a few studies have researched this episode in the history of teachers, interpreting it as an uplifting, civilizing mission and characterizing the teachers as valiant, benevolent, and occasionally misguided reformers. Yet these migrant teachers' own words suggest that the desire to uplift played little part in their migration decisions, whereas low pay and limited employment opportunities for women figured prominently. Drawing on diaries, correspondence, newspapers, and census records, this study explores how these migrant teachers understood themselves, their work, and their social location. The analysis offers new insight into these teachers' identities as workers both at home and abroad. While acknowledging how teachers' labor served reform objectives, the essay argues that the long history of teaching in the United States needs to be reconsidered as a labor history.