“Cheerleaders” and “Mama Bears”: Combatting Sexist Teacher Strike Discourse

Abstract

Teacher strikes have taken place in the United States since the end of the 19th century, became much more common in the 1960s, and have enjoyed a resurgence over the past five years (2018-2023). In this paper, we analyze teacher strikes with two main objectives. First, we examine how sexism and misogyny impact discourse around teacher strikes, as well as the justifications that teachers themselves give for striking. We find that teachers are at risk of being deemed ‘immoral’ unless they justify their decision to strike by appealing to their being in the service of others. Pressure to adopt this framing not only negatively impacts teachers’ dignity as human beings deserving of adequate compensation and working conditions, but it also inadvertently upholds unjust patriarchal norms regarding teaching as care work. In the second part of this paper, we put forward alternative framings teachers can adopt in justifying their decisions to strike. The framings are rooted in philosophical literature that allows for self-regarding actions to be recognized as properly moral in certain circumstances. We argue that by extending this recognition to teachers who strike, we combat covert sexist expectations and uphold the dignity of teachers as persons.

Introduction

In the United States during the late 19th century, teaching slowly transformed into a feminized profession (Beadie 2008; Blount 2000).1 In light of the historical turn toward women in teaching, it is no surprise that most teachers who have gone on strike in the United States have been women (Russom 2020).2 What may be less obvious though no less true is that anti-strike and anti-union sentiments in the public sphere have been formed at least partly in reaction to the historical feminization of the teaching profession. As Dana Goldstein recounts in The Teacher Wars, the founding of the Chicago Teachers Federation in 1897—the first time a professional teacher’s group became affiliated with an established labor organization—heralded not only a new era of aggressive, militant advocacy for higher teacher pay and pedagogical autonomy, but also new worries about gender-crossing and new targets for misogynistic control (Goldstein 2015, pp. 66–70). Women teachers who became organized unionists gave an “unfavorable impression” to the Chicago Chronicle, who called the Federation “impertinent” for demanding better pay (pp. 70–71). When Federation members joined 35,000 Teamsters in a violent, 105-day strike in 1905, members of the upper middle class found it “utterly confounding that lady teachers would want to affiliate with such a movement” (p. 76). “Does Unionism Make Girls Masculine?”, asked the Atlanta Constitution in response to the 1905 strike (p. 71). A year later, in 1906, Chicago school board member James Chvatal condemned “unionized teachers as greedy and self-interested,” saying, “It makes no difference what rules are made, the more they get the more they want” (D’Amico 2017, p. 41). And in 1915, Chicago Board of Education member Jacob Loeb testified before the State Senate against teachers unions, saying that, regarding unionists, “the female of the species is more deadly than the male…The lady labor slugger fights with a poisoned tongue and assassinates reputations” (D’Amico 2017, p. 42).

Indeed, the first written and photographic accounts of women teachers participating in picket lines would have been upsetting to many in an era when professional teaching contracts demanded adherence to strict rules applied specifically to women. One 1923 New York City contract, for example, specified that a woman teacher was not allowed to get married, keep company with men outside her family, break curfew, loiter, leave the local area without prior authorization (from a school trustee, typically a man), smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, use makeup, dye her hair, dress in bright colors, or wear dresses too revealing of the ankle (Apple 1988, pp. 73–74). Exhaustive and exhausting demands of this sort accompanied other “progressive era” reforms that legally enforced gender-based norms and expectations related to just about every aspect of a teacher’s life, including her weight, sexual activity, personal spending, physical strength, mental health, hygiene, personality, use of leisure time, and wardrobe (Perrillo 2004). And although such contracts applied to all women in major cities such as New York, misogynoir added a distinctively anti-black woman sentiment to exclusionary and disciplinary norms and practices in education. For example, black women were penalized for failing to straighten their hair for the Chicago Board of Examiners’ teacher candidacy oral exam—an exam that by the 1960s “had been under scrutiny by black educators in Chicago for years” (Grand 2015, pp. 62–63). The Black Teachers Caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union, formed in 1966 partially to combat anti-black sentiment within the Union itself, “enjoyed considerable support from the city’s black educators and community members, but suffered from a noticeable lack of black female leadership” (p. 66). Interviews with black women teachers at the time demonstrated that the Caucus “alienated African-American women” (p. 66), despite a long history of organizing by black women educators in Chicago and despite the fact that throughout the 1960s more black women than black men were passing the Chicago certification exam (p. 67).3

Fast forward to the 2018–2019 teacher strikes in the United States.4 Although American teachers are today no longer legally required to adhere to the prevailing gender norms outlined above, illegal and informal gender policing continues. There is, to take just one stark example, ongoing discrimination of trans and non-binary teachers (Ullman 2020).5 There is also gender policing in an underexplored arena: teacher union activism. The remainder of this paper is an attempt to make sense of, and militate against, sexist reactions to organized teacher action in recent years. In particular, we are interested in how sexist expectations around the (gendered) professional role of teacher affects not just the sorts of reactions teachers encounter when withholding their labor, but also the sorts of justifications given by teachers when defending their organized political action. Our second line of inquiry is how the misogyny that still structures the teaching profession, as well as popular conceptions of the role of teacher, actually shapes the very way that teachers’ moral dilemmas get framed in discourse. In other words, we note at times a tendency, even within discourse that is genuinely supportive of worthy teacher action, to frame the teacher’s dilemma around striking in terms that may reinforce, however subtly, certain sexist norms related to the role of teacher.

In Part I, we explore how the pressure to be ‘other-regarding’ can be inflected by sexism in the context of the work of teaching and teachers’ professional roles and obligations. We extend this analysis to the special case of teachers engaged in organized labor action by documenting layers of misogyny in the pervasive guilting and shaming of teachers who strike. We argue that, in the context of teacher strikes, gendered appeals to the ‘natural’, ‘maternal’ dimensions of teaching accentuate teachers’ other-regarding duties, obligations, and responsibilities in ways that are uncommon in the context of labor action by those in less feminized professions. We note this phenomenon arises even though other-regarding duties, obligations, and responsibilities are inherent to less feminized professional roles (indeed, to all professional roles). We then turn to some recent work in feminist philosophy and philosophy of education to try and unearth how gendered expectations around the role of teaching may shape, in subtle ways, discussions of the moral dilemmas faced by teachers who are choosing whether to strike. In Part II, we argue that workers in general, but especially those in feminized professions such as teaching, have good reasons to be self-regarding when deliberating over and justifying the decision to strike. We explore three such reasons: (1) the role-ideal of the teacher and obligations teachers have to themselves in light of that role-ideal; (2) the teacher’s obligation to resist oppression; (3) and the teacher’s responsibility to engage in self-cultivation. We conclude with a summary of our main argument, a note about its significance, and suggestions for further conceptual and empirical research that would helpfully expand our line of inquiry.

Part I: Teacher Organizing, Sexist Frames, and the Pressure to be Other-Regarding

In a recent analysis of anti-union rhetoric in labor-related news, John Kane and Benjamin Newman (2017) identify at least two factors that influence public opinion of unions and union activity: first, whether the depiction of a union-related event paints the union negatively or positively (e.g., whether a newspaper focuses on instances of union corruption or, in contrast, on illegal union suppression by employers), and second, the specific types of conceptual frames used by media outlets in depictions (typically negative) of organized labor. It is usually easy to gauge whether a depiction of an event is negative or positive, but frames are more subtle in their construction and effects.

One novel anti-union frame Kane and Newman (2017) suggest can be observed in media coverage of recent labor events is “class-based rhetoric” targeting workers themselves, the rank-and-file of labor unions (p. 1001). Using this frame, media outlets such as newspapers depict individual unionized workers as wealthy, “selfish,” “greedy,” and “undeserving of their ‘privileged’” economic position when compared to non-union workers (p. 1001). Class-based anti-union rhetoric (or, CAR) parallels “anti-rich rhetoric” in popular discourse by leveraging distinctions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’; the ‘1 per cent’ and the ‘99 per cent’; and the ‘rich’ and the ‘rest of us’ (p. 1002). Such rhetoric draws upon working-class sentiments to attack unions, “a historically pro-working class institution” (p. 1021). In their analysis, Kane and Newman found that CAR is effective in eroding solidarity with union workers and, as a result, eroding support for government policies that support workers and unions (p. 1020).

Though we cannot find a contemporary study focused specifically on gender-based anti-union rhetoric that is comparable to the work above, we hypothesize that gender-based anti-union rhetoric is both real (as it was in the early 20th century examples noted above) and sufficiently distinct from class-based anti-union rhetoric to warrant its own dedicated treatment.

If, as feminist philosophers such as Kate Manne (2017) have argued, it is true that misogyny arises where and when women fail to uphold a society’s gender roles and norms6 (with spillover harm to people of all genders who fail to uphold their designated roles and norms), we would expect misogyny to shape the reactions of observers (if not all, then at least a non-negligible percentage) who criticize teachers that choose to strike. Such gender-based rhetoric would overlap with CAR to the extent that it ‘otherizes’ targeted union workers, thus reducing their perceived similarity to oneself, but it would do so in a way that leverages sexist norms related to the professional role of teaching.7 Such a process would not be fully explained by class-based rhetoric alone; understanding this process would require an analysis of how gendered expectations play into the role of teacher and how those expectations shape how the public responds to teachers who strike.

The Guilting and Shaming of Teachers Who Strike

We build our case for the existence of gender-based anti-union rhetoric by starting with the ample evidence that care workers in particular, including teachers, are apt to experience guilt or shame when faced with the decision to go on strike (see for example Brown and Stern 2018; Hanrahan and Amsler 2021; Huget 2020; McAlevey 2016).8 “Walking out on kids and parents is a difficult act for mission-driven workers,” such as teachers, because they recognize the direct impact of their actions on those they serve (McAlevey 2016, p. 135). As explored by the philosopher and labor organizer Hailey Huget (2020), care workers confront “feelings of ‘moral failure’—and attendant moral emotions such as regret, shame, or guilt—whether they choose to go on strike or not” (p. 2). Such guilt may result from teachers’ fixed beliefs about their duties and obligations to their jobs, schools, or students. It may also be a reaction to vociferous (and at times emotionally manipulative) opposition to strikes, whether expressed by state legislators, community leaders, education administrators, or other relevant actors. In this opposition, critics generally shame teachers for two things: abandoning their duties to their students and abandoning their duties to their broader community, society, or economy. Both of these approaches to shaming teachers are rooted in the underlying assumption that teachers who strike not only abandon their duties, but furthermore act immorally in doing so because, in the minds of critics, there could be no competing duty, obligation, or responsibility that takes priority over serving their students, communities, or society at large.

Indeed, contemporary discourse around teacher strikes often characterizes striking teachers as unjustifiably selfish, greedy, and self-regarding. Legislators, community leaders, and ordinary citizens have called striking teachers “disrespectful” and “disappointing” (Jarvis 2018); “disgraceful,” “selfish,” and “passé” (Malm 2012); “greedy” (Blanc 2019, p. 367; Kelly 2012; Polumbo and Hauf 2019); “lazy” (Cho 2014; McConnell 2020); “a public menace” (Kar 2021); “intoxicated by their own demands” (Hess and Addison 2018); and “immoral” (Johnson 2019). Such terms are routinely used in coded ways to criticize women in particular, in what Manne (2017) calls “down girl” moves: not reflections of how women are viewed much of the time, but rather “forceful maneuverings…[that] put women in their place when they seem to have ‘ideas beyond their station’” (p. 69). When male lawmakers in West Virginia referred to striking teachers as “cheerleaders” with “shrill voices” (Salfia 2020, para. 16), they employed a down girl move. Remarked a teacher activist in Philadelphia, “[you] could not get away with…stereotyping construction workers with the same kind of laziness, the same kind of stupidity…[and] you could never get away with being so demeaning to police in that way” (Brown and Stern 2018, p. 180).

Along similar lines, teachers unions have been accused of “using” students rather than helping them (Riley 2019), of acting to “damage the social fabric of school communities” (Finne 2015), and of being “about power, not students” (Yass and Hardy 2019). In 2020, when some districts threatened to strike against unsafe school re-opening measures in the midst of a global pandemic, one critic wrote that teachers were “killing students with their selfish demands” (Emmons 2021). And in 2018, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin said that teachers going on strike “left children vulnerable to sexual assault” (Stracqualursi 2018).9 One is reminded here of Florida Governor Claude Kirk’s message to educators who, in 1968, participated in the first state-wide teachers strike in American history: that they were abandoning their children, unable to concern themselves with their students for an “unselfish moment,” and doing “irreparable harm” to themselves not only as professionals but also as individual human beings (Noll 2012).10

In other words, striking teachers are often accused of putting their own (mere) desires over and above the needs of others, especially those of their students, and are publicly derided and morally condemned for this type of political action (Hardman 2022). In some cases, these expressed desires include teachers’ demands for greater salaries, better healthcare benefits, or better working conditions. In other cases, they include teachers’ resistance to school reform efforts (Goldstein 2015; Kumashiro 2012; Santoro 2017).11 Regardless of what teachers are demanding, the demands aren’t interpreted as manifestations of a reasonable duty, obligation, or responsibility, and so critics default to shaming teachers for being ‘selfish’, ‘greedy’, ‘disobedient’, or ‘naive’. What we note here is how easily these rhetorical moves can consciously or unconsciously reflect broader misogynistic patterns that manifest in particular ways in the context of a highly feminized profession.

Striking Teachers’ Moral Dilemmas and Moral Constrictions

Huget (2020) notes that when deciding whether or not to strike, care workers in general, including teachers, interpret themselves as caught in a double bind in which any possible action leads to harm. She argues that if teachers strike, they choose to withhold care from their students in the short-term, yet if teachers do not strike, they allow the perpetuation of conditions that hinder their ability to care for their students in the long-term. Thus, teachers face a care-oriented double bind in which they are bound to fail regardless of their choice.12 For Huget, this decision has heightened moral salience because of teachers’ roles in maintaining social reproduction. However, while the belief that one is caught in this double bind is tragic in that it inevitably leads to some degree of moral failure, it also secures moral recognition for teachers—but only as long as they frame their decision as other-regarding. Teachers who decide to strike might “fail” morally in the short-term, but they can justify their decision by arguing that striking will help them better care for their students in the long-term. Likewise, teachers who decide not to strike can also justify their decision based on ‘what’s best’ for the students in the short term. Note that in both cases covered by Huget, the ability to secure moral recognition requires teachers to frame the dilemma itself in terms of other-regarding, care-oriented justifications.

In our view, the care-oriented moral dilemma that Huget identifies points to the greater problem we are addressing. Due to the feminization of teaching and the historic oppression of women, teachers (of all genders) are morally constricted: they have a choice to be either other-regarding and recognized as moral agents, or self-regarding and dismissed as irrational and/or heteronomous agents. This ‘moral constriction,’ as we are calling it, could play out in many decisions in the professional life of a teacher. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on the specific decision many teachers across the United States have faced within the past few years: namely, the decision whether or not to strike. Furthermore, this moral constriction is often imposed upon teachers from multiple directions within discourse: from critics, certainly, but also from otherwise sympathetic supporters of teacher strikes, and, importantly, from teachers themselves. This constriction is even more oppressive when placed upon women teachers of color, who may experience that, relative to white women and men of color, their contributions are more easily overlooked or forgotten, their performance evaluated more harshly, and their punishments more severe when difference is asserted and recognition demanded (Dovidio 2012, p. 115).

Expectations for Self-Sacrifice and Other-Regardingness

Fueling the externalized shaming issued by dissidents of teacher strikes, as well as the internalized guilt felt by teachers, is an often-covert expectation that has existed for as long as teaching has been a feminized field: namely, that teachers are expected to sacrifice their own well-being for the well-being of others, including but not limited to their students (Brown and Stern 2018; Cortina and San Roman 2006; Russom 2020).13 We see two primary reasons why this might be the case.

As teaching became a feminized field, it was in important senses viewed less as a ‘profession’ and more as a ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ (Bilken 1995; Brown and Stern 2018, pp. 8–9; Goldstein 2015, p. 31). Still today, these terms are commonly applied by and to teachers (Blanc 2019; Hansen 1995; Goldstein 2015, p. 31). While the idea of teaching as a vocation or a calling is not wrong-headed in itself—we believe it can be admirable—professions seen predominantly as a vocation become all the more easily exploitable. In their study on Catholic Spanish educators, for example, Regina Cortina and Sonsoles San Román (2006) demonstrate how the idea of ‘vocation’ is presented to women teachers as “a kind of predestined path requiring a spirit of sacrifice toward others” (p. 28). This idea encourages women teachers to avoid feeling exploited despite low salaries, a lack of job prestige, and the depth of “moral strictures placed upon them” (p. 29). When regarding teaching as a vocation, there is an expectation that people, particularly women, will assume this role at the expense of their well-being.14 Even compelling defenses of teaching as a calling, such as in the work of David Hansen, may acknowledge the risk that a misguided understanding of vocation can be used to “justify low salaries and diminished pedagogical authority, an injustice doubled by the fact that most teachers in schools have historically been women” (Hansen 2021, p. 6).15 Chris Higgins (2003) agrees, arguing that the expectation for teachers’ altruistic ‘self-sacrifice’ easily collapses into an expectation for unjustified asceticism. “The ideal of service,” Higgins warns, “has foreclosed the very question of the desires, needs, and aspirations of teachers” (p. 140). When ‘vocation’ and ‘wholesale self-sacrifice’ become conflated, as they often have within the teaching profession, teachers might feel more willing to forego their own well-being. In the name of ‘service’, ‘care’, or ‘duty’, they may also abandon an approach to teaching as self-cultivation.

The second reason, related to the first in that it provides the backdrop for the feminization of the teaching profession, concerns the relationship between womanhood and caring. Historically and still today, most societies around the world view ‘being caring’ as a gendered trait more inherent to women than to men (Bartky 1990; England et al. 2002, p. 457; England and Folbre 1999; Meyers 2001; Manne 2017, for example pp. 46–47; Reiheld 2015; Steinberg 1990). As such, many women view the act of caring, especially for children, as a characteristic fundamental to their womanhood (See for example Bartky 1990; Brown 2015, especially pages 104–107; Cortina and San Román 2006; Goldstein 2015). In this view, any act deemed ‘uncaring’ toward children is also an act uncharacteristic of women and, furthermore, immoral on the grounds of selfishness or on the grounds of not maintaining a natural social order.16 This expectation traps teachers (of all genders) within a sexist system by exploiting a characteristic taken to be intrinsic to womanhood.17 Misogynistic expectations of obedience and deference then work to further control teachers by making opposition to proposed school reform legislation (mostly written by men) seem prima facie immoral (Goldstein 2015; Kumashiro 2012; Santoro 2017). Teachers, who are typically not consulted as experts for such legislation, often oppose these efforts when they constrict and debase the teaching profession and undermine education for their communities and students.18

With these two primary reasons in view, we make a further claim that when the discourse surrounding teacher strikes does not uphold the possibility that teachers can at times be self-regarding and moral, such negative framing of the phenomenon can also inadvertently reproduce beliefs and assumptions that support the same oppressive and sexist moral constrictions discussed above.

There is debate in moral philosophy around whether self-regarding duties can be considered moral. Some philosophers argue that a person can only hold a moral obligation to another, thus to act morally inherently implies being other-regarding; conversely, being self-regarding would be considered a matter of prudence. Philip Kitcher (2021), for example, de-prioritizes the self-regardingness associated with an ‘ethical’ orientation (as in Bernard Williams’ distinction between ethics and morality), making ethical cultivation subservient to the more fundamental, other-regarding duties (pp. 60–62). Other philosophers, however, often in a broadly Kantian vein, argue that a person can have primary moral obligations to themselves. Christine Korsgaard (2009), for example, argues that self-regarding duties can exist if they preserve the qualities of our humanity, such as our reason-making abilities.19 This argument has been taken up by others to support the claim that self-regarding moral duties are particularly important for persons in oppressed groups to uphold, for the treatment of such groups in society often undermines precisely their fulfillment of self-regarding moral duties.20

Yet despite the fact that there are prominent arguments supporting the recognition of self-regarding moral duties, this perspective has been somewhat absent in research pertaining to teacher strikes. In fact, discourse in this arena tends to stick with the idea that moral recognition for teachers is achieved through other-regarding perspectives. As Mayor Bruce Harrell suggested during the September 2022 teachers strike in Seattle, a “just and fair resolution” would be one that “centers our students and prioritizes their education and future” [emphasis added] (Johnson 2022).

The political consequence of adopting this rhetorical approach is that if teachers do not justify their actions to strike as motivated by other-regarding concerns, then their actions will not be considered distinctively moral. The prevailing discourse does not recognize such self-regarding reasons as moral reasons given the overarching misogyny that frames the terms of the discussion. This framing is not forced by the phenomenon itself, but it does reinforce the ideological demand that care-workers, including teachers, should be focused primarily on caring for others and not also for themselves. As such, even sympathetic discourse may reinforce, however subtly, a sexist dynamic in activist spaces.21

Therefore, we argue that it is imperative for teacher strike discourse to consider drawing from ethical orientations, moral philosophy, and social movement traditions that allow for self-regarding moral duties to supply the terms of claims and justifications. This is because, without such possible justifications, the very framing of the discourse of teacher strike action will morally constrict teachers in the very misogynistic double bind that teachers and their sympathizers would want to avoid. If teachers could be more frequently recognized as moral actors when citing self-regarding justifications for striking—including even by critics who disagree with the necessity, value, or strategic timing of a strike—this recognition by itself would help undercut the misogynistic expectation of women (and others working in feminized professions) to be self-sacrificial.

We wish to expand the conversation surrounding teacher strikes to keep alive the option for teachers to understand their own organized political actions, such as strikes, as distinctively moral (not merely prudential) avenues for preserving their dignity and upholding duties to themselves, even if such actions have certain “harmful” effects on students, parents, or others.22 Teachers should not have to justify their striking by deferring primarily to the needs of others. It is morally praiseworthy for teachers to strike because they are concerned with their own well-being, rooted in their inherent value and dignity as individual persons.23 Teachers are justified in striking for their own dignity, rights, and well-being as goods in themselves.

Part II: Permission to be Self-Regarding

Teachers often justify their actions within strikes as being primarily other-regarding in order to maintain moral recognition and public support. Striking teachers and their supporters often explain a teacher’s desire to strike as ultimately a desire to improve students’ well-being in the long run: by striking for better school and classroom conditions and better salaries, for example, teachers ultimately fight to expand their own capacity to care for their students in the future. Two statements from different striking teachers in the UK describe this: “I’m striking because of what we owe the children in our care”; and “Sorry for the inconvenience caused to pupils, but I’m doing it for the good of them, so they are not made to feel that their best is not good enough” (Fishwick 2014). Along the same lines, one teacher from Chicago remarked, “We’ll do what we need to do to win the schools our students deserve” (Coles 2019), while another teacher from Pennsylvania warned that, “When you go after our kids, we will go mama bear on you!” (Russom 2020, p. 177). One Kentucky teacher stated, “Women are not going to do what they are told, they will do what is best: nurturing” (p. 175). Finally, in the recent Columbus teacher strike, a striker suggested that teachers “wouldn’t be doing this unless it were very, very dire, and very much about their students” (Bradner 2022). And upon the strike’s conclusion, the Columbus Education Association tweeted, “When we fight together, we win together! CEA fought for our students alongside our community, CEA won for our students, alongside our community. #ColumbusStudentsDeserve” (Stancil 2022). These statements sum up many of the sentiments expressed by striking teachers; each also contains justifications for striking that remain other-regarding, often leveraging explicitly gendered norms and terminology.

We should note here that many teachers decidedly do not feel the need to justify their actions as other-regarding. West Virginia high school teacher Jessica Salfia, for instance, said she never felt guilty about her decision to participate in the 2018 and 2019 West Virginia teacher strikes—or to leave her students without classroom education for a collective eleven days—because she knew she was “doing the right thing.”24 Furthermore, Salfia asserted that she believed her students learned more from witnessing their teachers striking than they would have from typical classroom instruction. Salfia admitted, however, that this could be at least partially because her West Virginia family, with deep historical connections to miners unions, had instilled within her a culture that values worker unionism and the power of striking. In the context of teaching, however, we take Salfia as an exception to the norm. Doris Santoro, for instance, has noted how, when speaking with groups of teachers engaged in principled resistance, men are much more likely to appeal to their own sense of honor and dignity as justifications for resistance, whereas women are more likely to cite their concern for students.25

Within this project, we hope to nudge discourse in a direction where more teachers will avoid guilt when justifying their decision to strike, as Salfia has, and to recognize themselves and others as engaging in characteristically moral action when striking. We saw the need for this clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic when teachers, who had originally been deemed ‘heroes’ and ‘superheroes’ (for example Haywood 2020; Tinsley 2021; Weingarten 2020), were vilified for striking or considering going on strike when citing concerns for their own health and safety. Across the country, teachers were chastised, delegitimized as authority figures, and criticized for being ‘selfish’ and ‘lazy’ (for example Allen 2020; Lowry 2020; McConnell 2020; Siemaszko 2020; Will 2021).

Below, we move beyond our assertion that it is not a moral failure for teachers to be self-regarding when striking. We extend toward a view that teachers should be self-regarding, at least partially, when striking in order to more greatly value teachers’ well-being and dignity; to contradict the oppressively sexist expectations of teacher self-sacrifice and wholesale other-regardingness; and to help shatter the gendered moral constriction teachers face by virtue of their profession. At the very least, teachers should be able to be primarily self-regarding in their justifications for striking and also be recognized as making properly moral choices when striking. This is an inescapable part of respecting teachers’ well-being and dignity.

In the following section, we propose three ways to recognize teachers’ decisions to strike as primarily self-regarding and also distinctively moral. This includes recognizing teachers on strike as: (1) fulfilling their role-ideals (as teachers) by fighting against structural injustice; (2) fulfilling duties they have to respect themselves (as persons) by fighting against gendered oppression; and (3) expanding avenues for self-cultivation.26

Role-Ideals and Structural Injustice

Huget (2020) uses Robin Zheng’s (2018) notion of the role-ideal to justify teachers’ moral obligations to strike. She argues that when teachers’ work environments prevent them from fulfilling their role-ideal, they are morally justified in striking. This is a moral rather than merely prudential justification because teachers, as care workers, perform a role related to social reproduction, which in itself bears moral significance. As such, Huget uses the concept of the role-ideal to reflect teachers’ beliefs that they have a moral obligation to strike, an action that will enable them to provide better care for their students in the long-run—in other words, to better enact their role in social reproduction. However, Zheng’s conception of role-ideals might also allow for teachers to be morally justified in striking even if their motivations are not primarily other-regarding or oriented toward social reproduction.

Zheng argues that part of doing one’s job well is to strive towards a role-ideal (p. 878). The role-ideal is a person’s “interpretation of how she could best satisfy the expectations constituting” her social role, such as her job (p. 875). This interpretation can vary greatly depending on the person. A new black woman teacher in Atlanta or Washington, D.C. might have a drastically different role-ideal of being a teacher from that of an elderly white male teacher in Budapest or Helsinki. Furthermore, individuals have more than one social role (e.g., teacher, volunteer, aunt, spouse, etc.), and thus their various role-ideals might conflict and make it “impossible to predict how a given person will act” when negotiating among them (p. 875). However, two things remain true for all role-ideals: (1) a person who identifies with a social role will find it “intrinsically gratifying to satisfy role expectations,” and (2) fulfilling a role-ideal inherently encompasses considering how that role contributes to structural injustice (p. 881).27

Thus, while role-ideals can indeed be used to reflect teachers’ beliefs about the importance of contributing to social reproduction, another use of Zheng provides a different moral justification for striking: namely, people are morally justified in striking when doing so will mitigate structural injustice associated with their role. In such a case, people use their “agency to reshape structure,” and in so doing pursue their role-ideal (p. 883).

In the case of education, on our reading, teachers would not strike because teaching itself contributes to structural injustice; rather, teachers would strike because they experience structural injustice through their profession. Namely, teachers have historically been underpaid, disrespected, and mistreated due to the feminization of the profession. Of course, those who are underpaying and disrespecting teachers have a greater responsibility to alleviate such structural injustice. Nonetheless, Zheng notes that “every person is subject to claims to act in ways that constitute changing the system, because every person already enacts a small part of the system in virtue of performing their social roles” (p. 879). Thus, teachers who strike may better achieve their role-ideals by working to alleviate the structural injustice they face in their profession. Again, this structural injustice relates directly to the historic exploitation of teachers contingent on the feminization of teaching. This grounds the moral justification for striking not on social reproduction or other-regarding care, but rather on remedying structural injustices oriented towards ameliorating one’s working life and professional status. Thus, teachers can have a moral justification for striking that remains self-regarding (where self is representative of individual teachers as well as the profession they are a part of) rather than other-regarding, when being self-regarding entails fighting against structural injustice.

Self-Respect and Resisting Oppression

While Zheng helps us see the moral value of alleviating structural injustice in order to realize one’s professional role-ideal, other philosophers help offer more generalized justifications for striking. According to Alison Hills (2003), for example, we have a moral obligation to our own well-being just as we have a moral obligation to the well-being of others, but the latter does not outweigh the former. Rather, a balance should be achieved between one’s other-regarding duties and one’s self-regarding duties. Meanwhile, while Daniel Silvermint (2013) also claims that individuals have moral duties to their own well-being, he takes the point further by arguing that “under conditions of oppression these duties entail resistance to that mistreatment” (as explained in Smith 2020). Ashwini Vasanthakumar (2020) echoes this argument by asserting, “Under conditions of oppression, resistance is intrinsically self-respecting and autonomous…while acquiescence, as opposed to protest, expresses servility rather than self-respect” (p. 2).

For each of these philosophers—Hills, Silvermint, and Vasanthakumar—we all, by virtue of being persons, have a moral obligation to be self-regarding. Teachers, as persons, are included in this. Accordingly, we can assert that teachers are morally justified in striking even when they strike for self-regarding reasons, such as higher salaries, better healthcare, and greater respect. An even stronger claim would draw from Silvermint and Vasanthakumar to assert that any teachers who are oppressed have a moral obligation to resist that oppression. Now, it is certainly a strong claim to assert that teachers are oppressed. However, when we examine the historic oppression of women alongside the feminization of the teaching profession, it is difficult to ignore how the mistreatment and under-valuing of teachers stems largely from the fact that the teaching profession in much of the world has been mostly populated by women for centuries. Thus, in line with Silvermint and Vasanthakumar, we would argue that teachers as a collective group, composed mostly by women, have a self-regarding obligation to resist their oppression, manifested in this regard through being undervalued and exploited.

To take this line of inquiry further, women in particular—and consequently all those working in a feminized field—have a moral obligation to remain self-regarding in the face of their historic oppression. For instance, Carol Hay emphasizes the importance of self-respect specifically for women, arguing that women have a duty grounded in self-respect precisely because it acts as a form of resistance against their own oppression (Smith 2020).28 Connecting Vasanthakumar and Hay, one might argue that not only is resistance intrinsically self-respecting, but self-respect is intrinsically a form of resistance, at least when performed by women. Ann Cudd (1998) also argues that women have a moral obligation to resist gender oppression by refusing to comply with specific traditional stereotypes that limit women’s freedom, including their propensity to take on the bulk of unpaid domestic work. (By extension, we can add here an obligation to resist inadequate compensation in general but especially relative to less-feminized fields.) Finally, Rebecca Hannah Smith (2020) argues that if we recognize women as having moral reasons to oppose their own oppression, then we better “respect and defend women’s rights” (p. 1). According to Smith, while women are not morally obligated to resist their own oppression, they have pro tanto moral reasons for doing so.

With Hay, Cudd, and Smith, we have additional justifications for teachers’ decisions to strike when their reasons for doing so are primarily self-regarding. Within the feminized field of teaching, teachers experience the burden of oppressive gender stereotypes whether or not they choose to strive toward a role-ideal. Thus, an act of resistance that denies these gender stereotypes and promotes self-respect is not only morally permissible, as Hay and Smith might assert, but also perhaps a moral imperative, as Cudd might assert. At the very least, we could say that such a self-regarding act of resistance should be recognized as distinctively moral rather than selfish. While this is important for all people working in the feminized field of teaching, it is particularly salient for women teachers.

Self-Cultivation

Finally, we can argue that teachers are morally justified in striking even when they are primarily self-regarding because doing so might better enable self-cultivation and change the narrative around teachers and self-sacrifice. Teaching has long been considered a rather ascetic profession, and when teachers strike, they publicly disagree to comply with this ‘unspoken rule’ of the field. Yet Higgins (2003) argues that good teaching “requires self-cultivation rather than self-sacrifice” (p. 131). Higgins admits that self-cultivation is itself complex; for teachers, self-cultivation actually encompasses tending to the growth of others. He argues against, however, the prevalent idea imposed on teachers that being other-regarding is both necessary and sufficient for their moral lives. Instead, while being other-regarding is necessary, it is not sufficient for the moral life of a teacher. A teacher must be focused on the question of excellence. As such they must be focused on being self-regarding insofar as this leads to self-cultivation. As Higgins asserts, “The ascetic teacher neither flourishes nor helps others flourish” (p. 154).

We could argue that many aspects of education today prevent teachers from engaging in self-cultivation within their profession. For one, teachers across the country have attested to salaries and benefits so meager they have had to take second or third jobs to survive. Self-cultivation takes time and energy, and having to work disparate jobs to make ends meet carries significant potential to derail such efforts. Furthermore, many teachers have spoken out against substandard working conditions, such as large class sizes, outdated technology, and insufficient supplies. Self-cultivation and excellence at one’s job are more difficult under these conditions than they would be in classrooms fully equipped and with fewer students. Finally, teachers have continually resisted state legislative efforts to privatize public education through the expansion of charter school and voucher systems. Teachers often fight against these privatization efforts because they contribute to larger class sizes in non-charter public schools, treat education like a one-size-fits-all business model rather than an art, and delegitimize the teaching profession by hiring people with little to no training in education. All of these consequences of school privatization make excellence and self-cultivation more difficult for teachers.

If teachers must practice self-cultivation in order to act ethically (and aspire toward excellence), then they should seek to eliminate obstructions to self-cultivation, including the ones listed above. At times, this ‘seeking to change’ might manifest in striking. When it does, teachers who pursue self-cultivation, as both a means to pursue excellence in their profession and a means to resist expectations of self-sacrifice, are justified in striking. Again, while excellence in teaching requires one to tend to the growth of others, being entirely other-regarding is not sufficient for achieving excellence. Teachers must always focus on their own growth and self-cultivation alongside that of their students; one must, in other words, always be at least somewhat self-regarding.

Conclusion

In Part I of this essay we pointed to subtle (though at times quite overt) sexism that teachers face when deciding to go on strike. Such sexism, in our view, often happens at the level of public discourse. For example, when interviewed, administrators or politicians may use gender-coded language not only to express their disapproval of strike actions but also to suggest that teachers cannot possibly be acting morally if they are striking for their own sake. This discourse is not new to the teaching profession; rather, the expectations for teachers to be self-sacrificing and other-regarding have been baked into the teaching profession since its feminization. Problematic in its own right, such sexist discourse is even more troubling in the context of teacher strikes as it only secures moral recognition for striking teachers if they frame their actions as other-regarding. As such, teachers and their supporters may reinforce such coded language in the way they interpret their own behavior.

Part II was an attempt to undermine the stability of this rhetoric by exploring three lines of justification for striking that do not require the adoption of a predominantly other-regarding moral view. Rather, each justification puts forward an alternative way of framing teachers’ decisions to strike centered on teachers’ rights or obligations to be self-regarding. The first line suggests teachers can justify their decision to strike by seeking to achieve their role-ideals, which necessarily demands a fight against associated structural injustices. The second line posits that teachers should enact self-regarding duties in resisting oppression (e.g., arbitrarily unjust gender norms) that impedes their self-respect and constricts their possibilities for a dignified life within society. The third line contends that teachers are justified in fighting against obstacles that impede their self-cultivation and flourishing.

The main argument we advance throughout Parts I and II is that teachers should be recognized as properly moral agents whose justifications for striking deserve to be understood as distinctively moral, including especially when these justifications focus on self-regarding care, duties, responsibilities, or obligations. In advancing the argument of this paper, we understand that achieving political victories sometimes requires strategic rhetoric. We acknowledge that experienced teachers or union leaders may want to consciously deploy other-regarding messaging in the hopes of mounting a successful strike or appealing to the general public. Nonetheless, it bears noting that rhetoric used for immediate political ends can nonetheless undercut other desirable long-term ends. So, we stand by our assessment that, because sexism and misogyny are at play in shaping popular expectations of teaching, the role of teacher, and the material conditions of teaching, they are also quite likely at play in shaping the public’s reaction to strikes organized by teachers. We invite teachers to consider the three lines of justification laid out above as viable, honorable alternatives to the default justificatory discourse.

Within our field, the significance of our argument can be further appreciated by drawing connections to adjacent work, such as Doris Santoro’s studies on ‘moral madness’ (2017), ‘demoralization’ (2018; 2019), and ‘principled resistance’ (2018) among teachers. Moral madness, for Santoro, occurs “when a person’s moral claims are not recognized as moral and the individual is disregarded as a moral agent” (2017, p. 49), leading to strong feelings of confusion and frustration. Teachers who assert self-regarding justifications for striking may experience moral madness in a system that demands them to be other-regarding. This may in turn contribute to teachers’ feelings of demoralization, a notable reason for leaving the profession. Santoro argues that, rather than leaving the teaching profession, teachers may enact principled resistance to counter feelings of demoralization and moral madness that arise due to work-oriented ethical dilemmas. We posit that public articulations of the three alternative justifications we put forward help support teachers’ principled resistance.

We end this conclusion with two suggestions for further study. The first requires noting that, throughout this paper, we have leveraged the axioms of a liberal tradition in politics and philosophy to critique a prevailing justificatory discourse around teacher strikes that leverages those same axioms. This is reflected in, for example, the rather Kantian tradition of distinguishing sharply between duties to oneself and duties to others, itself grounded in an (perhaps overly strong) emphasis on a self/other distinction. We chose to deploy this framing in part because it makes the job of contrasting sexist and non-sexist justifications a bit easier, to the extent that sexism heightens a distinction between self-regarding justifications (coded masculine) and other-regarding justifications (coded feminine). Nonetheless, the existence of teachers who describe their reasons for striking in highly nuanced ways reveals a complex understanding of how duties, obligations, and responsibilities to self and others can be quite tightly and inextricably intertwined. Indeed, a follow-up study might open with a view of the interdependence of self and other or, relatedly, the premise that flourishing is always joint flourishing and interdependent in principle, defined by mutual aid and our ability to enact our relational responsibilities (Tanchuk, Rocha & Kruse 2021). This interdependent framing could incorporate Asha Bhandary’s (2021) idea of interpersonal reciprocity, whereby people in a caring relationship have a bounded responsibility to one another, or Yibing Quek’s (2021) notion that teachers contribute to their own self-cultivation through practicing complete care for their students, even in the midst of striking. Why did the current study not take this approach? Though we are sympathetic to conceptions of the self that emphasize its fundamental interdependence with other forms of life, including more-than-human life, it is somewhat more difficult to spotlight a sexist emphasis on other-regardingness if we begin with a conceptual focus on interdependence. We fear that, at the level of public rhetoric if not necessarily in philosophy, an emphasis on interdependence may give political opponents an opportunity to exploit the (very blurry) line between self and other and in turn demand even greater concessions from teachers. This remains, for us, a hypothetical concern, one to be confirmed or dissolved via empirical investigation, much like the true prevalence and effect of gender-based anti-union rhetoric.

Our second suggestion is to pursue an empirical study that would (hopefully) strengthen the empirical claims that motivated the current inquiry. As a starting point, we suggest borrowing from Kane and Newman (2017), who devised a series of internet survey experiments to test for the prevalence and effects of class-based anti-union rhetoric. In each experiment, participants across control and experimental groups were presented with fabricated news stories about labor unions that varied in the content and framing of anti-union messages. We propose a similar series of survey experiments designed specifically to strengthen the evidence of sexism in anti-strike reactions, with the profession and gender of strikers, as well as other- vs. self-regarding justifications, serving as independent variables. For example, one could test whether self-regarding justifications for teacher strikes are less likely to be criticized as ‘selfish’, ‘shameful’, or ‘immoral’ if test subjects believe that the majority of strikers are men. An experiment might also present test subjects with fairly identical descriptions of justifications, changing only the profession of strikers involved. Such a study might be supplemented by a methodical discourse analysis of, for example, newspaper and magazine articles that covered the 2018–2019 teacher strikes in the United States, paying careful attention to how authors, as well as quoted teachers and observers, frame justifications for action. This in turn might be followed by a discourse analysis of academic work that theorizes teacher strikes, in order to help reveal the extent to which a generally liberal academic workforce might nonetheless reproduce sexist expectations in accounts of teachers’ resistance. Finally, it would be important for any empirical study inspired by our analysis here to be guided by an understanding of intersectionality. Any narrative-based survey experiment, for example, can modulate variables such as the race, ethnicity, and national origin of fictional strikers in order to help illuminate the effect of misogynoir and xenophobia, among other complex, overlapping forms of prejudice.